DVD Review - How To Survive A Plague (2012)

Genre:
Documentary
Distributor:
Network Releasing
Rating:15
DVD Release Date:
31st March 2014 (UK)
Director:
David France
Buy:How to Survive a Plague [DVD]
“Plague! We are in the middle of a fucking plague! And you behave like this. Plague! Forty million infected is a fucking plague! We are in the worst shape we have ever, ever, ever been in. All those pills we are shovelling down our throats, forget it! ACT UP has been taken over by a lunatic fringe. They can’t get together. Nobody agrees with anything. All we can do is field a couple of hundred people at a demonstration. That’s not gonna make anybody pay attention. Not until we get millions out there. We can’t do that. All we can do is pick at each other and yell at each other. And I say to you in year ten the same thing I said to you in 1981 when there were 41 known cases. Until we get our acts together. All of us. We are as good as dead.”

So goes the extraordinary outburst of Larry Kramer (whom some of you may know as the screenwriter for Ken Russell’s Women in Love) at around the midpoint of the film. Kramer is frustrated. Frustrated at the infighting going on in an organisation whose anger should be aimed outwards. The organisation in question is ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power). Their aim to force the US government and pharmaceutical industry into faster action in the fight against HIV/AIDS. What Kramer’s powerful and arresting speech illustrates is the depth of access afforded to director David France, through the vast amount of archival footage (700 hours, I believe) that was available to him, in making the remarkable documentary How to Survive a Plague.

France’s film immerses the viewer within the movement and through the use of footage filmed by activists we feel like we are experiencing the meetings, protests, new conferences, and home videos with them. We are experiencing their world from within. We feel like we are a part of something. And this is what makes the film remarkable. We are with them at the ‘Kiss In’ at St. Vincent’s Hospital. We are with them at the ‘Stop the Church’ protests at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. And we are with them on demonstration at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Campus. We are with them at their formation in 1987 when they took their mortality into their own hands and began challenging the government and the medical establishment. And we are with them in 1996 when their persistence finally pays off and combination drugs makes their illness manageable.

Through the use of found footage the documentarian is no longer reliant on conventional documentary techniques to tell a story. And from the greater access we now have to filmed footage through cheap recording equipment, we have a new genre of documentary: archival verité. What this type of documentary does is put the subject in the present-tense and, to quote Robert Greene (Sight & Sound), “bring the past into the immediate present.” In the case of How to Survive a Plague this approach brings ACT UP’s fight for better HIV/AIDS treatment back to the forefront of our collective consciences and stands as a reminder for how activism can bring about change.

★★★★☆

Shane James