Challenging Official Histories in “Natchez” and “Mr. Nobody Against Putin”

Rev displays the rhetorical power, leavened with humor and warmth, of a skilled public speaker, but many others are charismatic, too. There’s Deborah Cosey, the first Black member of the Pilgrimage Garden Club—who says that the garden clubs had long been “slaps in the face to the African American community”—and the owner of an antebellum house known as the Concord Quarters. An unadorned brick building, it housed enslaved people and has a kitchen where many of them once worked. Cosey was formerly a guide at a historic inn in the town and was ordered to “stick to the script” when she insisted on mentioning the inn’s slave quarters; today, as she says, “I wrote my own script.” There’s David Garner, an elderly white homeowner and guide who is also a brazen and unabashed racist, using the N-word on tours, even after being “reprimanded” for “inappropriate words” and forced to censor himself by the “hoop-skirt mafia.” Garner is gay and claims that “half” of the historic-home owners are gay men, the only people, he says, with “the money and the taste” to maintain the properties. Rev, who’s been on Garner’s tours, wonders whether Garner is merely “trying to portray a Southern aristocratic gentleman, how they would talk.” He adds, “Maybe you can see if there’s a real him or is that the real him?”

White tourists describe visiting these sumptuous, old-fashioned properties as a way to “get away from current events,” and the film’s poised cinematography, by Noah Collier, captures the enveloping allure of these pristinely preserved grand dwellings. But current events are inextricable from the subject of “Natchez,” perhaps all the more so in the months since the movie premièred, at the Tribeca Film Festival. The federal government is a conspicuous presence in the film, because the National Park Service owns an antebellum house, and a ranger who works there, Barney Schoby, goes into great detail regarding the daily lives of people who were enslaved, including how knowledge that some surreptitiously gleaned during their labors helped them prosper under Reconstruction. The N.P.S. also owns another Natchez site, called Forks of the Road, which, for a time, was the second-largest American slave market. The N.P.S. is attempting to purchase all the former land of the market in order to turn it into one of the country’s principal slave-market museums—but the owners of some sites don’t want to sell, and one, a white man named Gene Williams, is derisive about the project.

The person mainly responsible for the Forks of the Road preservation and historical research, according to Schoby, is an elderly Black man named Ser Boxley. Boxley, seen all too briefly onscreen, is one of the most extraordinary presences in the recent cinema. He describes his activism in mystical terms: “The enslaved ancestors here asked the question, Who is going to tell their story? And I said I would.” An unnamed white ranger who openly seeks to end the whitewashing of history says, “I see him as a Biblical prophet,” someone who is “pointing out to the status quo that they were not fulfilling their mission of justice.” The grandeur of Boxley’s influence is conveyed by his terse, oracular speech. When Cosey first met him, in a store, he mentioned her purchase of the Concord Quarters and said, simply, “These buildings are worthy of preservation.” To watch Herbert’s film is like watching a report on a place that has subsequently been besieged. It’s hard to imagine the N.P.S., under the Trump Administration, advancing the educational program that’s on heroic view in “Natchez.” Herbert may have preserved more history than she ever expected.

The power of governments to replace education with indoctrination is the subject of another remarkable new documentary, “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” which likewise features characters who, at the end of filming, are at risk. It’s a first-person narrative relating the experiences and observations of Pavel (Pasha) Talankin, who, as a videographer at a school in the Russian town of Karabash, about a thousand miles east of Moscow, was directly affected by his country’s invasion of Ukraine, in February, 2022. Quickly, the school received directives “from above” requiring teachers to install a new “patriotic” curriculum and students to perform nationalistic songs and speeches—all of which Talankin had to record on video, as proof that the school was following orders. Talankin, an independent-minded opponent of the war, who had turned his office into a “pillar of democracy” where students could gather and speak freely, submitted a letter of resignation.

Soon after, however, he made online contact with David Borenstein, an American filmmaker based in Denmark, who wanted to document the war’s impact on daily life in Russia. Talankin, realizing that history was unfolding before his eyes, promptly withdrew his resignation. Now he could fulfill his official duties—recording marches, flag-waving parades, grenade-throwing competitions, and educational visits from Wagner Group mercenaries—while also amassing footage for Borenstein. In the film, he reflects wryly that he is no longer just a videographer but also a film director.

Talankin bears witness to the conscription of young men and mourns the combat deaths of some of them, and he ruefully recognizes the effectiveness of propaganda. With dogma filling school days, students aren’t being educated and are left intellectually unprepared for much but obedience. He hears President Vladimir Putin declaring, on TV, “Teachers win wars,” and redefining opposition as treason. When Talankin notices a police car parked at his apartment building, he decides to leave Russia. Pretending merely to go on vacation, he takes with him much more footage for Borenstein to assemble. The result, featuring a copious voice-over by Talankin, is an exemplary work of cinematic modernism, a reflexive film that turns its genesis into its subject and its moral essence. “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” relentlessly dramatizes its most exceptional aspect—the very fact that it was made. ♦