Reviews
A Progressive Netflix Queue
The New Year may be upon us, but that’s no reason to pass up the best progressive films of 2007.
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Reese Witherspoon as Isabella Fields El-Ibrahim in “Rendition.” (Photo by Sam Emerson/New Line Cinema)
As a student activist at Connecticut’s Wesleyan University, I was always searching for films that promote awareness of the progressive issues that were important to me. Many of the finest films released in 2007 fulfilled this need for socially engaged media, serving as potential catalysts for discussion among progressive-minded students around the country. They came from points near and far within the global landscape of contemporary cinema and operated in a variety of genres, forms, and modes of production.
What follows is a brief survey of the year in cinema cast through the critical lens of issues that defined progressive politics in 2007. With an upcoming presidential election, intractable military occupations abroad, and unresolved health care and civil liberties issues lingering on the domestic front, these films will continue to spark essential dialogue into 2008 and beyond.
2007 was the year that the war in Iraq became spectacularly visible at the American multiplex. Where Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, and other definitive portraits of the Vietnam War did not emerge until well after the fall of Saigon, Hollywood released an onslaught of films this year that confronted the immediate concerns of post-9/11 security, Iraq, and the status of our troops: Paul Haggis’s “In The Valley of Elah”; war-widower story “Grace is Gone,” with John Cusack; “Rendition,” a counterterrorism saga starring Reese Witherspoon; and Brian DePalma’s “Redacted,” a fictionalized, multimedia account of the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. troops.
The critical and commercial reception of these films has been mixed at best. The most scathing critiques have centered on the pervading self-righteousness of some films, their attempt to impose a unifying moral order upon a conflict that defies conceptual comfort. Beyond any differences in the caliber of their cinematic personnel, what separates these recent Iraq dramas from their more artful Vietnam counterparts may be a lack of historical perspective, an inability to dramatize a war that continues to evolve at home and abroad.
To the progressive student activist, however, the films represent a vital new development to consider within the American media landscape. If the casualties of U.S. foreign policy are made visible to a wider audience, how can this translate into forging a citizenry more critical of our political status quo? Will these films spark outrage and political action, or will they lead to over-saturation and a newfound complacency?
In spite of the mixed results of Hollywood’s foray into political drama, this year continued a trend in which U.S.-produced documentaries on the Iraqi conflict have served as essential works of journalistic investigation and artistically rendered historical documents in the making. Where previous years saw films like Laura Poitras’ “My Country, My Country” and Deborah Scranton’s “The War Tapes” offer vital portraits of ground conditions overseas, this year augured a shift away from intimate character studies toward the exhilaratingly comprehensive analysis of Charles Ferguson’s “No End in Sight.”
Making full use of his extensive rolodex as a former Brookings Institution scholar, Ferguson conducts riveting interviews with a veritable who’s who of the major U.S. officials that oversaw the first six months of Iraqi reconstruction. His impeccably paced narrative builds a panoramic indictment of a policy shaped by high-level arrogance and incompetence, quietly stoking the viewer’s outrage.
As the title suggests, “No End in Sight” offers no cure-all for the problems that continue to engulf post-surge Iraq. By crystallizing the critical blunders that led us to our current dilemma, the film instead stands as a revelatory testament to the importance of questioning the hell out of leaders who conflate policy propositions with incontrovertible fact.
Where “No End in Sight” highlighted the effectiveness of the rhetorical slow burn, Michael Moore’s “SiCKO“ tackled the U.S. health care crisis with the subtlety of a house on fire. The approach works surprisingly well, particularly in the outrageous afterglow of President Bush’s veto of increased funding for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP.
Moore has never been more skillful at entertaining and affecting his audience. Hit me with a breathtaking montage of healthy French couples making out to the pulsing baritone of Serge Gainsbourg, and I’ll believe anything he tells me about their social welfare state, annual riots in the Paris suburbs be damned. Confront me with the stunned gaze of a Texas family that’s lost a father due to penny-pinching corporate malfeasance, and I’ll be eternally grateful for Moore’s clear-eyed capacity to reveal stories too often neglected by the public eye.
