[Peace-discuss] Fw: New Wave of Films Tackle Globalization Head on

Wed Feb 18 05:12:53 CST 2009

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <moderator at PORTSIDE.ORG>
To: <PORTSIDE at LISTS.PORTSIDE.ORG>
Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2009 3:05 PM
Subject: New Wave of Films Tackle Globalization Head on


> Lights, Camera, Activism
>
> New Wave of Films Tackle Globalization Head on
>
> By Siobhan Dowling in Berlin
> SPIEGEL Online (Germany)
> Fehruary 14, 2009
>
> http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,druck-607187,00.html
>
> This year's Berlin International Film Festival provided
> a veritable showcase for films that criticize
> globalization and free market ideology. From Michael
> Winterbottom's "The Shock Doctrine" to "The Yes Men Fix
> the World," many films cast businessmen as the world's
> new baddies.
>
> A German politician said recently that people are now
> more afraid of their financial adviser than of al-
> Qaida. If the latest string of films dealing with the
> globalization, business and free market ideology are
> anything to go by, bankers and corporate executives are
> fast replacing terrorists as the baddies in the popular
> imagination.
>
> This year's Berlin International Film Festival, or
> Berlinale, is a veritable showcase for films that
> attack globalization, big business and the ideology of
> so-called neo-liberalism, as well as films that plumb
> the consequences of decades of unfettered capitalism.
> Offering a range of films with wildly different tones
> and forms, from the madcap hoaxes in "The Yes Men Fix
> the World" to the sober intellectual history of neo-
> liberalism portrayed in the "L'encerclement" to Michael
> Winterbottom's cinematic adaptation of Naomi Klein's
> bestselling book "The Shock Doctrine," this year's
> Berlinale has tapped into a zeitgeist that resoundingly
> rejects the notion that "greed is good."
>
> Even the festival's opening film, German director Tom
> Tykwers' pacy thriller "The International" has jumped
> on the corporate-bashing bandwagon. It has Clive Owen
> as a permanently disheveled Interpol agent running
> around the globe with Naomi Watts as his plucky
> district attorney sidekick on the trail of a bank
> involved in shady arms deals that will stop at nothing,
> including political assassination, in its pursuit of
> profit. It is surely a sign of the times that "The
> International" manages to plausibly portray the creepy
> investment bankers as the far worse than a murderous
> Italian family of Armani-wearing arms dealers.
>
> Of course most of the films on show this February were
> in production long before the financial crisis
> unleashed itself last October with the collapse of
> Lehman Brothers, when the world became intimately aware
> of the toxic risks posed by derivatives, subprime
> mortgages and turbo capitalism. Now, of course, the
> film directors come across as canny prophets of gloom,
> and for quite a few their mission is not just to
> explain to the audience exactly how the world has got
> itself into this mess but also to encourage a genuine
> bit of citizen activism.
>
> Take Micheal Winterbottom and Matt Whitcross' "The
> Shock Doctrine" -- a 90 minute barrage of archival
> images of mayhem and crises from the last 30 years
> ranging from Pinochet's Chile to Yelstin's Russia and
> right on up to the invasion of Iraq. The documentary
> hammers home the central message of Klein's book: that
> the free market ideology pushed by Nobel Prize winning
> economist Milton Friedman and his disciples was based
> on taking advantage of crises to impose the shock
> treatment of deregulation and privatization. The
> filmmakers have taken up her argument that far from
> free markets and free societies going hand in hand,
> democracy has often been suppressed because voters
> tended to reject policies that push more people into
> poverty.
>
> Winterbottom rejects the idea that the film could be
> regarded as a conspiracy theory. He says he is simply
> showing that neo-liberalism has become the dominant
> ideology in the world. "This is how we see the world
> now," he told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "Free markets are good.
> Governments are bad. It's always more efficient to have
> private corporations providing services than it is
> government. And free markets go hand in hand with free
> societies." The intention of both film and book is to
> present an alternative history of the past three
> decades that argues that the opposite is true.
>
> The Yes Men's Comedy Attack on Globalization
>
> Both filmmakers are passionate about the importance of
> galvanizing people into action. "What happens next
> depends on people getting involved," Winterbottom says.
> "It's up to everyone to try and influence the debate
> and to try to influence what happens rather than just
> sitting there saying I wonder what's going to happen
> next."
>
> A very different film shares this aspiration to spur
> people into action. In "The Yes Men Fix the World," the
> two artful dodgers of gonzo filmmaking, Andy Bichlbaum
> and Mike Bonnano, take up where they left off in their
> 2004 offering "The Yes Men." While the tone has shifted
> somewhat from documentary to slapstick entertainment
> the two pranksters return to their clever parodies of
> corporate culture by posing as businessmen at
> conferences and in the media. In one hoax, one of the
> pranksters, identifying himself as a representative of
> oil giant Halliburton, modeled the ridiculous
> inflatable "SurvivaBall" -- a survival suit designed to
> protect executives from the effects of global warming,
> epidemics and social unrest. Once again, they duped
> conference attendees.
>
> The film also shows their most successful stunt so far,
> when a Yes Man landed an interview on BBC World Service
> pretending to be a spokesman for Dow Chemical on the
> 20th anniversary of the Bhopal chemical disaster and
> solemnly apologizing and pledging to clean up the site
> of the world's worst-ever industrial accident. The
> market reacted by briefly wiping $2 billion off the
> value of Dow's shares.
>
> The Yes Men explain that their raison d'etre is to
