Anger After Death
1971 · 28m · Canada
Directed by Rick Raxlen
Genres: documentary, drama, war
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
A weapons chemist, a detached scientist, and a resurrected gas victim confront audiences about chemical warfare. Documentary and drama merge to unsettle contemporary complacency.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
1971 and still nobody knows how to handle this — a weapons chemist, a ghost, and a documentary colliding in the same frame to make you complicit in something you can't quite name. The fact that it resists being categorized as either doc or drama is exactly why it works.
Raxlen's formal hybridity sits in a lineage of essay-films and political cinema verité, but the resurrection conceit pushes it into stranger territory than most of its peers dared; the editing discipline required to hold documentary and supernatural drama in the same moral space is formidable.
The decision to literally resurrect the gas victim — not as metaphor but as presence — is the hinge that lifts this from polemic into something unsettling; everything else serves that single, audacious choice to make abstraction visible.