French kissing aside, Moore is typically ham-fisted in his exploration of case studies beyond the borders of The Red, White, and Blue. In his trademark foray into the utopian expanses of the Great White North, any Canadians in the audience (this writer included) will find that there literally is no place like home.
Yet such pitfalls are integral to Moore’s usefulness as a model for young progressives navigating the intersection between media and politics. His work highlights both the power of direct address and what can be lost by engaging political subjects from an unabashedly polemical perspective. Is a certain degree of strategic essentialism necessary to surmount intransient institutional injustice? Or do we lose support and credibility from the blurred details and fudged facts that occasionally crop up in such rhetorical endeavors?
Misguided essentialism was hard to avoid in the fear-mongering that dominated U.S. public discourse on Iran this year. Thankfully, that nation’s dynamic contemporary filmmaking culture served as a vital counterpoint to the rhetoric. The U.S. release of Jafar Panahi’s “Offside,” a wonderfully nuanced portrait of youthful rebellion, was a particularly powerful antidote to all the woefully premature talk of war.
“Offside” follows a handful of die-hard female soccer fans as they attempt to gain entry into a qualifying match for the World Cup. Stymied by the police and by strict rules forbidding the mixing of the sexes, they end up confined to a makeshift holding pen along the stadium walls, engaging in a series of hilarious negotiations with the ill-matched young guards entrusted with watching them.
Though he has laid down years of his life in jail for his harsh and unforgettable portraits of the marginalized in Iranian society, Panahi commits himself to the kind of refreshingly complex vision of human relations that is entirely lacking in our political discourse on Iran. He celebrates the toughness and guile of his heroines while also casting a sympathetic glance at the ethical quandaries facing the men whose livelihoods depend upon reinforcing their country’s oppressive patriarchy.
In the transgressive energy of his youthful protagonists, Panahi confronts us with a film that is truly alive to the possibility of social transformation. Surely the United States can do better than to meet such creative struggle with fear-mongering and militant posturing.
More foreign food for domestic thought came from Germany in “The Lives of Others,” this year’s Academy Award-winner for Best Foreign Language Film. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s poignant, unsettling thriller explores the ethical trials set in motion when a secret police captain plants a wiretap in the home of a playwright and his actress girlfriend. In the context of this summer’s FISA debate and recent revelations of CIA efforts to destroy interrogation tapes, it is easy to draw parallels between the Orwellian logic of life in the German Democratic Republic and the erosion of civil liberties under Bush II.
“The Lives of Others” is above all an inventive exploration of the old truism that “the personal is political.” The film reminds us that political institutions and cultures are not confined to the abstract realm of public discourse. They also manifest themselves in the most intensely personal, intimate spheres of life. They can skew our thoughts. They can thwart our desires. They can confront vulnerable people with impossible choices.
Returning to the domestic sphere, there is no better way to underline this notion of the personal as political than by offering a closing tribute to the year’s most exciting cinematic event: the 35 mm re-release of Charles Burnett’s criminally underappreciated “Killer of Sheep.” Completed in 1977 but fully released only this year, Burnett’s film is an extraordinary portrait of a slaughterhouse worker and his family living in a bombed-out stretch of black Los Angeles. Stan, the film’s protagonist, is both an executioner and a victim in a world that is quietly suffocating him, a working-class striver struggling to keep his family together. In his exploration of the complex emotional universe of his characters, Burnett redefines the underrepresented and frequently oversimplified terrain of black and working class life on film, offering some of cinema’s most counter-hegemonic images. He reminds us that good art can be inherently political without directly engaging official figures and institutions.
