Not a Pretty Picture

It is a brilliant Brechtian experiment and an essential filmic document.

What’s most unnerving about this four-decade-old film is how little has changed in the time since. We are still learning the same lessons Coolidge was trying to impart so long ago — nothing is different.

Its blend of documentary and dramatic filmmaking, of first-person reflection and reenactment, sets a standard for cinematic inquiry into the political implications of personal experience.

Made nearly half a century ago and long hiding in plain sight, Martha Coolidge’s “Not a Pretty Picture” is at once an autobiographical documentary, a Pirandellian psychodrama, an acting exercise, a personal exorcism and a powerful political tract.

A film which never really manages to confront us with the enormity of its subject, nor with any kind of analysis as to why rape occurs.