- #Tyke the elephant documentary movie#
- #Tyke the elephant documentary series#
- #Tyke the elephant documentary tv#
In cutting back and forth between footage of civil unrest in Chicago and a white bestselling author insulting the white creator of National Review, Gordon and Neville drive home the message that the nature of this political debate had already left the bounds of the real world it purported to represent.
But there’s something going on here that’s much darker and colder. And counterculture film buffs will appreciate the clips from Myra Breckenridge, the infamous 1970 adaptation of Vidal’s satire about a man who becomes a woman and tries to destroy Hollywood.
#Tyke the elephant documentary tv#
Buckley and Vidal’s battles, which were televised because a desperate ABC needed to boost ratings for its political-convention coverage, were the forebears of the toxic political punditry that has come to dominate TV news: the character-driven style and the ad hominem personal attacks.įor media gadflies, directors Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville deliver an entertaining yarn, tracking the narrative of the country’s upheaval over the course of the pair’s debates and climaxing with the infamous exchange of “crypto-Nazi” and “queer” insults.
The timing wasn’t the film’s fault-in fact, it seemed to be apologizing for its own existence.
#Tyke the elephant documentary movie#
The movie is a lively history of the televised 1968 debates between bitter arch-rivals Gore Vidal and William F. It was both sobering and entirely fitting to the tone of past festivals that the opening-night film was Best Of Enemies, a self-mocking origin story for the vacuum of political punditry. Would this be a sign of what was to come-a weekend of back-patting and peppy stories instead of films that would drag us toward the ideas that mattered most at that moment? As the festival’s opening-night selection played in the nation’s capital, a man was committing a horrific hate crime in Charleston, with roots in the nation’s most painful memories.
This year, it was saddled with external drama as well.
#Tyke the elephant documentary series#
It’s played host to a series of internal dramas in the last few years after losing a major sponsor, expanding beyond its longtime home in Silver Spring, Maryland, and attempting to rope in the political establishment by promoting the movies alongside their boiled-down causes. The AFI Docs festival in Washington D.C., has always had a strange vibe, trying to cater simultaneously to independent filmmakers, activists, and policy wonks who want to be coddled almost as often as they want to change the world. But documentaries, by their nature, want to drag viewers back into the world-kicking and screaming, if necessary. Film festivals, by their nature, want to take people out of the world, into a cocoon of narrative and artistry. Through her former trainers and handlers, circus industry insiders, witnesses to her rampage, and animal rights activists for whom Tyke became a global rallying cry, the film raises fundamental questions about our connection to other species.It’s strange to attend a documentary festival while the world nurses an open wound. Tyke’s break for freedom – filmed from start to tragic finish – traumatised a city and ignited a global battle over the use of animals in the entertainment industry.
This is the gripping and emotionally charged story of Tyke, a circus elephant who went on a rampage in Honolulu in 1994, killed her trainer in front of thousands of spectators and died in a hail of gunfire.
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