Feel no shame if you’ve never heard of Burnett or “Killer of Sheep.” This vital work of black independent cinema languished for years without theatrical release, available only in battered prints lying around film schools and libraries. This year’s triumphant re-release forces young progressives to consider not only the paucity of progressive representations of race and poverty within American media but also questions of multicultural access and visibility within the American film industry. The film’s 30-year journey out of the shadows reminds us that the same asymmetries of power that progressive students seek to resist in their activism are frequently reproduced in the very processes of media production and distribution through which progressive messages are disseminated. There could be no more vital lesson for young progressives to consider as they look to creative media for guidance in the struggles of 2008 and beyond.
Will Di Novi graduated from Wesleyan University in 2007.
What follows is a brief survey of the year in cinema cast through the critical lens of issues that defined progressive politics in 2007. With an upcoming presidential election, intractable military occupations abroad, and unresolved health care and civil liberties issues lingering on the domestic front, these films will continue to spark essential dialogue into 2008 and beyond.
2007 was the year that the war in Iraq became spectacularly visible at the American multiplex. Where Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, and other definitive portraits of the Vietnam War did not emerge until well after the fall of Saigon, Hollywood released an onslaught of films this year that confronted the immediate concerns of post-9/11 security, Iraq, and the status of our troops: Paul Haggis’s “In The Valley of Elah”; war-widower story “Grace is Gone,” with John Cusack; “Rendition,” a counterterrorism saga starring Reese Witherspoon; and Brian DePalma’s “Redacted,” a fictionalized, multimedia account of the rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. troops.
The critical and commercial reception of these films has been mixed at best. The most scathing critiques have centered on the pervading self-righteousness of some films, their attempt to impose a unifying moral order upon a conflict that defies conceptual comfort. Beyond any differences in the caliber of their cinematic personnel, what separates these recent Iraq dramas from their more artful Vietnam counterparts may be a lack of historical perspective, an inability to dramatize a war that continues to evolve at home and abroad.
To the progressive student activist, however, the films represent a vital new development to consider within the American media landscape. If the casualties of U.S. foreign policy are made visible to a wider audience, how can this translate into forging a citizenry more critical of our political status quo? Will these films spark outrage and political action, or will they lead to over-saturation and a newfound complacency?
In spite of the mixed results of Hollywood’s foray into political drama, this year continued a trend in which U.S.-produced documentaries on the Iraqi conflict have served as essential works of journalistic investigation and artistically rendered historical documents in the making. Where previous years saw films like Laura Poitras’ “My Country, My Country” and Deborah Scranton’s “The War Tapes” offer vital portraits of ground conditions overseas, this year augured a shift away from intimate character studies toward the exhilaratingly comprehensive analysis of Charles Ferguson’s “No End in Sight.”
Making full use of his extensive rolodex as a former Brookings Institution scholar, Ferguson conducts riveting interviews with a veritable who’s who of the major U.S. officials that oversaw the first six months of Iraqi reconstruction. His impeccably paced narrative builds a panoramic indictment of a policy shaped by high-level arrogance and incompetence, quietly stoking the viewer’s outrage.
As the title suggests, “No End in Sight” offers no cure-all for the problems that continue to engulf post-surge Iraq. By crystallizing the critical blunders that led us to our current dilemma, the film instead stands as a revelatory testament to the importance of questioning the hell out of leaders who conflate policy propositions with incontrovertible fact.
Where “No End in Sight” highlighted the effectiveness of the rhetorical slow burn, Michael Moore’s “SiCKO“ tackled the U.S. health care crisis with the subtlety of a house on fire. The approach works surprisingly well, particularly in the outrageous afterglow of President Bush’s veto of increased funding for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP.
Moore has never been more skillful at entertaining and affecting his audience. Hit me with a breathtaking montage of healthy French couples making out to the pulsing baritone of Serge Gainsbourg, and I’ll believe anything he tells me about their social welfare state, annual riots in the Paris suburbs be damned. Confront me with the stunned gaze of a Texas family that’s lost a father due to penny-pinching corporate malfeasance, and I’ll be eternally grateful for Moore’s clear-eyed capacity to reveal stories too often neglected by the public eye.
