THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE: More Than A Sum Of Its Nonsensical Parts?

In an almost too-perfect chance encounter, I happened upon a movie through one of the shadier back alleys of Amazon’s catalog late one night that was so unorthodox and bewildering that I’m still not too sure that it actually exists.

Avant-garde Journey

In Joshua Oppenheimer’s forty-eight minute venture into nearly every documentary topic imaginable except what the title might imply, The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase does just that – taking the few people who have seen it (its IMDB page clocks in at an astounding forty reviews) on a journey through the avant-garde that proves its place in a void of its own.

But the thing is about movies like this and many others that share the classification of experimental that annoys me is that, no matter how much you find you don’t like about it, no matter how objectively bad it might be filmed or edited or even if it’s just an incoherent mess on par with The Room, there’s not much you can say or do about the matter.

It seems that as soon as the avant-garde label is slapped on any project, all chances at genuine criticism are deflected away on the grounds of “you just didn’t get it” or that it’s just “your interpretation of it”. And all of a sudden, that thing you made two minutes ago when you were bored that surmounted to recording the shit twirling around in your toilet has as much right to be art as David Lynch’s Eraserhead.

I’m not saying that’s the case with the example I have here, but it very well could be. For all I know (and believe me, it’s hard to find much about this enigmatic artifact), this movie could very well just be random footage arranged together for no  apparent reason and put out with the intent to do nothing. Or maybe not, because again, it’s impossible to know.

Maybe the fact that I’m even talking about it to begin with is proof enough that The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase is more than a sum of its nonsensical parts. Maybe the jarring transitions between completely random subjects and the overtly serious narration over topics that couldn’t be further from any chapter in your textbook on US history is meant to be comedy. Or maybe it’s the same kind of comedy that movies like The Room inadvertently turned out to be.

Or what’s even more likely, maybe it just came off to me that way. Maybe the filmmaker really did lay the breadcrumbs for a profound meaning in between talking heads of the inventor of the microwave and the Antichrist and I just didn’t give it the time of day to follow it. Maybe all Oppenheimer wanted was to get inside the heads of viewers like me, and had no business to do much of anything once he was there.

Conclusion: The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase

I’d like to think that giving the benefit of the doubt to films like this is a pastime of mine, but, as I said before, my years of movie-watching have jaded me into the cynic I am today, and The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase is frustratingly and simultaneously the best and worst experience I’ve honestly yet to have achieved in my cinematic life.

So if I had to give it a rating out of five stars, I’d give it the emoji with the two arrows pointing both ways and the word “On!” under it. Make what you will of that because it makes about as much sense of any rating I could give. And hey, who knows, maybe the emoji I just described can be avant-garde.

What do you think? Can movies that are described as avant-garde or experimental be judged under the same criteria as any other movie? What was one experimental movie that you just didn’t get? Let us know in the comments below!