Hearts and Minds
May 1, 2008
My two favourite documentaries on Vietnam are Winter Soldier and this one, Hearts and Minds. Its hard to say which is better the former giving a very accurate account of a solders life and his affect on his surroundings while, Academy Award winning, Hearts and Minds gives an excellent overview of the whole war.
Meeting Resistance
April 28, 2008
Meeting Resistance is now available on DVD. This is not a big commercial release. Please honour the rare courage of these journalists and assist their work by purchasing it here.
Reign Of The Rockets?
April 24, 2008
Unreported world journalist Sam Kiley and director Edward Watts travelled to Gaza to make a documentary which got prime time viewing on Channel 4.
I got the impression they were not experts on the Israel-Palestine conflict as they tended to repeat Israeli Government propaganda without, I think, realising or questioning.
If the title isn’t enough to show a bias (why not reign of Apache Gunships / F-16s?) then this one statement can sum the whole thing up.
“All Gazans suffer because of the rocket attacks on Israel” Sam Kiley
Wittingly or not, Kiley recycles Israeli propaganda on the recent conflict. Theres no reason to say that Israeli oppression is due to Palestinian rocket fire. Israel was shelling Gaza even as Hamas maintained over a year long ceasefire. At best you could say the situation is not clear enough to say which side is retailiating – in fact it makes more sense to say the Palestinians are retailiating. Given that Hamas had a ceasefire before being elected, after which Gaza was then blockaded, a military coup plotted against them and the Strip was shelled by Israel. All this before the rockets began.
He also then fails to point out that collective punishment is illegal under Geneva Conventions – in other words punishing all Gazans due to rocket fire is not justified and is actually a war crime. What he should have said, at the very least, was “all Gazans suffer due to Israeli war crimes [illegal collective punishment] which aren’t justified by rocket attacks.”
With these obvious discrepencies its easy to see why the Glasgow Media Group found that people had a confused understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Zapatista
April 20, 2008
Another documentary by Big Noise Films this time on the Zapatistas of Chiapas Mexico. The Zapatistas (EZLN) are an armed revolutionary group that rose up on New Years day 1994 in opposition to NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement). They are ideologically opposed to corporate globalisation and neoliberalism – which they see as exploitative and destructive to their indigenous culture.
They’re also quite famous as the first resistance movement to garner popular global support through innovitive use of the internet. Their charismatic – and media savvy – spokesperson Marcos with his poetic philosophy and stylish image, I believe, played a large role in their success in this area.
Can I speak? Can I speak about our dead at this celebration? After all, they are the ones who made it possible. Can someone say that we are here because they are not? Is that permitted?
I have a dead brother. Is there someone here who doesn’t have a dead brother? I have a dead brother. He was killed by a bullet to his head. It was the before dawn on the 1st of January, 1994. Way before dawn the bullet that was shot. Way before dawn the death that kissed the forehead of my brother. My brother used to laugh a lot but now he doesn’t laugh any more. I couldn’t keep my brother in my pocket, but I kept the bullet that killed him. On another day before dawn I asked the bullet where it came from. It said: “From the rifle of a soldier of the government of a powerful person who serves another powerful person who serves another powerful person who serves another in the whole world. The bullet that killed my brother has no nationality.
The fight that must be fought to keep our brothers with us, rather than the bullets that have killed them, has no nationality either. For this purpose we zapatistas have many big pockets in our uniforms. Not for keeping bullets. For keeping brothers.
Thus Spoke Fanon
April 20, 2008
A documentary based on Frantz Fanon’s Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black Skin, White Masks).
Sartre: The Road to Freedom
April 19, 2008
Jean-Paul Sartre: Human All Too Human.
What I find ironic is that BBC couldn’t find anyone better than the clown Bernard-Henry Levy, a man who is perhaps the antithesis of everything Sartre stood for.
This is What Democracy Looks Like
April 16, 2008
In 1999 opponents of corporate sponsered globalisation succeeded in shutting down the World Trade Organistion (WTO) Seattle summit. This is what democracy looks like is a moving testimony recorded by over 100 of the activists involved, compiled by Big Noise Films.
“If you do not move you will be the subject of pain compliance” Seattle Police Force Fascists
Taxi to the Dark Side
April 4, 2008
Taxi to the Dark Side is an excellent documentary charting the recent history of the US Governments use of torture. I hadn’t realised that a high level legal adviser to the President, John Yoo, went as far as publicly arguing that “there is no law that could prevent the President from ordering the torture of a child of a suspect in custody – including by crushing that child’s testicles.” Rationality gone mad – his name has gone on my list of people whose testicles do need crushing.
As a side note, I enjoyed Stephen Kings recent comments on the debate as to whether waterboarding is torture or not “if the Bush administration didn’t think it was torture, they ought to do some personal investigation. Someone in the Bush family should actually be waterboarded so they could report on it to George. I said, I didn’t think he would do it, but I suggested Jenna be waterboarded and then she could talk about whether or not she thought it was torture.”
“This is dedicated to two people who are no longer with us, Dilawar, the young Afghan taxi driver, and my father, a navy interrogator who urged me to make this film because of his fury about what was being done to the rule of law. Let’s hope we can turn this country around, move away from the dark side and back to the light.” Alex Gibney, Director, Academy Award acceptance speech.
Bush’s War
March 27, 2008
PBS’s Frontline series produces some exceptional documentaries, however its latest is perhaps not its best. The much hyped two part series on Bush’s presidency and the two wars he started is mostly based on Bob Woodward’s Bush at War trilogy, and Ron Suskind’s excellent book The One Percent Doctrine. However it mostly relies on establishment figures, and establishment dissenters, and despite scoring interviews with key players, it skirts key questions, such as the motivations of the neocons. Nevertheless it is a must see, if only for the superb archival footage.
You can watch the full documentary online here. Also check out this article by Morgan Strong and this one by Ray McGovern.
Commanding Heights
February 4, 2008
The Battle for the World Economy
Here is an excellent three part series from PBS that presents a rather celebratory but interesting account of globalization.
1. The Battle of Ideas
A global economy, energized by technological change and unprecedented flows of people and money, collapses in the wake of a terrorist attack …. The year is 1914.
Worldwide war results, exhausting the resources of the great powers and convincing many that the economic system itself is to blame. From the ashes of the catastrophe, an intellectual and political struggle ignites between the powers of government and the forces of the marketplace, each determined to reinvent the world’s economic order.