> bring attention to the issues and ultimately they want
> to see the creation of "a world agreement on how to do
> things to make life better instead of just making more
> money." They hope their string of pranks can inspire
> others to get involved. "Basically all the audience
> really needs to know about us is that we are odd and
> hapless and only kind of good at what we do," Bichlbaum
> told SPIEGEL ONLINE: "And if you know that, that's
> enough. It's basically to communicate that you can do
> it too."
>
> Intellectual History of Neo-Liberalism
>
> Coming from a completely different angle yet also a
> critique of the neo-liberalism agenda is
> "L'encerclement" or Encirclement a three-hour
> documentary by French-Canadian director Richard
> Brouillette.
>
> This sober intellectual history features a number of
> anti-globalization thinkers, including Susan George and
> Noam Chomsky, while also giving space to neo-liberals,
> right-wing advocates of scrapping the welfare system
> and libertarians. Brouillette says the choice of the
> title was a way of describing the process of how free
> market ideas came to dominate. "I really wanted to
> concentrate on ideology and how the neo-liberals
> managed to encircle thought and also politics, " he
> told SPIEGEL ONLINE.
>
> Shot in black and white, the film has a sparse visual
> style, with a series of chapters with which the
> director reconstructs the way that the liberal ideas of
> the 19th century were eventually turned on their head.
> Neo-liberalism managed to infiltrate politics and
> eventually the big international institutions like the
> International Monetary Fund and World Bank through what
> Brouillette calls a "network" of think tanks funded by
> big business.
>
> Brouillette admits that his film is "challenging" and
> may not reach a particularly wide audience. "But it
> will make those fewer people more informed and more
> aware, I think." He adds that he loves films like "The
> Yes Men" but he just wanted "to do something in my own
> style."
>
> The flipside of explaining the ideology is of course
> showing the impact that free markets and globalization
> has had on real people's lives in the developing world
> and there are several other films in the Berlinale that
> attempt to do just that.
>
> Brazilian director Jose Padilha, who won last year's
> Golden Bear (Berlinale's top honor) with his hard-
> hitting "Tropa de Elite," is back with a documentary
> called "Garapa," a grim exploration of global hunger
> viewed through the prism of three families in northern
> Brazil. The director spent a month with these people
> struggling to survive and feed their children.
>
> Rural poverty is also the theme of "Los Herederos," or
> The Inheritors, by Mexican filmmaker Eugencio
> Polgovsky. Spending months among the poor of different
> regions across Mexico his film focuses specifically on
> the issue of child labor. With hardly any dialogue his
> sensitive work shows the everyday reality of small
> children, some as young as three, who work to help
> their families get by.
>
> Many work illegally in the big farms along the border
> with the United States, picking tomatos and chilies for
> export. Others work on construction sites, make
> handicrafts or collect wood. Most also take care of
> elderly grandparents and younger children.
>
> Polgovsky wants people to look more closely at the
> realities of globalization. "We living in the first
> world are consuming these products but we have to know
> they have an origin," he says. "That it was probably
> picked by the hand of a child."
>
> He explains how he wanted to represent how these
> children are not only inheriting the skills and
> cultures of their parents but also their poverty and
> lack of any opportunities and future. "It is a homage
> to the children, to their talents for their skills," he
> told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "But with their poverty, they are
> lost, they are dying in some way under the sun. They
> are losing out on the chance to prepare for a better
> life."
>
> He says the whole issue of child labor is a difficult
> one as many families simply could not survive if the
> children didn't work. "Some communities completely need
> the help of the children but this is abused by the big
> companies that use this cheap labor," he says. "In the
> end they are taking advantage of the necessity of the
> others: this is how the system works."
>
> URL:
>
> http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,607187,00.html
>
> RELATED SPIEGEL ONLINE LINKS:
>
>    * Photo Gallery: Globalization at the Berlinale
>      http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-3968.html * Sharing 
> Klein's Vision: Winterbottom
>      Brings 'The Shock Doctrine' to the Silver Screen
>      (02/14/2009)
>
>      http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,607234,00.html * 
> Gonzo Filmmakers in Action:
>      The Yes Men's Brilliant Plan to Fix the World
>      (02/12/2009)
>
>      http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,606625,00.html * 
> 'The International' Opens
>      Berlin Filmfest: Clive Owen Sets Hearts Throbbing
>      at Berlinale (02/06/2009)
>
>      http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,605902,00.html * 
> Worry Lines Through the
>      Botox: Berlinale Reflects Leaner Times for Movie
>      Business (02/04/2009)
>
>      http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,605431,00.html
>
> (c) SPIEGEL ONLINE 2009
>
> _____________________________________________
>
> Portside aims to provide material of interest
> to people on the left that will help them to
> interpret the world and to change it.
>
> Submit via email: moderator at portside.org
> Submit via the Web: portside.org/submit
> Frequently asked questions: portside.org/faq
> Subscribe: portside.org/subscribe
> Unsubscribe: portside.org/unsubscribe
> Account assistance: portside.org/contact
> Search the archives: portside.org/archive
>
>
> -- 
> No virus found in this incoming message.
> Checked by AVG.
> Version: 7.5.552 / Virus Database: 270.10.25/1957 - Release Date: 
> 2/17/2009 7:07 AM
>
>