Rottet die Bestien aus!

With its essayistic style and thematic divergence, Exterminate All the Brutes is reminiscent of the work of Adam Curtis. Except for occasional flashes of dark humour, however, Peck is more serious, takes a more personal approach and uses performed sequences, often quite brutal and pulling us out of the concept by employing deliberate anachronisms, in which Josh Hartnett almost always portrays a racist swine. In various episodes from ancient and recent history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust and today’s neo-Nazi marches, Peck examines how a “deviation in pigmentation”, i.e. white skin colour, was “transformed into a source of power”. He is interested in the stories that form the basis of the belief that the white race is superior. In gathering together examples of how the happiness of some people was purchased at the cost of pain inflicted on many others, he puts himself in the position of a biased narrator, not a neutral historian. Therefore, he does not shy away from using words that you probably would not encounter in a serious sociological or anthropological study. He bluntly calls Andrew Jackson a murderer of Indians and talks about how the Belgians plundered the Congo and how the genocide of the native population is still ongoing in the United States today. To support his arguments, he uses scenes from Triumph of the Will and John Ford westerns, quotes from Thomas Hobbes, excellent animated maps, well-made animated sequences, classic paintings set in motion and Eva Braun’s home movies. In addition to his sombre voice, we hear a broad range of music ranging from funk to classical. The way in which Peck places individual images and texts behind himself (sometimes even on himself) and thus cleverly confronts us with facts that have been excluded from our culture for centuries (preventing us from cultivating the ability to perceive them) is in itself so suggestive that I momentarily became so absorbed in the visual component that I forgot to listen to the commentary. Exterminate All the Brutes is the most transgressive documentary of recent years. (16.04.2021)