Directors Gédéon and Jules Naudet (“9/11”, “November 13: Attack on Paris”) produced a documentary that, like their previous project, revolves around a national tragedy. The “January 6” of the U.S. Capitol riot posed a similar challenge: How exactly to tell a story whose drama and horror are seen and transmitted in real time and continue to suffocate the country into fragmented pieces? since two years?
Filmmakers take a fairly simple approach that gives film its strength. Adhering strictly to a chronological account of events, “January 6” brings together the progression of the violence that day through video footage and details from speaker interviews with those either defending the reasons or hiding in it.
Strikingly, he often avoids theorizing about the political context that could provoke such an attack (see the other side of that coin, a new documentary, “The Rules of This Place,” on Jan. 6); instead, we’re just left with what’s on the ground, as Capitol Police officers, journalists, and lawmakers say. In that sense, the movie doesn’t offer any particularly new insights, but it’s how it witnesses the events of January 6 – in fact, as a two-and-a-half-hour montage, it seems to happen all at once. in slow motion and with shocking speed – perhaps a new instinctive and sustained terror.
There is a constant, terrifying creep across the film—the violence climbing and piercing through fences and windows, the sound of a crowd approaching barricaded doors. All of this makes for a frightening and necessary document of a deadly day, and also has the earnest realization that it all may have gone too far as the camera continually rushes through a 3D rendering of the Capitol to move on to a new horror scene. worse.
January 6
Not rated. Duration: 2 hours 30 minutes. Watch it on Discovery+.