"How do you practice humanism when you don't consider everyone to be as human as you, or at least on your level?

"The answer when it came to Axe was clearly anathema to these two who'd cut their teeth on fly-on-the-wall filmmaking: place themselves in front of the camera. And it works.

"Rather than reducing their meditation on the Katrina diaspora into a navel-gazer, the filmmakers' insertion of their white, Northern liberal selves into profoundly disenfranchised Southerners' testimony actually expands the film's relevance and renders it more honest."

With this assertion it's only fair to heartily disagree. There's a certain laziness to modern documentaries when transition points between multiple storylines are thin, old school style editing seems unwelcome and timeliness is of the essence. The filmmaker himself, or in this case themselves, become the transitions, the subjective viewpoint through which a social dilemma is examined and judged. While Pincus and Small are by no means uninteresting protagonists, they are certainly unnecessary ones.

In many ways, a comparison can be drawn between Elizabeth Barret's Stranger with a Camera and this film, namely that the filmmakers are forced in both cases to question the ethics and reliability of their processes. Yet while Barret manages to do so with a distinct purpose, using her own questions to explain her troubles in relating to others on the journey, Pincus and Small do so with a self-effacing yet in so self-referential mode, neither of them needing to fall back on the trope, particularly because the film's raw footage is so compelling without their direct commentary.

Looking out at image after image of destruction as he snails along in his car, landlord David Averbuck tells Pincus and Small, "Each of the items and each of these houses are multiplied by families and stories, and these are the people that want to come back to the Lower Ninth Ward. This is their community, and the truth is you can't come back to this"; Keyionda Goff shares with them the story of a women, who on the fifth day after the levee break, desperately attempting to leave the city by foot, her brood of children in toe, clutched her infant to her breast and then, with a National Guardsman watching, threw the child off a bridge; in the incongruously named Hopedale, Marie Reedy fights back tears as she explains how her home was lost not once but twice during the same year, her plaintive statement, "Hopefully next year will be better than this year," heartbreaking. All and all, it was not as if Pincus and Small were working with scrapes of emotion left behind by the flood of the now many Katrina chroniclers. They have on their hands engaging material, though sadly it's packaged with first-person narrated distraction, rendering all those moments therefore somewhat less moving, somewhat less reliable.

In analogy, when the hand of our universal maker, whichever god or gods that may be, created the universe, the earth and then us, the mark left was so subtle that every great philosopher and scientist and artist of all of time has contemplated that existence. In this film, it would likewise have been nice to come away with those questions about the filmmakers. Who are they? How did they create this? But, as it is, Pincus and Small reveal too much and rob their audience not only the sorrow of the stories they hear but the mystery of those stories' meanings.

The Axe in the Attic plays 7:00 PM, Mon, Apr 14 and 1:00 PM, Thu, Apr 17 at the Landmark Midtown. Purchase tickets..