Why We Fight (US, France, Canada, UK, Denmark, 2005)

Eisenhower saw the military-industrial complex coming

This film focuses on why the US invaded Iraq from the claim it was involved in 9/11 to Bush’s statement that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with that ‘watershed’ attack. However it contextualises these years by explaining America’s neo-colonialist project throughout the 20th century and bookends the film with Eisenhower’s swansong speech as President when he predicted that war would become a function of capitalists’ desire to make money. As the documentary shows, this has come to pass.

It’s tempting to think everyone watching this movie would be convinced of the argument that wars are fought for businesses like Haliburton. However, as Dan Gardner demonstrates in his brilliant Risk (Virgin Books, 2009), once humans believe something to be true it is almost impossible to convince them otherwise. So while I find this film utterly convincing, those who are politically on the right are likely to believe that it’s left wing propaganda.

Jarecki mixes archive footage with interviews with politicians, ex soldiers and, refreshingly, Iraqis supposedly being liberated. A range of political voices are heard, including the right wing idiot who argues that a pre-emptive strike is legitimate because it’s common sense to shoot first before someone shoots at you; it may be but Iraq NEVER had weapons of mass destruction and and didn’t have the capability to shoot first.

The question ‘why we fight?’, echoing WWII propaganda films, is asked throughout and is answered, most potently, by Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski ret. who saw at first hand the Bush adminstration’s abuse of intelligence in the Pentagon, when she says we fight because not enough people stand up against war. Given the millions who protested against the Iraq war this might seen harsh, however the war went ahead anyway. It’s the problem with democracy, many people believe it is ‘power of the people’ and – hegemonically – accept their powerlessness; it isn’t, it’s ‘power of the capitalist’. We need a better political system.

Shock Doctrine (UK 2009)

Naomi Klein presenting her take on the Shock Doctrine

The Shock Doctrine is a documentary produced by Revolution Films for the digital TV channel More4 in the UK. It is written, edited and directed by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross who also worked together on The Road to Guantanamo (2006). The film is structured around the public lectures delivered by the Canadian writer and activist Naomi Klein who produced a book with the same title in 2007. The Guardian reported that Klein has since asked for her name to be taken off the credits for the film since she would have preferred a rather different approach to be taken – this after she initially approached Winterbottom to make the film (see the Times Online). Klein had originally made a short film with Alfonso Cuaron which is currently on YouTube and this is what she wanted Winterbottom to expand:

Klein’s book presents her argument that it is possible to trace the connection between the methods espoused by the right-wing ideologues in the US (including the CIA and the Chicago School economists led by Milton Friedman) and the tactics deployed in peace and war via US political, economic and military power – part of what she terms ‘disaster capitalism’, a process whereby planned economies are effectively destroyed in order to allow ‘unfettered capitalism’ to create a much more unequal society in which the rich get much richer and the poor suffer most. The story begins in the 1950s with CIA experiments with methods of torture using shock treatment and sensory deprivation to get compliance from prisoners (subsequently used in Chile and then Iraq more than 40 years later) and runs through the pain and suffering caused by Pinochet, the Argentinian Junta, the economic policies of Thatcher and Reagan, the capitalism out-of-control in Russia and Eastern Europe after 1989 and the consequences of 9/11, the ‘War on Terror’ and the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan (and the scandal of the domestic disaster of Hurricane Katrina).

Winterbottom’s decision was to edit passages of Klein’s address in various locations into a continuous filmed history comprising archive material edited together with a bridging commentary narrated by a ‘voice of God’ – actually Kieran O’Brien. Klein would have liked more interview material.

Watching the film on More 4, a commercial channel with irritating ad breaks, sponsorship clips from Volkswagen and confusing trailers for other docs meant that it wasn’t possible to fully appreciate the editing work of Whitecross and Winterbottom, but I think that they were probably right in terms of maintaining flow to limit the interview material.

