Sonic Cinema

Grade : A Year : 2020 Director : Sierra Pettengill Running Time : 18min Genre : Documentary, Short

Harlon Carter is the most notorious political activist you’ve probably never heard of. Sierra Pettengill’s short documentary will burn his name into your memory for all eternity. Carter rose to prominence as a member of the United States Border Patrol started in 1936, and in the 1950s, he commanded border patrol during Operation Wetback, where he sent a million-plus Mexicans back across the American border. That alone should make him infamous, but in the 1970s, he became a high-ranking leader in the National Rifle Association, and one of the things he did was radicalize the organization’s rhetoric when it came to gun control regulation using fear and racism. In 18 minutes, Pettengill creates a damning case of him being one of the reasons for not only our inability to pass simple, but effective, gun regulation, and also the climate to make the recent resurgence of white supremacist thought to come out of the shadows. The revelation about Carter that one newspaper helped bring out into the open in his later years should come as no surprise after everything “The Rifleman” has told us about earlier. This is the type of film where you feel wiser about the state of America, but also more ill about what type of country we’ve been over the years.