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SPECIALOPENING SECTION EYES SPECIALOPENING SECTION EYES telling stories of secret US military warfare that the film fo- ual devices born in Hollywood that are becoming more and Take me cuses on: Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. more common in contemporary documentaries. All three are tales of black ops, where the US military The opening sequence could have come out of the to the front played a central role in acts of war against civilians, by Bourne series. The post-production grading of the video committing them or, in the case of Somalia, facilitating creates an effect audiences will recognize as a kind of half- them. As Scahill says, in the opening montage, “This is a way house between entertainment and documentaries. Call RICHARD GIZBERT story about the seen and the unseen. And about things hid- it cinéma (slightly less) verité. den in plain sight.” The narrative winds through dusty roads in the Mid- In the documentary Dirty Wars (directed It seems rather easy nowadays, given what has hap- dle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa, pauses for by Rick Rowley) Jeremy Scahill shines a pened to the news industry, to hide such things. Jingo- breath at the reporter’s apartment in Brooklyn and fol- ism still mars a lot of the coverage of foreign policy coming lows Scahill into a congressional committee room in Wash- light into the darkness of America’s secret out of the US. Despite the mea culpas (or kinda culpas) we ington, DC. There, his shocking findings on an American wars, and on the culture of apathy and heard after all those anchor people helped cheerlead Amer- war crime are presented to a half-empty committee room ignorance that enables it. ica, indefensibly, into Iraq, they are basically singing from that just grows more empty as Scahill delivers his evidence. the same song sheet on Iran. One of the narrative threads the film relies on And with the economics of the news industry collapsing is Scahill himself, and he is uncomfortably prominent Dans le documentaire Dirty Wars de Rick budgets and Justin Bieber running amok and attracting those in the presentation of the film. “Uncomfortable” is his Rowley, Jeremy Scahill fait la lumière sur les coveted clicks, what sensible North American news outlet word, not mine. He told me in an interview that he had sombres guerres secrètes de l’Amérique. Et would devote its dwindling resources to chasing stories from to be convinced to front the story for marketing purposes. sur la culture d’ignorance et d’apathie qui which most North Americans would rather avert their eyes? Scahill despairs at that uncomfortable truth: that the best chance his documentary had to succeed with mostly white, les rend possibles. irty Wars gets at those stories through a combination Western audiences would be if he presented it, rather than Dof dogged journalism, thousands of miles travelled, allowing the participants — and victims — of the story to exceptional access and good storytelling, as well as the vis- tell it themselves. uring the national anthem at the recent Super Drones are the weapons of choice in more and more Bowl, the television audience got the now cus- conflicts these days. This is because they are the perfect Dtomary military component of the pregame pres- tool to fight the new kind of war, the asymmetrical con- entation: an Army colour guard on the field, live images of flicts that confound conventional armies. They also usually troops saluting from some base in Afghanistan followed by confound modern news outlets, which haven’t yet learned the customary fly-by, the strutting of overhead weaponry how to cover them. 1/2 page horizontal that Americans somehow find reassuring. These are the kind of conflicts Jeremy Scahill covers This year’s fly-by, however, was different. No jets. In- in Dirty Wars, the timely documentary that goes where stead, we got Apache helicopters, which makes sense when much of the Western world’s news media does not and tells QUEENS you think about it. Given what the US military seems to be important stories that usually go untold. up to around the world these days, it’s not really about jets. Getting into the shadowy areas around modern warfare It’s about close air support. is not easy. Doing it with a video camera is harder. And What would have made even more sense would have turning it into a watchable, Academy Award-nominated been a fly-by of drones. The skies over the stadium in documentary is harder still. New Jersey should have been filled with pilotless Preda- Scahill made his name and learned his way around