Like many readers of The Berkshire Edge, I am following the “Gender Queer” brouhaha with a queer eye. I am also closely tracking the shortlists leading up to the Oscar nominations announcement next Tuesday.
Specifically, the 15 current documentary short subject contenders will shrink to five by next week.
This brings me to a very friendly suggestion: Why not screen “The ABCs of Book Banning” prior to the January 25 meeting of the Berkshire Hills Regional School District Committee? The film is competing in the documentary shorts category and is a mere 27 minutes long. Available now on Paramount+, I bet someone on the committee subscribes to this streaming service.
I watched “The ABCs of Book Banning” on Sunday afternoon. Although it was available for free at public libraries across the nation last Saturday, somehow I missed this. Truth be told, I was reading at the Nantucket Atheneum that day as gale force winds howled outside.
I often park myself in this fabulous, cushioned vintage Windsor writing chair with attached arm desk. Located in the library’s hallway connecting the adult section with the children’s section, it would be a perfect spot to read “Gender Queer.” When I snapped the picture below, I was reading a previously banned book, Kenneth Anger’s “Hollywood Babylon.”
I bought Anger’s book in Provincetown last summer. Let me put it nicely: This is a salacious dumpster fire of epic imagination, with even more disturbing photos than all of “Helter Skelter.” But Anger was a child actor who later became an avant-garde filmmaker, so his take on early Hollywood is in my wheelhouse, however fabricated. Of course he was gay, but so what?
Here’s the thing: You need to meet Grace Linn right away; she turned 101 last October. She is the catalyst behind 84-year-old Sheila Nevins’s latest documentary, the first one Nevins ever directed. This, after producing over 1,000 documentary films for HBO. Nevins is a legend, plain and simple.
Likewise, children’s voices make Nevins’s work so powerful here; eight-, nine-, and 10-year-old kids wise beyond their years exude a playful candor you will find truly refreshing. As I noted in my review of “Anatomy of a Fall,” kids are super smart, which is why we must pay more attention to their thoughts and emotions. Take a look at this clip from the CBS Morning Show, part of the Paramount family:
In closing this week, I urge students, parents, teachers, school administrators, and the police department to hold a community screening of “The ABCs of Book Banning.” It would offer not only Linn’s sweeping perspective of Nazi book burnings during World War II to Florida’s misguided book banning impulses now, it would also amplify the voices of children uninvolved in the Great Barrington case.
As with books, film broadens our worldview and exposes us to other people’s experiences. In this case, we should thank LGBTQIA+ writers like “Gender Queer” author Maia Kobabe and documentary filmmaker Sheila Nevins. Ditto for school teacher Arantzau Zuzene Galdos-Shapiro, as well as centenarian quilting badass Grace Linn.
Bottom line: Get up, get dressed, and go watch “The ABCs of Book Banning.”
