By LASIS Staff

The American Film Institute has named it the second best courtroom genre film of all time by the American Film Institute (first place: To Kill a Mockingbird). It garnered three Academy Award Nominations in 1958 (it lost all three to Bridge on the River Kwai). But to the disaffected ethnic youths who work with Avi Brisman, the film is “just another movie with too many white guys.” That’s their initial verdict, anyway. And then…

Last week New York Law School’s Program in Law in Journalism presented symposium “The Media and Criminal Law: Fact, Fiction, and Reality TV” which featured panels and presentations about the convergence of the media and criminal law. Mr. Brisman, a panelist at the event, is a graduate student in anthropology at Emory University studying “the interface of legal/political anthropology, criminology, and the sociology of law and punishment” and as part of his studies, he’s shown Twelve Angry Men to groups of adolescents he works with.

Some of the reasons the kids are not immediately hooked: Well, to tell the truth, it is another film about a bunch of white guys … It’s in black-and-white…. And except for three minutes at the very beginning, the entire movie takes place in the the jury room. As if that’s not enough, Brisman concedes, the film lacks everything that makes a crime story compelling today. There is no dramatic arrest, no close-ups of intolerable prison conditions, no show-stopping cross-examination.

So why does he show it? Because, he explained, in fictionalized media today, law enforcement are the good guys — and if they’re not, they get their comeuppance before the end-credits. The defendants are the bad guys — and if they’re not, they’re exonerated before the end-credits. But Twelve Angry Men, said Brisman, “deviates from this pattern of “glorified criminal law.” The film expertly captures racial prejudice (which sadly, many of the youth Brisman works with know something about) and jury deliberation (which intrigues them, and which is rarely depicted with in the media they are exposed to). Indeed, many of the youth he works with, directly or through their family members, have had close brushes with law enforcement, through arrests, incarceration, or government searches of their person or property.

We hate spoiling films, so for those of you who haven’t seen it, we won’t discuss the film’s ending. But Brisman believes that much of the film “reaffirms for these kids what the criminal system is really like” and lends truth to the parts they have not experienced first-hand. He’s had to pause the film a few times mid-screening to the young folks, and he has been surprised by how adamant they are that he turn it back on. But then again, maybe not so surprised.

Victoria Rosner contributed to this piece.