the tors and Reapers. And the video feed shouldn’t have come nooks and crannies in and around the US military when he from Bagram. It should have been from a secret location in wrote Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mer- 1 0 0 Nevada or upstate New York, at one of the many military cenary Army, his 2008 book on the giant military contract- bases where pilots do their remote control thing. ing firm that made billions during the American invasion 9 5 and occupation of Iraq. Like drones, Blackwater does most of its work in the 7 5 dark, off screen (and off the books, as far as Pentagon spending is officially concerned). Scahill’s reporting on Richard Gizbert hosts Listening Post, on Al Jazeera English. Blackwater prepared him well for Dirty Wars and the three 2 5 5 22 OPTIONS POLITIQUES POLICY OPTIONS 23 MARS-AVRIL 2014 MARCH-APRIL 2014 0 2 0 1 4 I R P P P M P A a d _ r e v _ b l e e d D e c e m b e r 9 , 2 0 1 3 1 1 : 5 8 : 5 8 A M RICHARD GIZBERT OPENING EYES There are a few moments where the filmmakers do o the nomination of Dirty Wars for a best documentary seem to take it a bit too far: the freeze-frames, with a tele- SOscar was welcome. As a story, the War on Terror Inc. Known unknowns photo effect and the machine-gun text across the bottom and its growing subsidiaries in the shadows will continue of the screen capturing a man heading into a meeting in to be a tough sell on the evening news and in the papers, SHERIEF GABER Jalalabad. The technique would have been more effect- let alone with cinema audiences. ive had the target of the lens been a Bin Laden courier or But Jeremy Scahill and his production team have suc- an American operative, rather than Scahill himself. ceeded in doing just this. They have bucked some of the Most of the Egyptians fighting and dying But that’s showbiz. And I’m quibbling. disturbing trends in contemporary journalism, such as the in the country’s ongoing revolution are Because journalism, like warfare, has changed. There devotion to simple narratives of good vs. evil that reduce the anonymous to the outside world. In Jehane are techniques filmmakers rely on to attract audiences that struggles in the Middle East and other “foreign” places to a car- were unnecessary just a generation ago. Complaining about toonish grammar seen through the prism of domestic politics. Noujaim’s documentary The Square, we that is as pointless as moaning about the technology that Punching through that corrupted vision is the film’s meet some of the people who made the has driven the change. true achievement. It has taken us to the stories we are not revolution. Journalists have always had to fight to get their stories shown, or choose not to see, even though those stories lie, on the air. All that has changed is the rules of the game. as our reluctant narrator tell us, hidden in plain sight. n La majorité des Égyptiens qui luttent et meurent au nom de la révolution en cours dans leur pays sont totalement inconnus du monde extérieur. Le documentaire The Square, de Jehane Noujaim, en tire “This is a story about things quelques-uns de l’anonymat. hidden in plain sight.” Scahill in Somalia. RICHARD ROWLEY n August 14, 2013, as Egyptian police were in the end to oppression, to impoverishment, to marginalization middle of perpetrating the largest single massacre and the abusive neglect of the state. Even after the initial Oin modern Egyptian history, Mahmoud Abdel 18-day uprising that saw the generals and tycoons abandon Hakim wrote on his Twitter account: “Tomorrow we’ll President Hosni Mubarak, Mahmoud continued to take to die the same death.” Three months later, during a protest the streets, fighting for the fall of a regime that promised commemorating the second anniversary of the battle of him no future. Mohammed Mahmoud Street, which marked a decisive Amidst the graffiti that has filled the walls of Egypt, moment in our revolutionary struggle, Mahmoud was shot been erased and been written again over the past three and killed by police in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. years, two tags in particular are repeated, hastily scrawled A charismatic, intelligent 22-year-old engineering in freehand: “Glory to the unknown” and “Freedom for the student, Mahmoud could have easily been a character in detained whose names we do not know.” Indeed, how can The Square, Jehane Noujaim’s street-level documentary we keep track of so many names, of the over 2,000 killed that takes us past the wide shots of drifting tear gas and and the 20,000 arrested just since the July 3 coup last year inside the personal struggles over Egypt’s fate.