A Night at the Garden

A Night at the Garden is a 2017 short documentary film about a 1939 Nazi rally that filled Madison Square Garden in New York City.[1] The film was directed by Marshall Curry from footage found by archival producer Rich Remsberg, and was produced by Laura Poitras and Charlotte Cook with Field of Vision.[2] The seven-minute film is composed entirely of archival footage and features a speech from Fritz Julius Kuhn, the leader of the German American Bund, in which anti-Semitic and pro white-Christian sentiments are espoused.

A Night at The Garden
Film poster
Directed byMarshall Curry
Produced by
Written byMarshall Curry
Music byJames Baxter
Edited byMarshall Curry
Production
company
Marshall Curry Productions LLC
First Look Media
Distributed byField of Vision
Release date
  • 2017 (2017) (online)
  • January 26, 2018 (2018-01-26) (Sundance)
Running time
7 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

Release and reception

The documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018 and was nominated for the 91st Academy Awards for Best Documentary Short.[3][4]

Synopsis

The film uses footage from Monday, February 20, 1939, and opens outside Madison Square Garden with shots of the New York City Police Department reining in anti-Nazi counter-protesters along with a marquee that lists a "pro-American rally" scheduled on that night, above a National Hockey League match and an NCAA Division I college basketball game later in the week. After a procession of flag bearers to a stage decorated with swastika-adorned pennants, U.S. flags, and a portrait of George Washington, a German-accented man leads the audience in the Pledge of Allegiance. Kuhn steps up to the podium and casually remarks about how he is depicted as a "creature with horns, a cloven hoof, and long tail" by "the Jewish-controlled press." As he begins to outline a program calling for a "socially-just, white, Gentile-controlled United States" and "Gentile-controlled labor unions, free from Jewish Moscow-directed domination," a counter-protester rushes on stage in an attempt to attack Kuhn. He is beaten onstage by the Bund's paramilitaries, and as he is hauled away by the police the footage is slowed to focus on him. The footage ends with a rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" by a German-accented woman, before cutting to a title card noting that the rally occurred when Adolf Hitler was overseeing construction of Nazi Germany's sixth concentration camp and seven months before the German invasion of Poland and the beginning of World War II.[5][6]

Background

The documentary was produced using footage of the rally originally intended for newsreels that had never been widely issued due to its controversial content. Many film exhibitors avoided footage of Hitler and Nazism due to strongly negative reactions and even disorderly conduct from audiences. News of the Day never released its footage, while RKO-Pathé News quickly withdrew a newsreel incorporating the footage after deeming it "too inflammatory." As a result, the rally was widely forgotten after the end of World War II. After viewing the footage and expressing surprise at the event's obscurity, Curry was inspired to produce the documentary by the rise of the alt-right in the United States and the August 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The footage was retrieved and edited from the National Archives, the Grinberg Film Library, Streamline Films, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive.[7]

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References
  1. A NIGHT AT THE GARDEN - Trailer on Vimeo
  2. Sharf, Zack (2017-10-12). "'A Night at the Garden' Documentary Resurrects a Chilling 1930s Nazi Rally in New York City — Watch". IndieWire. Retrieved 2019-01-21.
  3. Patten, Dominic (2017-12-04). "Sundance 2018: American Nazis, Trapped Astronauts, Elvis & Spike Lee Among New Indie Episodic, Special Events & Shorts Slates". Deadline. Retrieved 2019-01-21.
  4. "Short docs, big Oscar hopes: "A Night at the Garden," "My Dead Dad's Porno Tapes" and "Los Comandos"". Salon. 2019-01-04. Retrieved 2019-01-21.
  5. Bump, Philip (October 17, 2017). "Analysis | When Nazis rallied in Manhattan, one working-class Jewish man from Brooklyn took them on". Washington Post. Retrieved 2019-01-21.
  6. Daley, Jason. "Footage Recalls the Night Madison Square Garden Filled With Nazis". Smithsonian. Retrieved 2019-01-21.
  7. Doherty, Thomas (2019-02-20). "Hitler at the Garden". Tablet Magazine. Retrieved 2019-09-23.
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