Across The Margin: The Podcast explores the poignant work of noted documentarist Marshall Curry, particularly the chilling, Oscar nominated short “One Night At The Garden”…
In this latest episode of Across The Margin: The Podcast listeners are whisked back in time to the evening of February 20th, 1939, a night where 20,000 Americans rallied in New York’s Madison Square Garden to celebrate the rise of Nazism — an event largely forgotten from American history. This chilling and distressingly relevant to today’s times event is the subject of the recently released, Oscar nominated short film “A Night At The Garden,” and this episode features an interview with the filmmaker behind the film, Marshall Curry. Curry’s body of work is remarkable, from the 2002 Oscar-nominated Street Fight (which chronicled Cory Booker‘s 2002 mayoral campaign), to the Oscar-nominated If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front (about an environmentalist who faced life in prison for burning two timber facilities), and onto his work on Mistaken For Strangers (centering on the band The National), all of Marshall’s films are engaging, revealing to the human condition, socially conscious, and riveting.
While Curry’s extensive career and projects are discussed, this episode’s focus was aimed most sharply at “A Night At The Garden,” a distressing documentary short made entirely from archival footage filmed that fateful night. This affecting film transports audiences to this alarming gathering and shines a light on the power of demagoguery and anti-Semitism in the United States. In this episode Michael and Marshall discuss how the footage was unearthed, the unique way in which Marshall edited and presented the footage, and the frightening relevance of this event, so many years removed from today, to the current political climate in America.
