A Night at the Garden

A great and elegant reminder how close we are to fascism in our own times.

The Oscar-nominated documentary "A Night at the Garden" shows scenes from a Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939. As expected, the speakers spout lots of anti-Jewish and anti-labor pronouncements. It just goes to show how evil can be something so simple (Hannah Arendt called it the banality of evil). And then in 2017, neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, egged on by a certain orange-skinned head of state. As Mark Twain said, history doesn't always repeat but sometimes it rhymes.

Excellent documentary. The producer is Laura Poitras, who notably filmed Glenn Greenwald's interview with Edward Snowden, turning it into the Oscar-winning documentary "Citizenfour".

No one has known that it did happen in America in 1939, just a few months before the war of great evil. But everyone has to face it now because it is the TRUTH. In this very time, this very moment, a night at the garden is a must see for EVERYONE.

It's terrifying. A Nazi rally was held in NYC before the outbreak of WWII, and this film shows some archival footage from that rally.

There are obvious parallels to modern political rallies, but I was more terrified at the fact that as a nation, there was anyone dancing publicly with the Nazi idea so proudly. I had no idea that this occurred so brazenly in our history, and to this level of scale.

Films like this are uncomfortable to watch, and I do feel like this was a targeted glimpse to look at only pieces that paralleled the modern rally. I want to see more context here and understand what led to this, and if there was any noticeable outcome.

Marshall Curry's A Night at the Garden is a shocking look at fascist nationalists uniting under hateful premonitions. Though the footage is all straight from the archives, I thought its raw telling of this rally was all the more sobering than it could have been even with more context. This is a trend in this year's Oscar nominees for documentary short. I was sincerely disturbed by the final text that comes on the screen. It really makes you think about where we stand today in American politics and how we may be losing sight of the bigger international picture and injustices. We must keep our wits about us, ladies and gentlemen.