In Lee Anne Schmitt’s latest feature, Evidence, which premiered at the Berlinale earlier this year, the conspiracy theory adopts a progressive slant. With Schmitt’s characteristic attention to the thematic weight of the materiality of film and objects, her cinematic essay implicates the viewer (and the filmmaker) in a wide shot of political and environmental history.
Schmitt’s father travelled the world as a part of the international division of Olin Industries, a chemicals and munitions manufacturer. And while her childhood is defined, in part, by the beautiful dolls he bought for her during his travels, which she captures in velvety, intimate 16mm film, her attention is aimed more directly at the company’s transgressions. Thus, the first half of the film charts the company’s dealings with the environment. Toxic waste dumping from its manufacturing plants has transformed their surrounding areas into Superfund sites by the EPA, which pose long-term threats to human health and require extensive clean-up efforts.
Schmitt includes snippets of footage from outside various Olin Industries plants around the country, also shot in 16mm film, which casts a noticeably nostalgic glow over what is quite grim material. But that’s not without purpose. Through her visuals, she deftly weaves together warm childhood memories and the damage caused by Olin Industries, and reveals the complicated complicity all of us bear in the Earth’s pain.
Schmitt takes implication even further when she turns her attention to the Olin Foundation, a conservative, grant-making arm of Olin Industries established by the founder’s son, John M. Olin, in 1958. From then until 1966, it primarily acted as a money launderer for the CIA, which was funding anti-communist propaganda; but its largely inactive fund was revitalized in 1969 when Olin, disturbed by the student uprisings at his alma mater (Cornell University), decided to pour the foundation’s money into the nascent Law and Economics Movement.
The foundation, and soon others like it, spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars funding new think tanks, university departments, and individual scholars with the goal of establishing a dominant conservative movement in the United States. The Olin Foundation’s name is behind the rise of a diversity of prominent conservative figures, from Phyllis Schlafly to Dinesh D’Souza. It was also key in establishing the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization that advocates for an originalist interpretation of the constitution by its members, and which includes at least five current Supreme Court Justices; at one point, Schmitt gravely describes the Federalist Society and its far-reaching aims as a “slow-motion judicial coup.” One struggles to find a better description.
Evidence lives up to its name, charting with clinical efficiency the insidious tendrils that the Olin Foundation, and other industrial family-led trusts like it, cultivated in order to wrangle the United States’ legal systems, popular media, and cultural norms under its control. Schmitt’s logic is, like all conspiratorial thinking, lively and open. The viewer begins to internalize the slow dread the filmmaker describes in this history every time she films herself tracing a finger through the acknowledgment section of yet another foundational mainstream right-wing text (Charles Murray, John You, or Francis Fukuyama, to name a few) and inevitably lands on the Olin Foundation.
Evidence shifts gears in its second half, when Schmitt’s presence is more embodied and she speaks specifically about her family, and her reluctant, unexpected journey to becoming a mother. She acknowledges her uneasiness with the institution of the family, calling it the reactionary right’s main bludgeoning tool. Lauded as a place of security, it is also often people’s main source of violence, a reality Schmitt ties to more Olin Foundation-funded writing by James Dobson, who advocated corporal punishment for children as young as 15 months.
The Olin Foundation folded in 2005, though not before establishing the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE), a think tank whose free market approach to environmentalism viewed the Earth as a thing to be used, not a place to live. Schmitt points to the role of humility in her own life, which she applies to her parenting, and her views on the environment, the latter shaped by the writing of Jedediah Purdy and his book After Nature, which argued, among other things, that the idea that humans are apart from Earth obscures the fact that they are dependent on it.
In Evidence’s final reflective sequences, the 16mm footage that once soberly accompanied an index of industrial harm now speaks for itself in lovely hues of green and blue, taking the form of mirrored lakes, rustling leaves, and blinking sunlight. Purdy’s humility takes hold of Schmitt’s camera, which seems to express the same love for and devotion to the Earth as her narration. Humility strikes Olin Industries, too, which continues, after many years, to pay for the cleanup of toxic chemical waste around its plants, the affected nearby water sources still hazardous as much as 50 years after contamination. Whether that humility will take, as it did with Schmitt, is probably unlikely; it’s too much to expect a billion-dollar corporation or, perhaps especially, the people running it to quell the quest for mastery of the Earth.
Published as part of Cinéma du Réel 2025.
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