The Role of Documentaries: This is Not About Michael Moore

I've been privileged to watch some excellent documentaries lately: Kassim the Dream at American Film Institute's Silver Theatre in Silver Spring; Taxi to the Dark Side and Bishar Blues at Busboys and Poets near U Street. The stories presented in these three were all moving enough to enlarge my personal view of the world. A brief description of each:

• Kassim the Dream is the story of a Ugandan immigrant to America who struggles with his boxing career at the same time that he tries to come to terms with his past as a child soldier in the army and the friends, family, and displaced persons left behind.
• Taxi to the Dark Side delves into the horrific practices by the US Army (and the policies that enabled them) in American prisons abroad and at Guantanamo, centering around the story of a taxi driver whose fate is to suffer and die from fatal blows to the legs - all in the name of collecting foreign intelligence.
• Bishar Blues tells the story of the fakirs in Bengal, India, who struggle to transcend religious classification and caste limits in a society that ostracizes them for their earnest practice. Their beliefs celebrate the holiness within people and are a modern manifestation of the human lifestyle of Mohammed (and Jesus, for that matter) before institutional structure began to dominated these ideologies.
  

Though vastly different in subject matter, the obvious common thread is a portrayal of people who have been marginalized, intended to be digested and enjoyed by a broader audience. Is shining the public, artistic light on the small stories then the purpose of most or all documentaries? To explore this idea a bit, I turn to a Chilean documentalist I briefly researched for a Spanish class report on art during Pinochet's reign of terror.

Patricio Guzman is a famed documentalist born in Chile in the 1940s who was left his country when Augusto Pinochet, supported by the United States, took power from Salvador Allende in a coup that ushered in an era of murder and missing persons, quieted journalists, and stolen livelihoods. His first film, La Batalla de Chile (The Battle of Chile) documented the coup and was nominated by CINEASTE, an American magazine on the art and politics of the cinema, as one of the top 10 political films in the world.

Guzman has a lot to say about the importance of the making of documentaries. In Spanish and then in English, two quotes from his website:

"No todos los documentalistas somos cazadores de eventos, sino que también somos poetas, que tratamos de encontrar en el tiempo y espacio reales las huellas de la gente, aún las más ínfimas," y "Un país sin cine documental es como una familia sin album de fotografias."

"Not all makers of documentaries are hunters of current events, rather we are also poets that try to find in contemporary time and space the paths of the people, even the smallest," and "A country without documentary film is like a family without a photo album."

For Chile, his films serve to remember the awful events of the reign of terror that forever changed their lives and their relationship to their home. They are a remembrance that begins to do justice to the desaparecidos, who went missing from their families never to be heard from again (and who probably faced fates as dark as torture and mass, unmarked graves). Here, the documentaries are more than an educational film about people without the glamour to make it into a media dominated by celebrities and economics. You and I are united through these films with a marginalized people through knowledge of their struggle. To return to Kassim, the dramatization of dark events brings emotional release, and enables us to live more humanely like the fakirs of Bengal in Bishar Blues.

Update (19/7/08): A new website is making documentaries available for free viewing online. Kudos to them for using the internets for its most edifying purpose: worldwide distribution!

The burning question

I keep wondering about the broad-spectrum goals of my organization, and the environmental justice movement in general. I'm going to start accosting folks around the office with this question:

Are policy changes the true ultimate tangible accomplishment we are working so hard to achieve?

My bias is this: It's a little less than believable to me that policy changes alone will accomplish the sociocultural changes needed to truly prevent harm that's perpetrated by chemical factories and a waste industry so focused on profitability that they don't even factor in life cycle and the effects on human health before something bad happens. But then what do caring folks work toward after those policy changes are or are not achieved?

We'll see what responses I get.

Constituent does not equal Consumer

Every morning I wake up to C-SPAN radio, before it even gets light outside. For some reason, it's easier for my brain to come to waking when political speakers are demanding my attention, asking for Change, insisting Yes We Can or trying to drum up some party unity.

This morning I noticed that, when addressing all manner of issues (from health care, investment and the economy, environment, education), decision-makers tend refer to their constituents primarily as consumers - as if the only factor that matters in any of these issues is money.

Excuse me for being picky, but I truly see myself as a citizen first and a consumer at least third or fourth, maybe even last. This way of thinking - the long shadow that "economics" casts - seems to be entrenched in the minds of those who should be thinking of their constituents' needs, not their wallets.

I don't want a politican to look at me and see dollar signs. But how to fix that unless the ubiquitous stakeholder companies are taken out of the legislative, judicial, and executive equation? I read a lot about that problem (and have a few posts on it), but I wonder what other major patterns in American society are contributing to the current myopic focus on money. We should be shaking our politicians out of their avarice and demanding they re-focus on what really sustains people -- health, shelter, family, and an occupation by which to contribute to society.

Profile of Ronald McDonald, The Psychopath

My latest reading list epiphany is from Drutman and Cray's "The People's Business." Some related thoughts:

Corporations are being awarded more and more rights and privileges traditionally reserved for individual citizens. These privileges were originally established to protect you and I from the powerful. Everyone knows of someone whose house has been taken for "justifiable use" whether they wanted to sell it or not, but how inappropriate current corporate law is might be better highlighted by comparison to the psyche of one very scary type of individual: the psychopath.

According to Dr. Robert Hare, a renown expert on psychopathy, a corporation fits the following checklist for an individual who is psychopathic:

1. Irresponsible: In an attempt to satisfy the corporate goal, everybody else is put at risk.
2. Manipulative: They try to manipulate everything, including public opinion.
3. Grandiose: Every company insists they are the best, number one, above their competitors.
4. Lack of Empathy and
5. Asocial Tendencies: Corporations' behavior indicates they don't identify with or care about their victims.
6. Refusal to accept responsibility for their actions: If caught breaking the law, they pay big fines and continue doing just what they did before.
7. Unable to feel remorse: Rarely does behavior change after settling a lawsuit due to wrongs perpetrated on innocents.
8. Superficial: The corporations' goal is to have an appealing public image but that often does not represent what the corporation and its operations are really like.

So what do we do with psychopaths in society, danger that they are? Apparently, we have decided to let them control everything, from our schoolyards to our politics to our homes.

But what should we do with psychopathic corporations? Get them into reform school, at the very least. And that does mean shutting down sales during the rehabilitation period - which most corporations refuse to do even while in court. The thought process behind that: Why lose profits during long-winded litigation, even if a company's means be ruled responsible for harming the public?

We are one, and our actions matter.

I want to share some quotables that I came upon recently while reading The Omnivore's Dilemma. They link what we like to think of as separate things: how we eat, what industry does, the war machine, and the impact of our way of life on our ancestors. I think a linked view - though less simple, and less easy to manipulate - is a lot truer to our lives as inherently biological organisms, despite our attempts to automate and electrify every last detail.
(These kind of quotes usually have a habit of being lost amid a blitz of little pieces of paper I keep around to "remember" ideas and suggestions and provocations and work schedules &c. But I trust that the internet, record of imaginary signals, will guard these a little more safely. And might better send them out into the world than moi in lecture mode!)


"Organic's rejection of agricultural chemicals was also a rejection of the war machine, since the same corporations -- Dow, Monsanto -- that manufactured pesticides also made napalm and Agent Orange, the herbicide with which the U.S. military was waging war against nature in South East Asia. Eating organic thus married the personal to the political."
Michael Pollan

"In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations."
From the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy