Brian Huberman documentary filmmaker

See and learn about University of Houston – Downtown’s Ed Hugetz film festival, featuring several of our films.

February 17, 2017
5:30 PM
University of Houston-Downtown
O’Kane Theatre
One Main Building, 3rd Floor

And here’s some nice commentary about Alligator-Horses by Johanna Schmertz, associate professor of English at UHD:

Paralleling the work of the cultural historians it includes (e.g. important figures like Carroll-Smith Rosenberg, Eric Lott, and Richard Slotkin), Brian Huberman and Ed Hugetz’s documentary Alligator-Horses writes a cultural history of the violence and class warfare on which the United States has been built. Alligator-Horses may be seen as a chronicle of the dispossessed white male, a figure that moves between poles of savagery and civilization in a contest over the role and definition of masculinity in the United States. Primarily focusing on 1830-1840, the period during which the United States moves toward industrial capitalism, Hugetz and Huberman tell their story through archival materials like almanacs, maps, paintings and penny newspaper stories.

 

Though – like Ken Burns – they use archival sources to document and depict a time long gone, Hugetz and Huberman resist Burns’ linear style of storytelling in favor of a thematic Eisensteinian montage approach in which events depicted “don’t belong together and certainly didn’t happen one after another” (Huberman and Hugetz). As Huberman’s daughter tells him after seeing a rough cut of the film, only the unifying figure of Davy Crockett keeps the movie’s broad cast of characters from becoming a set of historical footnotes. She suggests Alligator Horses be seen as a dance – specifically, a square dance (and you’ll hear Hugetz talk about what this means for the film’s structure).

You have heard of Davy Crockett, “King of the Wild Frontier.” Alligator-Horses tells the story of David Crockett, the U.S. congressman who, years before his famous stand at the Alamo, campaigned against Andrew Jackson and fought for the cause of the poor in West Tennessee.

Alligator-Horses, a feature-length documentary film by Brian Huberman and Ed Hugetz, presents a vivid collage of stories and interviews with scholars and historians that reveal the 1830s as a pivotal decade in American history, when a growing underclass first began to struggle against the invisible grip of the “aristocracy” and emerging industrial capitalism.

Retracing Crockett’s political tour of the Northeast and examining the comic almanacs that first popularized him as an urban working class hero, the film recounts lesser known events from the “Age of Jackson,” including early labor strikes organized by women, the rise of the blackface minstrel show, anti-abolitionist riots in New York, and the scandalous murder of a prostitute that evolved into something like an O.J. Simpson trial of its time.

In our present decade, the “Occupy” movement speaks out against man-made forces that create income inequality and secure the status of the “one percent.” Alligator-Horses argues such a division has been present in America for almost 200 years, since a time when the national identity was in the midst of an ornery, anarchistic adolescence.

This experimental documentary, 14 years in the making, may look at a small slice of the American story. But in its weave of past materials into the present, it gives us a larger scope through which to examine history—and, by extension, ourselves.

FILM INTERVIEWS INCLUDE: social historian Eric Lott; New York Times bestselling author David Shields; cultural critic and historian Richard Slotkin; professor emerita of History, American Culture, and Women’s Studies, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg; historian, author and former New York firefighter Capt. William Groneman…and many more.

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