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Gray Matter

2004, Movie, NR, 59 mins

Gray Matter: Review

Sometimes the intrinsic power of a documentary's subject matter trumps the director's craft, however good that craft may be, and Joe Berlinger's film about Nazi medical studies of children and the bottled brains that bear mute witness to their actions is a perfect example.
In 2002, American filmmaker Berlinger — whose credits include PARADISE LOST (1996) — joined and international group of journalists at a conference in Vienna. The purpose: To bring ceremonial closure by burying the preserved brains of 700 children deemed disposable on the grounds of mental, physical or psychological defects. The youngsters were Sterilized and subjected to a variety of experiments at Austria’s Spiegelgrund Psychiatric Hospital, under the command of eugenicist. Gross was never prosecuted, avoiding the post-war fate of other war criminals in deference to his skill as a courtroom forensics expert; more astonishing still, he was granted access to his specimens until 1998! But while politicians honor the dead children, the reporters are both stonewalled as they try to ascertain information about the atrocities and prevented from obtaining Dr. Gross’s address. A technician is fired after he allows Berlinger to visit the off-limits lab area, and government sources stall even as survivors of Gross's experiments both attest publicly to his guilt and pursue civil suits. When Berlinger finally tracks down the scientist, the slippery Gross refuses to shoulder any blame and remains the beneficiary of institutional protection.
Working on a small but historically unique scale, Berlinger uses the horrors of the Holocaust not to ask sweeping questions about the final solution but to calls contemporary officials to task for permitting individuals like Gross to evade responsibility decades later. leave a comment --Robert Pardi