Coming to DVD next Tuesday, April 24: OF DOLLS & MURDER
First-time documentary feature director Susan Marks has been screening her film about crime scene dollhouses on the festival circuit since last year, including appearances at Revelation Perth and Camden, as well as upcoming screenings at Minneapolis-St Paul.
Marks’ film, wryly narrated by John Waters (the best possible choice since Vincent Price isn’t available), revisits the infamous “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deaths” and the story of their creator, Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962), a millionaire heiress who distinguished herself as one of the founders of forensic pathology. The Nutshell Studies, miniature, scale-model dollhouse dioramas of often grisly crime scenes, were created by Glessner Lee in the 1930s and ’40s to help train investigators on what to look for and what not to miss at crime scenes. The film explores a number of the dioramas, meticulously based on real cases, as they are analyzed by modern-day forensics specialists for clues to what led to the homicides depicted. Marks handles her morbidly fascinating subject with an expert touch, balancing the sordid true crime elements with the more detached, clinical details that viewers have become accustomed to in the era of TV’s CSI, while the presence of the strange dollhouses evoke both a sense of childhood and the kindred scale-model doc MARWENCOL.
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