Dick focuses on an image of Michael Gottfredson, president of the University of Oregon from 2012 to 2014, and some text reading: “Allowed two basketball players accused of involvement in a gang rape to play in the N.C.A.A. “The Hunting Ground” belongs to a long tradition of documentary advocacy cinema it isn’t straight journalism, but there are instances when it could benefit from a more conventional approach.
“As your parents learned when they dropped you off today,” one gray-haired man in purple says, “what happens in college stays in college - most of the time.” There’s no indication of who he is he’s just a representation of male power enjoying a sinister-sounding joke, seemingly at the expense of those young faces. Dick cranks “Pomp and Circumstance.” These upbeat scenes give way to images of students descending on campuses and then, a handful of older people talking while decked in somber caps and gowns. Captured in what looks like their own home videos, they whoop their joy as Mr. Dick’s approach to his material is evident in the opener, which shows a number of young people, mostly women, reacting excitedly to their school acceptance letters.
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Visually the movie is somewhat of a mess, and although that can be frustrating, it does reflect, wittingly or not, the cacophony defining the current discourse on rape. (The filmmaking pair previously collaborated on the documentaries “ Outrage,” about homophobia among American political elites, and “ The Invisible War,” about sexual assault in the United States military.) Subscribing to the more-is-more school of documentary, the director pulls out all of the stops in this movie, using talking-head interviews, vérité-like scenes, seemingly generic archival imagery, seemingly nongeneric archival imagery and numerous graphics, including some footnote-like citations. In “The Hunting Ground,” the writer-director Kirby Dick, working with the producer Amy Ziering, crams a crowd of faces and one seemingly unwieldy subject into a painful, absorbing, if periodically cluttered 103-minute documentary. At issue is whether they violated federal laws under Title IX, which bans gender discrimination at colleges receiving federal money. In a move that continues to make waves, it also released the names of 55 schools - from Harvard College to the University of California, Berkeley - that were under investigation by the Department of Education for their handling (or mishandling) of rape accusations.
In 2014, the White House released guidelines on how campus rapes are to be treated. Fueling that discussion is the Obama administration, which has made the issue a priority. The movie arrives in the midst of a vigorous, sometimes furious and at times crudely simplistic national discussion about sexual assault. Their stories - delivered in sorrow and rage, with misting eyes and squared jaws - make this imperfect movie a must-watch work of cine-activism, one that should be seen by anyone headed to college and by those already on campus. A blunt instrument of a movie, it derives its power largely from the many young women and some men recounting on camera how they were raped at their schools and then subsequently denied justice by those same schools. “ The Hunting Ground,” a documentary shocker about rape on American college campuses, goes right for the gut.
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