Tattooed Tears

Broomfield and Churchill's 'sequel' to their controversial Juvenile Liaison raises urgent structural and institutional problems for the investigative form. The workings of a purportedly liberal Youth Training School for delinquents in California are examined, and condemned through an intensely dramatic concentration on four of its victims, ostensibly there for rehabilitation, but actually undergoing repetitive and vindictive punishment. In the process, the film raises the spectre of individual suffering exploited: one inmate dramatising his resistance specifically for the camera receives humiliating treatment which the camera duly observes but cannot forestall. Though the film's purpose may be agitational in the immediate US context, the result as received here tends, unfortunately, to the disturbingly voyeuristic.