The film previewed at Berlin earlier this year and has been bought by E1 for distribution in North America. I would guess that it will eventually appear on DVD. It will cause a furore simply because it is a straight down the line left analysis. It has the advantage over Michael Moore of being quite sober and chilling, but is equally accessible. I have to confess that it does get pretty simplistic at times (e.g. in the discussion of Milton Friedman’s influence on UK economic policy, which began with Callaghan before Thatcher) but overall I would agree with its stance. The biggest plus comes from Naomi Klein’s admirably direct polemic which creates a powerful ‘meta narrative’ – she actually analyses the narrative of the Shock Doctrine across fifty years and in doing so puts the boot firmly into the postmodernists whose frivolity and claims for the end of history and grand narratives has threatened to evacuate politics from public discourse. The doc may be a little glib but it’s great to hear a political polemic delivered using intelligent language as eloquently as she does (the lectures look very impressive) and without having to resort to the tricks of Reality TV.

I’m not sure that there is much new in the argument but the footage is worth seeing and the overall impact of the message is what is most important. The sickening footage of Thatcher and Pinochet together juxtaposed with footage of the horrific events of the American-backed coup in Chile in 1973 (from Patricio Guzmán’s film Battle of Chile, I think) are what it is all about. In a brief statement before the screening, Winterbottom said he made the film because his daughter was now old enough to vote and he wanted her to be aware of how what happened before she was born is still relevant to what is happening now.

Check the More4 website for future screenings.

The Age of Stupid (UK, 2009)

2055: the benefit of hindsight

This is a quite brilliant documentary about the disaster of climate change that capitalism cannot possibly do anything about as it’s, as the film states, predicated on expansion and when you’ve only one planet of resources… An SF framing device places an archivist, Pete Postlethwaite, in 2055 looking back at the ‘age of stupid’ – now – as we fail to get to grips with global warming. Using archive, and documentary footage, writer-director Franny Armstrong portrays the world of nimbys (who won’t have wind farms), exploitation of people by Big Oil, the declining glaciers of Europe, the displaced people of Iraq, and the Indian entrepreneur who’s bringing cheap flights to another billion people.

The editing (David G Hill) is terrific, for example juxtaposing the rationing during World War II with proposals for ‘rationing’ our carbon footprints, and the disparate footage is beautifully linked. There’s a quiet anger about the film that conveys its message powerfully allowing the blase entrepreneur, Jeh Wadia, to (inadvertently) pronounce his own stupidity and, memorably, one of the nimby wind farm protesters – when challenged about whether global warming was an important issue – drowned in her own hysteric laughter as she tried to reconcile her actions with her pronouncement that ‘of course it is, one does ones best’. Wind farmer, Piers Guy, comes across as heroic in his attempts, in July 2007, to convince the little-middle Englanders, in Bedfordshire, of their responsiblities. He fails but when the county is flooded in the same month it appears that downpour was poetic justice.

Bradford Friends of the Earth were leafleting outside the screening and this film should prove a potent recruitment tool for green parties. That’s not to say it is propaganda, only a ‘head in the sand’ dodo would say so; it should be seen by everyone, particularly young people as they’re going to inherit the disastrous legacy bequeathed by the carbon economy. Check out the website as it has interesting stuff on how it was made including its ‘crowd funding’.

‘The Invisible Woman’ – Kim Longinotto

With the release of a new DVD of Divorce Iranian Style and Runaway, and a new film appearing at Sundance this month, it’s an opportunity to highlight Kim Longinotto’s work. A British documentarian, who doesn’t quite seem to attract the recognition of some other documentary makers, her work is phenomenal in its range and its capturing of the emotional worlds of its subjects. Hold me Tight, Let me Go (2007), (pictured left) which has aired recently on UK television, is a powerful piece of work about the work of the Mulberry Bush School, for children who are severely emotionally and behaviourally disturbed. Longinotto’s triumph here is to weave all the different strands, of all of these different stories together, firstly without judgement and, structurally, without a sense of those narratives become eclectic and disjointed.

Longinotto, in contrast to the ‘celebrity’ documentarians that have accompanied documentary’s renaissance in recent years, does aim to efface herself from the storytelling and to allow the ‘protagonists’ to speak for themselves. There are problems with attempting to do this, since the documentary maker inevitably shapes the material they produce through editing and decisions about accessed voices. However, her work is always affecting in its intense humanity in relation to its subjects. In Sisters in Law (2005) she, her collaborator Florence Ayisi and sound recordist Mary Milton, follow the work of a campaigning prosecutor, Vera Ngassa, and judge, Beatrice Ntuba, in Cameroon. Both women seek to redress the balance of endemic injustice by pursuing groundbreaking prosecutions of husbands for rape and violence and adults for abuse of children.

