“A Night at the Garden” Is the Most Terrifying Movie You Can Watch This Halloween
▻https://theintercept.com/2017/10/29/a-night-at-the-garden-is-the-most-terrifying-movie-you-can-watch-this-
▻https://vimeo.com/237489146
Terrifying Movie You Can Watch This Halloween
Jon Schwarz
The obscure 2008 movie “Synecdoche, New York,” written and directed by Charlie Kaufman, originated when Sony Pictures Classics approached Kaufman about creating a horror film. Kaufman, best known for deeply wacky scripts like “Being John Malkovich,” agreed. But he wasn’t interested in making the kind of paint-by-numbers movie for teenagers that appears to take place in another dimension. Instead, he later said, he wanted to make a horror film for adults, “about things that are scary in the real world, and in our lives.”
I can attest that Kaufman succeeded. In fact, I found “Synecdoche, New York” so frightening that I’ll never watch it again. Slasher movies like “Friday the 13th” and its 11 sequels are ultimately pleasurable — they end and you wake up from the dream buzzing with the adrenaline evolution gives you to escape predators, yet realize you are not in fact being stalked by Jason Voorhees. But when “Synecdoche, New York” is over and the lights come up, you understand that what was hunting its characters is hunting you too, outside the theater, in reality.
No other movie had ever given me the same jolt of pure dread until I saw the new Field of Vision documentary “A Night at the Garden,” directed by Marshall Curry. (Field of Vision is a division of First Look Media, as is The Intercept.)
Curry’s film, watchable above, is just six minutes long, and is a tiny masterpiece. It should be taught in history and filmmaking courses, as well as in classes about human psychology.
On its surface, it’s simply about a rally held by the German-American Bund in February 1939 at the old Madison Square Garden at Eighth Avenue and 50th Street in Manhattan.
The Bund – meaning “federation” – never metastasized to any appreciable size. Estimates vary, but its dues-paying membership did not top 25,000. However, it was allied with the Christian Front, an organization inspired by the notorious anti-Semitic demagogue Father Charles Coughlin. Tens of millions of Americans tuned into Coughlin’s weekly radio show; one of his slogans was “Less care for internationalism and more concern for national prosperity.”
The Christian Front helped turn out a capacity crowd of almost 20,000 people. It’s particularly notable that this was possible in New York, then as now a symbol of liberalism, and suggests both organizations enjoyed significant passive local support far beyond those who attended.
The marquee outside reads that it is a “Pro American Rally” — to be followed the next day by the Rangers playing the Detroit Red Wings, and the day after that by Fordham facing Pittsburgh in college basketball. The night begins with marchers filing in with dozens of American flags and then standing before a huge backdrop of George Washington.
