Michael Apted's documentary companion piece to his fictional Thunderheart: no permissive mysticism this time, and no tidy Hollywood ending either (though one can clearly see the leanings that would lurch all the way to the FBI-as-bad-guy conclusion of the fiction film). This is strictly true-crime stuff, re-examining the murders of two FBI agents who, while on the trail of a cowboy-boot thief, blundered into the midst of a "firefight" on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota at the peak of Indian-rights political agitation in the mid-1970s. Three Indians were ultimately prosecuted, one convicted -- another inglorious chapter in the annals of American justice, to say nothing of the annals of red-and-white race relations. Apted, a Britisher who has done the bulk of his film work on this side of the Atlantic, has here taken the format of TV's Unsolved Mysteries to perhaps its highest elevation. Highest thus far achieved; not highest conceivable. Essentially it's an interview movie, whose interviewer remains unheard and unseen, and whose interviewees (suspects, witnesses, investigators, prosecutors, defense attorneys, politicians) are all on their best behavior. This approach could be said, of course, to utilize few of the so-called resources of the medium. As a specimen of documentary filmmaking, the director's 28 Up (or his 35 Up) can lay claim to a more inventive premise as well as to a built-in structure in spite of itself (the reverberant acoustic of the British class strata). But as a fount of raw information, a fact-finding tour of a Third Worldy corner of America underexplored on screen, Incident at Oglala commands our attention. And it is sufficiently enlightening -- so to put it -- that you come out of it completely in the dark. Narrated and executive-produced by Robert Redford. (1992) — Duncan Shepherd
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