Jim Crow justice revisited in Ken Burns doco The Central Park Five

KEN Burns tells the tale of five young men wrongly convicted of a brutal rape.

The Central Park Five

'FILMMAKING is essentially about entertainment, but it's amazing to realise that it has this other muscle that could actually help," Emmy winner Ken Burns said recently. "People permit entertainment to wash over them, but every once in a while, entertainment - and this is entertaining - also galvanises something else, and that would be a really good thing to happen in this case."

He was speaking about his feature documentary chronicling a tragic miscarriage of justice, The Central Park Five, which airs on SBS this week. It's the story of Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana Jr and Kharey Wise, five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem who were sensationally and wrongly convicted of raping a white woman who had been jogging in New York's Central Park in 1989. The five were railroaded and framed in a manner Burns suggests was reminiscent of the Jim Crow America of the south, "just before you strung an African American up on an invented crime".

Burns is co-director of the film with his daughter Sarah, who wrote the 2011 book The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of a City Wilding, on which it's based, and Sarah's husband, David McMahon. ("Wilding" is a derogatory term, with connotations of "wolf pack", used in the late 1980s to mean the way a band of youths, generally poor and black, might roam the streets looking for trouble.)

The trio's complex, saturated-with-detail film is as unsettling, mesmerising and, finally, elevating as anything you're likely to see on TV this year. Few filmmakers demonstrate the skill with which Burns puts his individuality across despite the rigid mould into which television documentary usually must be fitted.

Burns is as much an auteur as Breaking Bad's Vince Gilligan, Mad Men's Matthew Weiner or The Wire's David Simon. His memorable documentaries (many of which he has co-produced with Lynn Novick) include The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The War, The National Parks and, more recently, The Dust Bowl and Prohibition.

Demonstrating a new kind of visual storytelling, they are milestones in television, ambitious and authoritative audiovisual histories reaching millions of viewers.

His familiar style unfolds through a stylised organisation of personal anecdote, a sonorous narration (usually from Peter Coyote), and elegantly realised visual documentation.

The Central Park Five, though, is more concentrated, a single film with no narration and a different sort of musical sensibility. But, as Burns maintains, it's still in keeping with the many themes in his work, especially race and justice.

The five black teenagers, not knowing their rights during detainment, were coerced into confessing the brutal rape of Trisha Meili, then a 28-year-old investment banker, who was also bludgeoned and left for dead. She has never been able to recall her attacker's face.

After interrogating the youths aggressively for many hours the cops, seasoned homicide detectives, decided they had the perpetrators, though there was little evidence linking the suspects to the crime.

As the film shows, by the time of the Central Park attack on April 19, 1989, the city was divided by what The New York Times reporter Jim Dwyer calls in the film "a social moat"; it was full of fear, resentment and almost suffocating racial tension. There were more than 2200 homicides and 5200 rapes that year and, inevitably driven by the tabloid press, frightened New Yorkers wanted instant retribution for this latest crime.

Donald Trump took out full-page ads in four daily newspapers calling for the death penalty, and politicians such as former mayor Ed Koch had already convicted the young men in the public gallery. They never had a chance. They were tried as adults and convicted of rape, despite their inconsistent and inaccurate confessions, DNA evidence that excluded them and no eyewitness accounts that could connect any of them to the victim.

They all went to jail, serving their complete sentences of between six and 13 years, before Matias Reyes - already serving 33 years to life for murder and rape - confessed to the attack. The courts exonerated the five, clearing their records of any crimes committed relating to the case.

But their innocence received little attention. Few New Yorkers realised the five had been exonerated. No reporters, prosecutors or detectives have ever apologised, the only act of contrition coming from the court artist, according to Salaam. ("They were drawing us looking like big gorillas," he said recently.)

A decade-long lawsuit against the city is still being waged by the men, alleging that cops and prosecutors violated their civil rights. City lawyers sought to inspect Burns's outtakes in hope of finding evidence with which to impeach the plaintiffs. They argued, in part, that Burns was not entitled to the protection afforded journalists because, they charged, he was in league with the five and their lawyers and that the purpose of the film was first and foremost the financial settlement of the lawsuit. Manhattan federal judge Deborah Batts quickly disposed of that sideshow.

It's an extraordinary story set against the dystopian backdrop of a city crippled by violence and despair and battling deepening race and class rifts. "I look back at the jogger case and wish I had been more sceptical as a journalist," Dwyer says. "A lot of people didn't do their jobs - reporters, police, prosecutors, defence lawyers. This was a proxy war being fought and these young men were the proxies for all sorts of agenda, and the reality is that truth and justice were not part of it."

Burns illuminates vividly and dramatically the way law enforcement, social institutions and the media undermined the rights of the individuals they were designed to protect. And while the story is a lacerating account of mob mentality, it's also - like so much of Burns's work - about character and the way these young men, once maligned and stigmatised as "criminals", have been able to rebuild their lives with humanity and dignity. (He often says that the idea of narrative he most fervently trusts in is the ability of people to change: "We have to keep the wolf from the door - we tell stories to continue ourselves.")

Burns sees his camera as a kind of lie detector that can't help but tell the truth. The prosecutor now looks haunted in the film, the police evasive, many journalists exploitative and self-seeking.

"In some ways the film reveals them, the Central Park Five, for who they are, and it reveals all the other participants, even those who didn't grant us an interview," Burns says. "The record, the archival record that we spent so long trying to assemble, is in a way a complicated, artistic polygraph test."

