|
Magazine
MEDIA MATTERS
Packing a punch
SEVANTI NINAN
|
“No End in Sight” demonstrates how a well made documentary can make an impact in ways the electronic media simply cannot.
|
Photo: AP
Changing our perceptions: Al Gore in a scene from “An Inconvenient Truth”.
That documentaries can be catalytic has been established by Michael Moore and Al Gore. The former made “Fahrenheit 9/11” to raise issues ahead of the last U.S. elections and then lately “Sicko”, on the American health industry. Gore used a single documentary film to change consciousness across the world about impending climate change. True, “An Inconvenient Truth” has a lot of Al Gore in it, but it is a powerful campaign film that can change the way you think.
Yet another documentary on the war in Iraq is now making its presence felt on the U.S. commercial circuit, particularly after surfacing in a number of year-end best films lists. Made by Charles Ferguson, a political scientist turned software entrepreneur (he and a partner developed the web tool Frontpage) turned academic, turned film maker, it is the most incriminating indictment of the U.S. administration so far, with regard to decision making in the Iraq war. It demonstrates how the documentary form can pack the sort of sustained punch that TV journalism simply cannot.
Trail of incrimination
“No End In Sight” opens with George Bush saying, “We will bring to the Iraqi people food and medicines and supplies and freedom.” And then goes down the line with a talking heads line up of one-time insiders who incriminate, well, themselves. Says one of them, “I just cannot hold my peace any longer.” It is hardly the first film on the subject, but perhaps the first one which nails U.S. policy through the words of those who implemented it.
Don Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and Paul Bremer are not there, but almost everybody else who mattered is. The film interviews among others General Jay Garner, who briefly ran the reconstruction before being replaced by L. Paul Bremer, Ambassador Barbara Bodine who was placed in charge of the Baghdad embassy, Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of the State Department, Robert Hutchings, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, Col. Paul Hughes, who worked in the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, and then in the Coalition Provisional Authority which replaced it. The New York Times called it a “devastating account of high-level arrogance and incompetence.”
Watch interviews of some of these people in the film on Youtube. Says the director in one of his press interviews, “If you are blind, having access to information doesn’t matter. If you are blind you can’t see and they weren’t interested in seeing so they didn’t talk to people and when people tried to talk to them they didn’t listen.” He used layers of bodyguards to protect himself while researching it in Iraq. There were 75 interviews done in the U.S., many of them with disillusioned insiders and participants in the war machine. The outcome is a tight, deadly movie.
India had many fine documentary film-makers making a huge variety of films. But one so compelling that the commercial circuit is willing to distribute it, I have yet to see. “No End In Sight” will probably make it to the Indian commercial circuit, just as “Fahrenheit 9/11” and “An Inconvenient Truth” have done. Though admittedly, for each of these, there were less than 10 people in the theatre when I saw them.
* * *
It is interesting how much the launch of a car tells you about the media. Gone are the days when a high end product needed to create some excitement in the market at its own expense. From first leads through the day on news channels to half-page front page stories in the newspapers, Ratan Tata drove solidly into the country’s consciousness on day one through a veritable media blitz which was entirely self- propelled. If anything, the press was chasing the Tatas, before and after. AOL India called it a pop star welcome.
Most of the Indian media bought into the “Ratan Tata’s dream” line: the seventy-year-old industrialist saw the Indian family riding a two wheeler and swore that his company would change that. One of the visuals at the launch was a wobbly Indian family on a two wheeler. Some read a class bias into the worries about environmental impact and the grumbles about impossibly crowded roads. And the foreign press seemed strangely silent on the Euro four norms that the little car boasts of.
Politically correct media outlets made sure they did a mandatory Singur protestor story to go with the hype generated by the little darlings in silver, red and yellow. But the launch fired the imagination. Funnies were turned out about memsahibs shunning the Nano in which their drivers would now show up at work. Think of the possibilities, said a fellow hack. “You could find out how many of Mamata Bannerjee’s party workers are planning to buy it.”
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
|
