BS Summary: This article contains 21 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Unattributed Quote, and Recency Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 18.5% saturation with 111 hits. Analysis detected 935 faulty-reasoning hits from 600 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 34.1% and a BS Rank of 28% (18,513 of 25,563 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 72.40% of the article peer group.
I want to bring attention to two Chicago-related short films released in the past few weeks that can be viewed online: Bill Morrison’s Sawyer Avenue, Sunday Afternoon (2026), and The New World of Stainless Steel (1960).
The former is very much of the present, the latter of the future by way of the past.
Morrison’s latest work for the New Yorker, was, like his 2024 Oscar-nominated short film Incident (about which I interviewed Morrison for the Reader in 2024), made in connection with the Invisible Institute.
The organization’s executive director, Jamie Kalven, wrote the text accompanying the film on the publication’s website, better illuminating what takes place within.
“We at Invisible Institute were moved to collaborate with Morrison in producing the film because of the immediacy of the incident it depicts: a community coming together to protect a vulnerable individual,” he proclaims, referring to an incident that took place on October 12, 2025, on Sawyer Avenue, when a group of Chicagoans intervened in the arrest of a young Latino man by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Still from Sawyer Avenue, Sunday Afternoon (2026) Credit: the New Yorker
Much like Incident, the film is composed of footage from the agents’ body cameras.
As Kalven notes in his piece, he “was the plaintiff in Kalven v.
City of Chicago, in which the Illinois appellate court ruled that investigations of police misconduct are public information in the state,” hence both the availability and use of such footage in the films.
It’s combined with video taken by the witnesses, who started an impromptu protest upon the man’s arrest, and arranged in multipanel split screens to provide various perspectives at once.
The effect is disorienting and infuriating.
I’m most familiar with Morrison through his work using decaying film stock to create ethereal treatises on tactility and ephemerality.
This and Incident are not dissimilar: Both are found-footage documentaries that create meaning from extant materials.
But what’s decaying in Incident and now Sawyer Avenue, Sunday Afternoon aren’t film or any kind of tangible material—rather it’s society, seeming just as warped as a one-hundred-year-old fragment of nitrate film stock.
Except there’s a restorative in the shape of the neighbors who intervene and the man being arrested.
“I understand you, I really do,” he says to the agents.
“But also, you have to understand us.”
Meanwhile, one of the neighbors who rushed out has done so barefoot, in her bathrobe, and at one point remarks that she’s going back in to put on pants since it seems like this will take a while.
In Kalven’s accompanying essay, this neighbor tells him she’s never in her life participated in a political protest, despite being one of the most vigorously involved in this one.
The New World of Stainless Steel, a recently finished preservation effort of the Chicago Film Archives and a Technicolor industrial film made at a Chicago production studio for an Ohio-based steel manufacturer, was anticipating a new world, certainly, but not the one we’re currently living in.
To hear it said and see it rendered so whimsically, you’d think stainless steel would have cured all that ails us.
Though what it lacks in political urgency compared to Morrison’s film it makes up for in breathtaking mise-en-scene more indicative of an auteur than an advertisement.
If perhaps there was anything that used to be great, about America or the world at large, it’s that when we were being sold to, it was at least done artfully.
Until next time, moviegoers.
More from the Moviegoer . . .
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Speakers
1speaker20%attributed speech482writer words
Selected voice
100%flagged-word coverageJamie Kalven
118 attributed words100% of attributed speech84% writer coverage
Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.
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Analysis
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