We need to be haunted by the images of our recent past. Having been bombarded in post-9/11 North America with endless streams of visual material, it is now our responsibility to add necessary context lest we lose sight of the important times that we live in.
While Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is a deeply divisive film, garnering reams of criticism from both right and left for its populist vision of American history, what the film does best is bear the torch of journalistic investigation, something that was lost to the American public in the face of Big Media. Here, Moore presents America as a dystopian vision not only as a result of a stolen election, but of the war architects who cling to power for its own sake.
In addition, Fahrenheit presents an alternate account of the recent past, and chronicles the stories of the disenfranchised and voiceless objectors to George Bush’s America. The film’s central strength lies in the re-contextualization of the all-too familiar images that we’ve been convinced to accept by the very nature of the subsequent image taking precedent over the one that we last viewed.
Control Room is an excellent companion piece to Moore’s film. A documentary whose central subject is the objective rendering of Arab network Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the recent Iraq war, the film challenges the notion that what we have seen of the Gulf War in its sanitized form is not the reality of the suffering inflicted, nor have we even begun to scratch the surface.
The network, whose mission is to bring a moderate, secular voice to the Arab world, is made up of ex-BBC employees, and their reportage as presented on screen is as “objective” as one could hope for in a world where images are owned and controlled for propagandistic purposes. Indeed, the most chilling figure in the film is U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose face is only transmitted through television screens. Here, the Secretary’s comments about the propagandistic nature of the Arab network are tempered and ironic in the light of the unraveling web of lies that the Bush administration is now becoming known for.
A strong image in the film is the toppling of the infamous Saddam statue-seen through a secular Arab lens, the event is exposed as something rather different, with a charge that the participants were not even Iraqis, and the convenient arrival of a fleet of cameras alongside military hardware begs the journalist and the viewer to look more deeply.
The recent resurgence of documentary as a popular form speaks volumes about our population’s appetite for information. As both these films prove, it is important for society to place its images, its history, and its culture under constant scrutiny-the result of this is that the documentary form is now filling the void that our news media is expected to fill, and in many ways, doing a better job of it.