Despite the grim nature of this material, which the documentary gives unflinching coverage to, what emerges is the triumph of people’s humanity and a female drive for justice. Longinotto’s stated intention is to stand beside those in the culture and to film their stories as truthfully to the emotions as possible. “The women we’re following know that we’re there to tell their stories. We’re part of their fight, we’re on their side. And the amazing thing is how they make use of our presence. Suddenly, there’s a witness and that gives them confidence.” (www.redpepper.org). Longinotto is appealing to the universality of these emotions, of the connectedness of all experience.

In Divorce Iranian Style (1998) which is included on this new DVD, her stated role is to give back an identity, a named identity to the faceless and the powerless: “I just thought I’m so glad that I’m making films because I’m giving those little girls names… Really, I’m just balancing it a tiny bit.” (www.dfgdocs.com). Therefore, she intends a celebration of her subjects and their bravery, using film to give them an identity rather than herself. Working as a Western director on this material does raise issues of perspective and ideology, but Longinotto’s commitment to her subjects is not in doubt.

Quietly and sure-footedly, she has been building a reputation in the industry. Amongst others, Hold me Tight, Let me Go, won the Best British Documentary award at the Britdoc Festival 2007 and Sisters in Law won the Prix Art Et Essai award at Cannes Film Festival.

Longinotto’s work seems to spring from her own deep wellspring of emotions about her early experiences, and I feel she draws powerfully on these in her documentaries. They simply never fail to move and engage you.

Her latest work, Rough Aunties (2008), concerns women who care for abused and neglected children in Durban, South Africa. It is in competition at Sundance Film Festival this month.

There is much material for Longinotto on the web, but here’s an interesting interview on BAFTA’s website: http://www.bafta.org/learning/20-questions-kim-longinotto,547,BA.html#overlay=hidden.

The new DVD is released by Second Run. Sisters in Law is also available on DVD.

Of Time and the City (UK 2008)

Of Time and the City is a wonderful film and it should give a great amount of pleasure to cinephiles and more general audiences. I watched it with friends unaware of other work by Terence Davies and they enjoyed it. However, I think some of the publicity for the film is misleading. The official website (in every other way a fantastic resource) gives two very important statements about the film and then suggests:

Liverpool’s phoenix-like rise is portrayed like it’s never been seen before; how a city can change itself and the people under its influence . . .

If you are expecting a documentary about change in Liverpool, you may be disappointed. There are images of change certainly, but they aren’t presented as part of an historical survey. This, like the early shorts and first two features from Terence Davies, is about memories from boyhood and adolescence between the early 1950s and the time when he left Liverpool in the early 1970s. Most of it refers to the period 1955-65 with some backward glances to a time when Davies would have been only a few years old. Davies despaired at the success of the Beatles and was not interested in football, so Liverpool’s pop culture renaissance is not celebrated here. Instead it is memories of church, gradual awareness of a gay identity and the magic of movies, ‘well-made’ pop songs, classical music and poetry set against a backdrop of images of working class Catholic life in the 1950s.

The model for the film, according to the press notes, is the classic ‘poetic documentary’ Listen to Britain (1942) by Humphrey Jennings. Unlike Jennings, who filmed in different parts of the country in an attempt to show the resilience of British culture in the face of German victories, Davies had to rely mostly on found footage, augmented by a limited amount of new material he was able to shoot on his return to a city he left many years ago. There is footage I recognised from Denis Mitchell’s prizewinning Morning in the Streets (made for BBC North in 1959) and several other images which seemed familiar. There are also three memorable still images taken from the work of Bernard Fallon.

Morning in the Streets was itself an innovative form of poetic documentary and one which drew on Mitchell’s radio experience. I was a little surprised that Davies did not make more use of radio on the soundtrack. Apart from a very funny clip of Round the Horne, I can’t remember any other radio references – certainly nothing like the emotional charge that the Shipping Forecast delivers at the beginning of Distant Voices, Still Lives (Davies, 1986).