Burns is not only a filmmaker and historian but also a narrative journalist with a social conscience, his mission to remind us what it means to be human, breaking down the barriers of apathy and cynicism. He constructs a compelling narrative by using almost novelistic techniques, selecting material, developing characters and arranging details. Few filmmakers tell their stories so imaginatively.

Not that all documentarians approve; many are derisive of the way he has disproved the notion of documentary as a kind of poor stepsister to fiction's cinema of entertainment. They disdain the way, in order to take public space and attention, his work borrows all kinds of structural and strategic devices from fiction to satisfy his audience. It hardly concerns Burns, who frequently quotes or paraphrases Jean-Luc Godard: "Film is truth 24 frames a second, and every cut is a lie." In many interviews he also proudly repeats the phrase that "all story is manipulation", but that his form of manipulation is in fact a positive force and that as people "we coalesce around stories that seem transcendent".

One thing is certain, though. "We have scars, but they didn't get away with it," Salaam says. "We didn't die. This doc has given us some justice, made us human, made us young men again."

"COMEDY feels like drama with little convulsions of incongruous surprise, little looping-the-loops of surprise, confusion, hysteria," wrote film critic Raymond Durgnat. This could be a description of what happens with Louie, which may just be the funniest series going around, certainly the best so-called cinema verite sitcom, featuring Emmy and Grammy award-winning Mexican-American comedian Louis CK.

Returning this week for a third season, Louie is also a drama and, above all else, a penetratingly funny essay in human shortcomings. (Louis's real surname, Szekely, is a common Hungarian surname that he changed to CK because people always had trouble pronouncing it.)

The series shows pungently that the frontier between taking things seriously and taking them comically is indeed blurred; Louie can be fall-on-the-floor funny or pensive and contemplative, sometimes so meditatively concerned with questions of mortality it brings a tear to the most jaundiced of eyes.

CK is smart enough, of course, to ensure the absurdities undercut the blunt social truths he explores; even as he has you wincing, his bemused, deadpan reactions to his misfortunes, whether sexual, parental or professional, start you grinning through the grimace. And suddenly you find yourself laughing.

In Louie, CK plays a stand-up comic who is divorced and shares custody of his two young daughters, which is the case in his real life. Just as in Seinfeld, each episode features scenes of the comic performing in red-brick-wall-lined clubs, scenes that are intercut with vignettes from his life that are related to these routines. He's a performer nurtured in the club environment and his humour reveals a distinct comic attitude shaped by it, as distinct from a talent merely polished in it. (Interestingly, the venues he plays are usually called "comedy cellars" or "basements".)

Life is always a struggle for Louie, his career presented matter-of-factly rather than with any semblance of glamour. He appreciates that there is a disheartening sleaziness to the larger part of the comedian's world; sometimes it's a living hell.

As the wonderful British comedian Les Dawson once said, a comic is like a human sacrifice; it's a matter of pride on the part of an audience to turn a normal human being into a quivering wreck in as short a time as possible.

In the new season's first episode, Louie tries to break up with love interest April (Gaby Hoffmann) - though, incapable of forming the words, he relies on her to end it with him ("You're going to make me break up with myself, aren't you?" she says), despite the fact he's not sure they're even in a true relationship. He then buys a motorcycle on a whim, with predictable results. Louie just can't win a trick, his attempts to do so proving every laugh has a sadistic lining.

ALSO returning this week is Come Dine with Me, Canada, the Great White North's version of the British reality food show. And it's as addictive as any of the others.

The original Channel 4 series reinforced cooking's attachment to a living culture by taking the camera out of the studio, away from the stylists, art directors and celebrity chefs, and into the kitchens and dining rooms of ordinary people. The camera also ventured into their bedrooms for a bit of voyeuristic prying and dressing up, and zoomed out to those backyards where hot tubs seemed to proliferate like Triffids.

Granada television producer Nell Butler dreamed up the concept in 2005, hoping the combination of cookery, snooping around people's homes and the subtle but ruthless social struggle at the dinner table would provide voyeuristic drama. She wasn't wrong, and her show has become one of modern TV's great successes, with versions airing in more than 20 countries - including, recently, Iran and Cyprus.

Butler somehow cottoned on to the secret for the successful TV format, that lucrative combination of recognisability, longevity, cheapness, narrative drive and repeatability. Her disarmingly simple concept puts together five strangers from the same area to host dinner parties on consecutive nights across a week. Three courses are served, and at the end of the meal each guest - away from the others and usually a bit pissed - gives a score out of 10, usually tipsily in a brightly lit cab on the way home. At the end of the week, the person with the highest score wins a cash prize.

It still fascinates me the way a cooking show like this one - and its many spin-offs - once considered a daytime format and conventionally gendered as feminine, is now a staple of mainstream programming. Maybe because it's really engineered around one of the eternal themes of both drama and comedy: that disparity between who we really are and who we like to think we are.

The Canadian series is one of the best, too, though as one of the contestants once said, "In Canada we don't have cuisine, just food."

So watch out for the preponderance of smoked salmon and maple syrup, smoky barbecues, and the way Canadians seem to love dressing in special-purpose clothing. They wear a lot of complicated jackets, are usually overconfident and talk at the drop of a hat about their kayaking adventures.

The Central Park Five, Sunday, 9.30pm, SBS One.

Louie, Monday, 9.30pm, ABC2.

Come Dine with Me, Canada, Monday, 9.30pm, LifeStyle Food.