DOMESTIC VIOLENCE 2

In some households, violence is part of the family. Director Frederic Wiseman has made a movie about women exposed to spousal brutality, Domestic Violence, Part I.

In Part II Wiseman takes a look at the men accused of battering their wives.

Three different courtrooms set the scene for many different cases. The presiding judges unroll the stories from the beginning, reconstructing the events in their details. The contradiction between the different parties’ perspectives at times is baffling.

Slowly the film peels layer after layer off the firmament that is the relationship between woman and man, revealing the dynamics of violence that dominate these daily wars.

It's the complexities of the relationships between the men and the women you see in the movie that make it difficult for them to separate. I don't know if complicity is the right word. (…) The difficulty to break the pattern and the need to maintain the relationship for a variety of reasons, as the case may be - love, fear, money, retaliation, and probably twenty others reasons - that was something I was not aware of that struck me quite forcibly.

Frederic Wiseman