DuVernay on ‘13th’ and ‘14th’: One Was a Straight Line, One Is a Puzzle
Ava DuVernay’s “14th” closed the New York Film Festival as a Netflix documentary, and she describes it as sharing DNA with “13th,” her Oscar-nominated earlier film. The family resemblance, in her telling, is not structural. “13th” was “very linear,” she told IndieWire; “14th” is “a puzzle.” Those are two different contracts with an audience. A linear documentary offers a route — claim, evidence, consequence — and asks the viewer to keep up; the film has already decided the shape of the argument. A puzzle withholds the route and makes assembly part of the case, working on the assumption that an audience which fits the pieces together holds the conclusion more tightly than one that was handed it whole. The risk is symmetrical. If the pieces don’t click, the film reads as a muddle rather than an invitation, and the shape of the thing becomes the argument’s weak point instead of its vehicle.
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“Linear” tends to get used as faint praise, but 13th’s straight line was a decision rather than a default. The clarity was doing work: the audience never had to wonder where the argument was headed.
And never having to wonder is its own limitation. Clarity can carry an audience to the end without asking them to hold anything themselves, while a puzzle at least hands them the pieces and lets them feel the weight of assembling it.