Not so long ago, the documentary feature category was among the snooziest at the Oscars, the target of jokes that said you couldn’t lose by making a film about the Holocaust. That backward-looking pattern began to morph when Michael Moore won the 2002 award with “Bowling for Columbine,” and exploded with last year’s win for Al Gore’s one-man show, “An Inconvenient Truth.” Odd though it sounds, Michael Moore and Al Gore have made the image of documentaries – O.K., maybe not sexy, but hot.
This year all five nominees are politically charged, four are about war, and amazingly, only one feels like homework. Spurred by global conflict and by technology that allows filmmakers to turn out movies in months rather than years, these works carry urgent messages. With their pointed arguments, though, this year’s nominees also raise an inescapable question: Can they have any real political impact?
They try in extremely varied ways. Mr. Moore’s “Sicko” is wildly comic while tearing apart the country’s health care system. Alex Gibney’s “Taxi to the Dark Side,” about American abuses of prisoners in the war on terror, is eloquent.
And even the less artistic films vividly present the faces and voices of people who have witnessed some of today’s most anguishing conflicts. Continue reading The Powerful Art of Polemics and Other Political Films
Category: Iraq War Fiction
1939 antiwar cartoon video
Liberation Lit cover
Cover collage of the first Liberation Lit issue – originating mainly from illustrations of The Masses magazine from early last century, and posters from the WPA federal theater project.
Propagandizing delusional and criminal mentality via Charlie Wilson’s War
By sanitizing and distorting history, and presenting Western militarism as a force for good, films like Charlie Wilson’s War ultimately help to perpetuate the ideological mindset shaping continued foreign policy blunders and crimes of historic dimensions, which the U.S. public has yet to fully come to terms with.
Mark Vallen on Bertolt Brecht and Mahagonny
Excerpt from Art for a Change:
Brecht understood theatre not just as a form of entertainment, but as a vehicle that could help workers understand and analyze their political situation, he felt theatrical performances should appeal to reason and not simply give way to sentimentality. In the 1957 book, Brecht on Theater, the playwright described his theory of “alienation effect” theatre as being that “which prevents the audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character created by the actor – and which consequently leads the audience to be a consciously critical observer.” The original Brecht production of Mahagonny, as with his other plays, utilized various contrivances to prevent viewers from being lulled into a theatrical fantasy. Stage settings were deliberately sparse and flooded with harsh lights, with no attempt to hide stage lighting equipment. Slogans and explanatory text were projected upon stage walls, and actors carried placards onstage bearing political messages. With outbursts of songs whose lyrics drove home his political points, Brecht would use music itself to interrupt stage action.
Continue reading Mark Vallen on Bertolt Brecht and Mahagonny
Liberation Lit fiction journal
Cover collage of the first Liberation Lit issue – originating mainly from illustrations of The Masses magazine from early last century, and posters from the WPA federal theater project.
US soldiers reading in Iraq
John Sutherland reports:
The top 10 novels supplied to American fighting men by Abe [Books]…: The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger; Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, J. K. Rowling; Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry; Mostly Harmless, Douglas Adams; The Collector, John Fowles; Devil’s Guard, George Robert Elford; The Unwanted, John Saul; The Alchemist, Ken Goddard; Apollyon: The Destroyer Unleashed, Tim LaHaye; Master of Dragons, Margaret Weis; The Illuminati, Larry Burkett.
There is a strong whiff of the high school curriculum (Salinger, notably) and a lot of fantasy. The presence of LaHaye’s vision of Armageddon (and the Second Coming) happening in the Middle East in the first years of the 21st century is slightly troubling.
Or greatly. Another book on the list, Devil’s Guard has been “generally regarded as sickening neo-Nazi pornography,” as Sutherland goes on to explain, glorifying warriors who slaughter “abominable sub-humans [Russians, Vietnamese], deserving only of extermination” and eventually go on to continue fighting under the American flag.
Tinseltown much critical of Iraq War? – No, thank you
‘Prom’ Date: Play documents a side of the Iraq War
J. C. Lockwood
Newburyport – Playwright George Larkin laughs when he’s asked, as a joke, how long he’s hated America. He’s heard comments like this before. In these politically polarized times, any writer dealing even tangentially with international or homeland security issues who is not sufficiently patriotic, not solidly positioned in the God-Bless-America camp, leaves himself open for attack — even in Los Angeles, supposedly the land of limousine liberals and America-lasters, where Larkin has been developing “The Baghdad Prom” for the past five years. Continue reading Tinseltown much critical of Iraq War? – No, thank you
Killing History Via Charlie Wilson’s War
Brzezinski and Charlie Wilson’s War
By Stanley Heller
Imagine, they made a funny movie about how the US helped turn Afghanistan into a killing field. It’s the film “Charlie Wilson’s War, a ligthearted look of how a skirt-chasing Congressman and a no-nonsense CIA thug helped bring mountains of weapons and money to the fanatic, women-despising “freedom fighters” who gave us 9/11. It’s certainly material for a “laugh riot”.
