Screen Capture

Carol Murphy talks to Andrew Jarecki, director of the acclaimed and controversial documentary Capturing the Friedmans.

In Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective, Phillip Marlowe recounts an incident from his childhood: Once when he was a young boy at school, he defecated on the teacher's table when no one else was in the classroom. When his teacher interrogated him in front of his class, Marlowe pointed the finger at an innocent boy. Eventually one by one his classmates agreed with him, and even went so far as to say that they had witnessed the heinous act, for it was better to have someone judged and condemned than to leave the question of guilt unanswered.

The same level of hysteria which infected this classroom, swept through an affluent middle class suburb of New York, beginning on the day before Thanksgiving in 1987 when Arnold and Jesse Friedman, a well-respected music and computer teacher and the youngest of his three sons, were arrested. Their arrests were triggered when child pornography being sent to Arnold was intercepted by the police. Arnold and the 19 year-old Jesse were eventually convicted after pleading guilty to an extensive list of charges of sexually abusing children who had been attending computer classes every week in their home.

Just over three years ago, Andrew Jarecki interviewed David Friedman, Arnold's oldest son, for a film he was making about professional children's entertainers. David is the number one professional children's party clown in New York, and so it seemed apt that he should be interviewed for the film. What didn't seem apt however, was the anger this clown expressed, his reluctance to speak about his childhood, and the vitriolic way he referred to his mother, Elaine Friedman. When Jarecki eventually gained David's trust he was unwittingly introduced to a panoply of information about the Friedman family, who were obsessive about recording the very banal, and indeed the most private and intense, moments of their life in home movies. It was David who decided to video-tape the period between Arnold and Jesse's arrest and their subsequent conviction.

Through an assemblage of news footage, home movies and interviews from primary and secondary witnesses (including the police, the judiciary, the children who were allegedly abused and members of the Friedman family), Jarecki has built a contextual analysis of a family breaking down under the weight of a fundamental private and social crisis. It is consistently difficult throughout the film to settle on any sort of judgement as to Arnold and Jesse's guilt or innocence due to the way Jarecki unravels the information. There are so many conflicting versions of the story, so many obscene reactions by the community and the judiciary based upon flimsy and suspect evidence, and yet there are many elements of the Friedman family life and behavioural patterns which fail to place them in a favourable position.

While the film does not deny that it has been made from a subjective position, in conversation Jarecki refuses to make judgements on any of the Friedmans. The crime is the centrepiece of the film; however, Capturing The Friedmans transcends the question of guilt when faced with of the elusive nature of truth. It becomes a tale of judicial hysteria and a strange portrait of a family tragedy and how individual and collective memory can be selected and censored in order to deal with an unsettling and disturbing past.

CM: Why do you think that David filmed the breakdown of his family over the period of the arrests and the trials?

AJ: Well the police would say that David filmed it because the family was just crazy and they don't know the difference between film and reality; but David's version of that is more plausible, which is that they started out making a different film, sort of like I did. David bought the video camera because he wanted to have a little history of his father's life. He knew that his father was going to jail in six weeks and he had no record of him. Then he says when things really started to go haywire the camera was already rolling. Suddenly the case became refocused on Jesse, and suddenly the number of charges started to escalate; then things got so crazy that he had to find a way to capture what was going on.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 98