Clowns Did Bring Us 'CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS'

These two clowns are taking part in the First Congress of Clowns in San Salvador as we speak. This pose was done during a class of physical skills for clowns. About one hundred clowns from Mexico, Guatemala, Peru and El Salvador take part of this congress in which they discuss about their benefits, financial assistance, and new skills to make people laugh. I'm a member of about half the population that can't stand clowns but ever since I saw the best documentary of 2003, 'CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS' I must thank them for one thing, and that this compulsory viewing documentary came in to fruition.


Andrew Jarecki started to make a film about professional clowns and in the process met David Friedman (pictured left), New York's most successful party clown. It turned out that David had a huge store of home movies, reaching back to the 1950s. They are home movies of a pretty middle of the road American family. Slapstick being the order of the day, they are nonsensical, normal, verging on yawn material. Andrew Jarecki: "And finally he said to me one day, well, if you're going to refocus the film and it's going to be about my family, I should tell you that in addition to the 25 hours of home movies I gave you in the beginning of my father and my family during happy times, there are another 25 hours of home videos that I started taking after the police showed up at my house." This revelation becomes the basis for the documentary and the home movies bloat with meaning.

The Friedman Family

Jarecki uses all kinds of material to explore one of the most bizarre sexual abuse cases in American legal history. David's father Arnold and his 18-year-old brother Jesse were charged with sex crimes against young boys that were allegedly carried out over a period of years in their Great Neck, Long Island home (they had set up a computer skills course in the basement). The film brings up questionable methods by which the police investigators at the time used to attain evidence such as the manner in which the alleged victims were questioned. It also uncovers old letters which reveal the sexual history of the father. The accounts from all family members conflict then match up and then implode again. It filters through how impossible it was for any of the boys in the family to have any objective distance from what there father may have done (or Jesse for that matter) or what he was really like as a human being. Only the mother obtains this distance but with major consequences. Utimately the test of this film is whether you can stand to be left in the dark about who is telling the truth and why your personal feelings about what really happened change with every blink of your exasperated eyes.

Andrew Jarecki: "I think interestingly, even the people who are telling you things that don't turn out to be true very often don't know it. It's not that they're lying. It's that they've completely convinced themselves over time that their version of events is correct."

Jesse and Arnie Friedman

There are a few websites worth visiting for more reading, one is run by Jesse Friedman himself and the other gives you some great insights into the film with some eerie back ground sound bites so make sure your speakers are on.