The emotional charge of the film comes from the meeting of visual and sound images. The music is primarily classical but includes five popular songs, each of which in different ways carries an emotional response to Davies’ Liverpool background. They all work very well in this personal sense, although I’m slightly puzzled about the choice of the Hollies’ 1969 hit, ‘He Ain’t Heavy He’s My Brother’ – only because of Davies’ real antipathy towards the music that consigned Lita Rosa and Alma Cogan to history. It doesn’t matter that the song dates from 1969 as precise chronological mapping is never a Davies aim and the message is very appropriate since it is a Vietnam era song used to invoke memories of an elder sibling going off to the Korean War. More sophisticated in meaning is the use of the fabulous Peggy Lee singing about the ‘Folks Who Live on the Hill’ who want to build a cottage with a view – as the montage shows the rise of flats and the demolition of back-to-back houses. It’s a show tune that Davies would have heard, in the Peggy Lee version, in the late 1950s.

Terence Davies is a private person who has exposed his personal memories, fantasies and beliefs in his films. He isn’t in any conventional way interested in politics, though he makes some comments that are witty and perceptive about social class and attitudes towards sexuality. I’m bemused about what younger audiences will make of the film, although Mark Kermode – barely old enough I would have thought to recognise the fifties material – has been rapturous about the film since its Cannes screening. Perhaps the use of sound and image does indeed work to release the inner cinephile in audiences who recognise the universal qualities of the Davies vision. I hope so. But considering the audience prompts me to reflect on the production and distribution of this film.

I think it is generally accepted that Davies is a film artist of distinction and that it is something of a scandal that such a filmmaker has found it virtually impossible to get funding since his adaptation in 2000 of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Of Time and the City is a ‘microbudget’ film that was selected as one of three films to be funded as part of Liverpool’s City of Culture in 2008. (The process is described in some detail on the official website.)

I’m guessing that ‘micro-budget’ means around £250,000 or less and I think this shows in the finished product. We watched it on the big screen at the National Media Museum, presented on a digital print. The new footage seems to have been shot on a relatively lo-res digital format (if you know the technology, you will probably be able to work out the camera from the location stills.) The result looks pixellated to me. The archive material is often grainy and blurred – not surprising given the problems of collecting local archival material and the original formats in which it will have been shot – but I wonder if with more money, something could have been done to restore some of the images. My overall impression was that, despite the great skill and artistry shown here, a bigger budget could have produced a richer film (i.e. with more material to choose from, more music rights etc.) and a higher quality of presentation. On the other hand, audiences may respond more to the ‘authenticity effect’ of the low-res material. I think I’d argue that the film may look better on a smaller screen. And my beef is not with Davies and his crew, but with a UK film sector that won’t find money for projects like this. Ironically, when the film received very positive coverage at Cannes it helped get a better distribution deal for UK screenings, with help from the UKFC P&A fund. The distribution support has been great and Davies is being promoted. I hope the audiences come and he gets the chance to make something else.

Manufactured Landscapes (Canada, 2006)

Manufacturing people

This visually astonishing film starts with a Godardian 8-minute tracking shot of a factory at work. Unfortunately that’s as close as the film gets to politics as photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose work is the focus of the film, takes the naïve liberal position of letting people decide for themselves. The decision they need to make is whether global capitalism is a good thing as Burtynsky’s images show the immense scale of manufacturing in China; as well as the minutiae of checking whether the ‘squirter’ works in a steam iron. If Burtynsky stays neutral the images of dehumanisation and exploitation leave no doubt as to the destruction, to the planet and souls, wrought by our consumer society.

So the film’s message is clear why criticise the photographer whose images are truly stunning? Well his occasional voice over is a limp soundtrack that suggests that we need not worry too much about what we’re seeing. It’s as if all he cares about is the opportunity for a good photograph; we do see him choreographing hundreds of Chinese workers.

The film also mixes in the ‘self-reflexive’ documentary mode that sit uneasily in the film as most of it’s a montage of images and image-making. It feels as if director Baichwal is padding an already short film.

I shouldn’t be so irritated as this is a fine film conveying the idiocy of consumerism in staggering and surreal beauty.