“13th”: A Masterclass in Documentary Filmmaking
How Ava DuVernay’s Documentary Uses Cinematography and Story Structure to Confront Injustice
I’ve been watching Ava DuVernay’s 13th, and I can’t stop thinking about its rhythm.
Not just the message—though it’s as urgent as anything in contemporary documentary work—but the way it moves.
The film doesn’t crawl. It doesn’t meander. It pushes. It flows through U.S. history like a current, from the 13th Amendment to mass incarceration, using interviews, archival footage, graphics, and music to pull you along without losing you. There are places to breathe, yes, but never a lull. Even in its quietest moments, the documentary is moving forward.
The Craft: Cinematography as Rhetoric
One of the first things that caught my attention was the wide-angle framing in the interviews. It’s not just a stylistic flourish—it’s rhetoric. These compositions place the subject in a rich environment, often with symbolic foreground elements (bars, empty chairs, office stacks, historical sites) that say as much as the dialogue. The lower thirds sometimes wrap into the frame in ways that physically connect the speaker to their words.
This is authority-building through the lens: camera placement, depth of field, and negative space as tools for credibility.
Archival as Evidence
There are no reenactments here—just a relentless use of historical documents, film clips, photographs, and political ads. Every archival piece feels researched and purposefully placed. From the chilling propaganda of The Birth of a Nation to the coded language of presidential speeches, DuVernay stitches history together without ever letting the viewer forget its continuity with today.
The motion graphics deserve their own shout-out. Minimalist, striking, and timed to the beat of the film’s pace, they make data persuasive without drowning us in it.
Music as a Bridge
From Public Enemy’s Don’t Believe the Hype to the haunting close of Common’s Letter to the Free, the soundtrack is its own narrative voice. It shifts tone, carries transitions, and connects past protest movements to present struggles. The African American spiritual There’s a Man Goin’ ’Round Taking Names, arranged by Jason Moran and sung by Lawrence Brownlee, stops the film in its tracks with a moment of stillness and ancestral resonance.
The iPhone Shift
One of the most compelling sequences connects smartphones to the long history of documenting injustice—bridging civil rights news footage, the Rodney King video, and today’s citizen journalism. The message is clear: everyone can be a witness, and that changes the power dynamic.
Resonance with the Finding Reuben Project
Watching 13th inevitably made me think about the Finding Reuben Project. Both films dig into systemic injustice—13th on the national stage, Finding Reuben at the local and generational level.
Where DuVernay moves through sweeping policy arcs, Finding Reuben traces the life, lynching, and legacy of one man and the generations impacted. Yet both share the same DNA: a belief that archival evidence, lived testimony, and intentional visual framing can force us to see history not as distant, but as present.
The question becomes: how do we use these tools—cinematography, pacing, archive, music—not just to make art, but to make an argument? To challenge comfort? To tell truth in a way that can’t be unseen?
For My Students
When I show 13th in the classroom, it’s not just to discuss the message. It’s to break down:
How interviews are lit, framed, and positioned in space.
How archival footage is layered for both context and persuasion.
How pacing and music shape the emotional arc.
Because whether you’re telling the story of an entire nation or the story of one man named Reuben, the craft matters as much as the content.
The 13th Amendment abolished slavery—except as punishment for a crime. Ava DuVernay’s film shows us what has grown in that loophole. The Finding Reuben Project asks us what happens when the violence isn’t hidden in policy, but carved into the soil of our own communities.