
“Sometimes, the truth is like a second chance,” says Congressman Jamie Raskin in The Sixth, an intriguing and rather surprisingly measured documentary of the January 6, 2021 attacks on the US Capitol building.
The images accompanying Raskin’s interview at some points, are quite distressing. Here, however, is the opposite. Raskin’s mood is contemplative and controlled as he appears to be in a Congressional hearing room; an empty vast space with no sound. He is partially facing the camera and is lighted from the side, gently guiding us through the thoughts of that day when he was in an office inside the Capitol building, worrying more about his daughter Tabitha who he knew had gone to the building, than about his own safety.
It has been almost four years since that day, but Raskin’s demeanor has not changed as the shadows of anxiety still linger on his face while he explains the events when the representatives of the American nation, be it the Republicans, the Democrats, or the Independents, and their staff along with their families were hiding in fear from a mob of haphazard chapel riding men and women.
Today, it’s safe to say that once the protestors reached the highest point of a storm in the House of Representatives chamber, they had enough rage to disperse a wee bit as it turned to evenings. For those very turbulent hours though, no one on either side was completely aware of what the outcome would be.
Everyone thinks they know the story of the January 6 event But in reality, this knowledge has more to do with the grabbing fifteen-second videos that stick in the memories of most people.
And each of those moments is present in this trying turning of pages of Oscar-winning Sean Fine and Andrea Nix The protestors scampering, like spiders, up the marble walls. the human battering ram exactly inside the entrance tunnel. the loud mike-wearing D.C. Metro officer pinned to the door frame. the Trump-penned more protestors marching inside the Capitol more interested in plunder than the sights.
The narratives are even exacerbated by telling the stories of people who were on defense of the Capitol or who were hiding during that day, but mostly they have to be led by the nose by the TV show presenters who are keen on hearing the juiciest consumption that can be heard before a speedy advertisement. Hardly ever had they been asked to look straight into the cameras first for eh start.
Such is the blessing of The Sixth, a vivid yet deeply compassionate story. Many of the January 6 documentaries make use of video footage in an attempt to reconstruct the disorder and bloodshed of the day. Fine and Nix go to greater lengths than ever before in their attempts to not only place us within the ruckus with awful precision, they go to great lengths to illustrate for us where in the park in and around the Capitol as necessary but also inside those locked, bolted doors behind which staff members shudderingly peer out through the glass as a seething tide of humanity draws closer and closer. But at the very least, there is a peculiar calm of sorts.
The painful silence is broken by early morning footage of smiling protestors walking peacefully toward the Ellipse located just behind the White House. The pictures show a sea of people that reach all the way to the Washington Monument tens of thousands were expected, but around 120,000 in fact came. While the speakers’ voices can still be heard giving speeches from the podium of the ellipse, on the boundary of this crowd, the protestors dressed in riot and combat costumes start advancing towards the Capitol. Anger radiates from the footage of their informal parade march.
Apart from Raskin, the film shows us a lineup of narrators which includes the award-winning photographer narrates events Mel D. Cole, who was filmed as he was swept to the Capitol’s steps by thousands of protestors, Metropolitan Police Officer Christina Laury, who was caught in a confrontation outside the Capitol, where she received a face full of bear spray from demonstrators officer Daniel Hodges, the man we’ve all seen being crushed in that doorway, and Erica Loewe who is the three deputies’ communications director for Representative James Clyburn (D-SC) and who progressively became horrified witnessing the protestors onsite breaking the police barriers and lines.
There is much to sympathize with this group’s recollections of threat and rage. where The Sixth falters is in providing an abundance of comprehension on the crowd invading the gates. There are still flashes of real people in the crowd because of the great work in documenting the events of Cole who, for instance, photographed a bow protestor rescuing a wounded person, and showing us a very brief moment when one protestor was screaming in tears begging his people to stop all the hatred and violence.
What becomes evident though is that the writer clearly has enjoyed his interviewing opportunity with the lady. First, it is captured on camera, there are theoretical aspects of it. The time was fast-founded probability, so Adult lady in a blue hat with a large blue bandana sitting downtown.
Astonishingly, the woman appears very similar to Ashli Babbit, the protestor who was shot and murdered while trying to enter the Speaker’s Lobby through a broken window. She is either a brave patriot or a fool who has been manipulated, but she is certainly going to see things through.
On top of that, the last material we have glimpsed is also the faces of the warriors faces full of fury, bodies jerking forward in eagerness to thrust their swords forward, and formations carrying a steady and grim forward movement. They could, however, have spent a minute or two on the reasonable explanation that, away from the main doors and the heated conflict, the cameras focused on some of the insurgents that were escorted into the Capitol via second-tier doors. How did that come to pass? Saddened are the policemen that were there, did they feel a sense of helplessness standing idle? Did they feel outraged as everything seemed abnormal considering they had no protective equipment? Or were they in actual sense, as some of the protestors put it, in support of the protestors? The simple story being told on other battlefields, that of good fighting bad, which was also happening elsewhere on that day, is just too easy. The Sixth ought to have been able to pursue something a little bit more intricate it should have been able to do that.
Sure, it’s not too unexpected that the narrators along with the filmmakers would let the January 6 insurgence off the hook for an onslaught that left over a hundred officers in serious injuries. They are after all America’s powerful and supreme warriors, not common street narcos. Even the antagonists in Marvel movies are afforded a man’s origin story. More than all else as an American, I crave to know the unambiguous ‘truth’ that so much resentment must have been felt by thousands of my fellow countrymen to give rise to a hasty charge as that. Their government, which they must have known, was a lost cause if they had the least bit of commonsense and was only meant for a short break height from.
Man, I could have doffed my hat had one or two of those highly tortured people looked into the camera and placed it gently to the side asking them for help once. Breathe in, breathe out, then EADEGIA.
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