We often do not comprehend our parents’ occupations when we are children. Aside from professions like lawyer and doctor, the titles promptly explain their duties; there are a plethora of other careers that carry enigmatic titles and corporations that are tough to understand their business. This childish ignorance may clash when you discover the true nature of their work: an army general or mortician, careers that have a more profound understanding of the activities. One of those cases occurred to the American experimental filmmaker Lee Anne Schmitt, whose films explore the ideological nature of the spaces we occupy. Ironically, a few decades after her infancy, the director dives into her father’s work at the Olin Corporation. In Evidence, Schmitt descends into her remembrances of her father’s absence due to his role in the industry, which required him to travel all around the world. Hence, every time he came back, she would get a doll from that place, resulting in a massive, varied collection of dolls that represented the material replacement for parental affection.
Presented through the lens of time, the director delves into the corporation’s activities, which reached its commercial peak during World War II, primarily as an ammunition producer. Following that, they became a manufacturer of chemicals, one of the leaders in the segment worldwide, resulting in multiple factories across diverse locations. Yet, the director and subject do not study only the consolidation of the Olin brand in two controversial industrial sectors, which arguably contribute to global violence and pollution. Schmitt unveils the participation of American corporations in financing Think Tanks, organizations that fund and support intellectuals of a specific current. In her father’s employer’s case, they financed conservative and neoliberal groups, resulting in the publishing of hundreds of books that support an industrial, elitist, and white-centered version of American history, sustaining the arguments of Republican politicians in the foreseeable future.
In an essayistic and personal tone, the documentary balances the director’s experience and her political beliefs, particularly analyzing the effects of think tanks on the creation of an American neoliberal bibliography. Through the imagery of the natural world around her, the collection of dolls, and the books, Schmitt offers a vision of the reality that shaped her. The breeze of the trees in her home, the toys that remind her of her father’s absence, represent an industrial household of destruction. Shot on film, the texture of the images imprints a bygone aspect, an era that does not exist anymore, and predominantly because of the consequences of late-stage capitalism. Even in the presented poetry, the director inflects the outcomes of Olin’s destruction, both at the production site and in the so-called laboratory of ideas it financed.
In a sense, Evidence and its primary thesis thematically rhyme with Laura Poitras’ All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. It portrays the Sackler family financing of museums across the United States, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), in an attempt to diminish their role in the American opioid epidemic. The same logic applies to the Olin Corporation, which allocates an infinitesimal percentage of its profits to support university infrastructure and research, such as Law and Economics Centers, thereby highlighting the role of law in favor of economic nature. Hence, the Think Tanks imply cooperative thinking in the academic sphere, utilizing the fellows’ structure of individual financing as a co-opt tactic.
In its most effective part, the director illustrates the effects of these financial contributions for the recipients; she presents the proof, as indicated in the film title. She opens up the sheets of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, which suggests the doomsday of American history as defended by the male-centered, bourgeois, and elitist thinking of liberal intellectuals. Another case study is Allan Bloom’s work, such as The Closing of the American Mind, which suggests that the central reason behind the “American failure” is the divorce rate and the decline in natality rates. Even so, Schimitt exposes the contradictory nature of Bloom’s personal life, one which involves the romantic relationship with his students of the University of Chicago, and his death, caused by AIDS.
Finally, Evidence is a reflection of the director’s parental absence caused by a corporation that defends political intellectualism, which clashes with Lee Anne Schimitt’s beliefs. As shown in a single take, the ideal of family that the Think Tank intellectuals defend and do not follow is contrary to her experiences once she became a mother in her forties. Yet the director defends the ideals of the American family, not the singular, inclusive one, but the one that corporations seek to defend based on political interests and corporate greed. Hence, the film is a response to her father’s former employer, who took him from her, and defends the white heterosexual family ideal, at the same time that its chlorine leaks destroy lives, and Think Tanks are as contradictory as conservatives usually are.
Evidence has recently played at a number of international film festivals, including the New York Film Festival.
Learn more about the film on the IMDb page for the title.
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