The USA’s Covert Attacks Against the USSR
You won’t see it in Charlie Wilson’s War, “Visions and Values” argues: Bill Clark’s and Ronald Reagan’s sponsored attacks in the USSR:
Green Zone Film
Paul Greengrass (“United 93,” “The Bourne Ultimatum”) directs Ryan along with Greg Kinnear and Matt Damon in an as-yet-untitled film based on Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s non-fiction book “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.”
Antiwar Novels
Daniel J. Neumann reviewing Civilized Savages by Susan Kaye Behm:
“I wrote two anti-war novels. At a recent book-signing, I recall a man arguing with me: “Why are you against war?” And I replied, “Why are you for it?” He did not answer, but if the conversation would have carried on, I would have recommended Susan Kaye Behm’s Civilized Savages to the man, over my own books. Behm may not have had any direct exposure to war, but she offers a future that conveys the horrors of war as much as any civilian can contemplate. In short, it is an anti-war novel for those of us who have never fought in a war—which makes it the most valuable variety of anti-war novel.”
Great Review of Charlie Wilson’s War by Chalmers Johnson
“My own view is that if Charlie Wilson’s War is a comedy, it’s the kind that goes over well with a roomful of louts in a college fraternity house. Simply put, it is imperialist propaganda and the tragedy is that four-and-a-half years after we invaded Iraq and destroyed it, such dangerously misleading nonsense is still being offered to a gullible public. The most accurate review so far is James Rocchi’s summing-up for Cinematical: ‘Charlie Wilson’s War isn’t just bad history; it feels even more malign, like a conscious attempt to induce amnesia’.”
What is a Progressive Political Film?
Called progressive but actually a far more liberal array of films overviewed in the Progressive Picture Prizes by Ed Rampell, author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” (2005).
Political Distortion in Charlie Wilson’s War
“We just can’t deal with this 9/11 thing. Does it have to be so political?” from an anonymous source at Playtone Productions
Euripides’ Antiwar Women of Troy
The play itself is a wonderful opportunity. There was a rash of Greek tragedies on the West End stage to greet the Iraq war, and this is, as it were, intended to remind us that the war isn’t over.
Rambo, Cheney, Rice, and Burma
Truthdig by way of USA Today notes:
If the combined power of thousands of Buddhist monks staging a nonviolent protest isn’t enough to oust Burma’s oppressive junta, one American hero (cue movie trailer voice-over) is coming to fight for democracy in a faraway land—or at least stick his nose in another nation’s business. Yes, Rambo is ready to exact vigilante justice in Burma in the fourth installment of the Stallone series called, well, “Rambo.”
My crossposted comment:
Yes, it’s quite comic what the movies can do – “cultural softening” and purging and all.
Norman Mailer – The Naked and the Dead – World War II and Today
Norman Mailer and the “Good War”
by Martin Smith
Each Obituary did at least mention The Naked and the Dead, Mailer’s first and most important novel. It is one of the great antiwar classics in literature and a book that speaks to all activists committed to ending the brutality of wars for empire.
Yet The Naked and the Dead is barely known today outside of academic circles–because it challenges the standard assumptions about the Second World War as “the good war,” and unmasks the hidden motives of U.S. involvement.
The Naked and the Dead is the story of a suicide mission by a reconnaissance patrol that is ordered to assess a Japanese rear position on the island of Anopopei. If the soldiers survive and return, General Cummings plans to send out a company for a surprise attack, a daring tactical move that would likely lead to his promotion.
Brian De Palma on Redacted and Iraq War Films
Lions for Lambs Iraq War Movie Critiques
Reviewer Kasia Anderson writes at Truthdig:
“After all, given filmmaking conventions and production timelines, the odds are stacked against any dramatization of current events achieving some semblance of intelligibility within 88 minutes of footage cobbled together to form a finished product long before reality could easily make a mockery of its driving premise.”
The claim is false. Continue reading Lions for Lambs Iraq War Movie Critiques
A Practical Policy 