Wolfpack

Some six months or so after I was prompted to buy this DVD by the NYRB, we have got around to looking at it, over two sessions.

As it says on the tin, a strange and memorable documentary; the tale of seven children - six boys and one disturbed girl - brought up by their parents in the confines of a New York apartment, with just the occasional visit to the outside world. A family who caught the attention of the social services from time to time but who were, nevertheless, left to get on with their strange life. I associate to the Cornerstone Church in Epsom, which had comparable ambitions to school children in isolation from the community at large.

The story of the film seems to be that when the boys were starting to flap their wings a bit and venture into the outside world, they came across a young lady who had just left film school. They clicked, and over a period of some years they collaborated with her to make this documentary, a documentary which may not have been a big hit but which did collect various arty prizes. It may have made the career of the young lady or, alternatively, it may have spoiled her for the rough and tumble of making regular films. Jury still out on that one.

For me, the film suffered from an absence of framing. We are told very little about how the family managed to live in this way for so long or about how exactly this documentary was made. How much money changed hands. Perhaps an absence made necessary by the fact that this documentary is about real people who are still, presumably, living in New York. But it left me very uncertain about what was fact and what was fiction. A version of the uncomfortable uncertainty about fact and fiction in historical novels - something which used to bother me in the past, but of which I may have been cured by the Rambaud trilogy about the fall of Napoleon, of which more in due course. For the present I can report having reached the end, six years after the off. See reference 1, complete with misspellings of the author's name.

Perhaps also a good example of the uncertainty principle at work, a principle which says that you cannot observe something at close quarters without changing it, so you can never be certain about how things were before you arrived on the scene, A principle in which anthropologists, perhaps in this unlike journalists and the makers of films, used to be thoroughly trained.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=aspern.