the revolution will be accompanied with somber voiceover
I remember seeing a brief blurb for Control Room in a schedule for the Harvard Film Archives last month, and had my interest piqued. A documentary on al-Jazeera's coverage of the Iraq war, Control Room was pitched as this counterbalance to the image popularized in America of a biased pulpit for terrorist sympathizers. I wanted to go see it but forgot about in the whirl and confusion of travelling and packing. Then two weeks ago, rojagato mentioned that it was still playing at the Kendall and that she was gathering a posse to go see it. So I went and I was impressed, though not for the reasons that I was expecting. I was expecting this massively sympathetic and possibly slanted portrayal of the Arab news network, and I got some of that. Control Room's portrayal of al-Jazeera is as a news network staffed by former BBC journalists1 who sympathize with their Arab audience, but also want to wake them up from the stupor of state sponsored propaganda. Yet, as journalists operating in societies that do not have traditions for objective reporting, they frequently fall into emotional traps of politicizing their stories, and I was surprised to see that the film didn't gloss over these inconvenient facts. There are interesting conversations where anchors have to repeatedly lecture their staff on staying unbiased, and there's a telling moment where the American ambassador to Qatar admonishes al-Jazeera's editors against "repeating another 1967" where the Arab media grossly exaggerated the progress of the Six-Day War and contributed to a massive sense of popular disappointment when the Israelis had driven the Egyptian and Syrian armies from the field. It's a moment that's a harbinger for the shock over the rapid fall of Baghdad.
There's also a surprising amount of time given to a Marine spokesman2 whose conversations with al-Jazeera journalists would come to represent the essential disconnection between American and Arab views of the war. It all makes for a wonderfully nuanced portrayal of the war in Iraq that foregoes lecturing and trusts its audience in being able to make up their own mind.
I pulled a Windows Media Player clip of Truth Uncovered from vulgarlad's journal. This is another documentary, made with the assistance of MoveOn, that deconstructs the Bush Administration's push to war. What's remarkable about Truth, though, is that it's completely based on interviews with career diplomats, spies and journalists who, taken together, represent an impressive collection of experience in foreign affairs. I mean, it opens with an introduction of Milt Bearden, for chrissakes -- the man who basically ran the mujahideen campaign against the Soviets, and you've got him saying that the Bush Doctrine is a bad idea. It goes on from there with CIA imagery analysts knocking Powell's presentation of satellite photos to the UN, and weapons inspectors talking about inconvenient facts of Iraqi compliance that were covered up in the march to war.
Part of what's interesting about Truth Uncovered is that it went through this odd form of distribution, where instead of going to theatres, it was distributed via Internet coordinated house parties, where activists were encouraged to download or order the film and show it at their homes. While that means that the film won't get the same exposure as F911, it does mean that the film gets to end-run the bottlenecks of theatrical distribution and all the costs that this implies. It's a model that's being followed by Outfoxed, an upcoming documentary on the inside machinations of Fox News as told by former journalists who left after getting fedup with Rupert Murdoch's dictatorship. And the main point for this entry is to ask:
"if I get the DVD, will folks want to come over and watch it?"
1 after all, al-Jazeera was essentially staffed by journalists from an aborted BBC Arabic news channel. Which makes the BBC's efforts to resurrect a pan-Arabic news network kind of poetic in a "Luke, I am your father" kind of way.
2 and yes, I have to agree with the female consensus. Lt. Rushing is way dreamy.
There's also a surprising amount of time given to a Marine spokesman2 whose conversations with al-Jazeera journalists would come to represent the essential disconnection between American and Arab views of the war. It all makes for a wonderfully nuanced portrayal of the war in Iraq that foregoes lecturing and trusts its audience in being able to make up their own mind.
I pulled a Windows Media Player clip of Truth Uncovered from vulgarlad's journal. This is another documentary, made with the assistance of MoveOn, that deconstructs the Bush Administration's push to war. What's remarkable about Truth, though, is that it's completely based on interviews with career diplomats, spies and journalists who, taken together, represent an impressive collection of experience in foreign affairs. I mean, it opens with an introduction of Milt Bearden, for chrissakes -- the man who basically ran the mujahideen campaign against the Soviets, and you've got him saying that the Bush Doctrine is a bad idea. It goes on from there with CIA imagery analysts knocking Powell's presentation of satellite photos to the UN, and weapons inspectors talking about inconvenient facts of Iraqi compliance that were covered up in the march to war.
Part of what's interesting about Truth Uncovered is that it went through this odd form of distribution, where instead of going to theatres, it was distributed via Internet coordinated house parties, where activists were encouraged to download or order the film and show it at their homes. While that means that the film won't get the same exposure as F911, it does mean that the film gets to end-run the bottlenecks of theatrical distribution and all the costs that this implies. It's a model that's being followed by Outfoxed, an upcoming documentary on the inside machinations of Fox News as told by former journalists who left after getting fedup with Rupert Murdoch's dictatorship. And the main point for this entry is to ask:
"if I get the DVD, will folks want to come over and watch it?"
1 after all, al-Jazeera was essentially staffed by journalists from an aborted BBC Arabic news channel. Which makes the BBC's efforts to resurrect a pan-Arabic news network kind of poetic in a "Luke, I am your father" kind of way.
2 and yes, I have to agree with the female consensus. Lt. Rushing is way dreamy.