French kissing aside, Moore is typically ham-fisted in his exploration of case studies beyond the borders of The Red, White, and Blue. In his trademark foray into the utopian expanses of the Great White North, any Canadians in the audience (this writer included) will find that there literally is no place like home.
Yet such pitfalls are integral to Moore’s usefulness as a model for young progressives navigating the intersection between media and politics. His work highlights both the power of direct address and what can be lost by engaging political subjects from an unabashedly polemical perspective. Is a certain degree of strategic essentialism necessary to surmount intransient institutional injustice? Or do we lose support and credibility from the blurred details and fudged facts that occasionally crop up in such rhetorical endeavors?
Misguided essentialism was hard to avoid in the fear-mongering that dominated U.S. public discourse on Iran this year. Thankfully, that nation’s dynamic contemporary filmmaking culture served as a vital counterpoint to the rhetoric. The U.S. release of Jafar Panahi’s “Offside,” a wonderfully nuanced portrait of youthful rebellion, was a particularly powerful antidote to all the woefully premature talk of war.
“Offside” follows a handful of die-hard female soccer fans as they attempt to gain entry into a qualifying match for the World Cup. Stymied by the police and by strict rules forbidding the mixing of the sexes, they end up confined to a makeshift holding pen along the stadium walls, engaging in a series of hilarious negotiations with the ill-matched young guards entrusted with watching them.
Though he has laid down years of his life in jail for his harsh and unforgettable portraits of the marginalized in Iranian society, Panahi commits himself to the kind of refreshingly complex vision of human relations that is entirely lacking in our political discourse on Iran. He celebrates the toughness and guile of his heroines while also casting a sympathetic glance at the ethical quandaries facing the men whose livelihoods depend upon reinforcing their country’s oppressive patriarchy.
In the transgressive energy of his youthful protagonists, Panahi confronts us with a film that is truly alive to the possibility of social transformation. Surely the United States can do better than to meet such creative struggle with fear-mongering and militant posturing.
More foreign food for domestic thought came from Germany in “The Lives of Others,” this year’s Academy Award-winner for Best Foreign Language Film. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s poignant, unsettling thriller explores the ethical trials set in motion when a secret police captain plants a wiretap in the home of a playwright and his actress girlfriend. In the context of this summer’s FISA debate and recent revelations of CIA efforts to destroy interrogation tapes, it is easy to draw parallels between the Orwellian logic of life in the German Democratic Republic and the erosion of civil liberties under Bush II.
“The Lives of Others” is above all an inventive exploration of the old truism that “the personal is political.” The film reminds us that political institutions and cultures are not confined to the abstract realm of public discourse. They also manifest themselves in the most intensely personal, intimate spheres of life. They can skew our thoughts. They can thwart our desires. They can confront vulnerable people with impossible choices.
Returning to the domestic sphere, there is no better way to underline this notion of the personal as political than by offering a closing tribute to the year’s most exciting cinematic event: the 35 mm re-release of Charles Burnett’s criminally underappreciated “Killer of Sheep.” Completed in 1977 but fully released only this year, Burnett’s film is an extraordinary portrait of a slaughterhouse worker and his family living in a bombed-out stretch of black Los Angeles. Stan, the film’s protagonist, is both an executioner and a victim in a world that is quietly suffocating him, a working-class striver struggling to keep his family together. In his exploration of the complex emotional universe of his characters, Burnett redefines the underrepresented and frequently oversimplified terrain of black and working class life on film, offering some of cinema’s most counter-hegemonic images. He reminds us that good art can be inherently political without directly engaging official figures and institutions.
Feel no shame if you’ve never heard of Burnett or “Killer of Sheep.” This vital work of black independent cinema languished for years without theatrical release, available only in battered prints lying around film schools and libraries. This year’s triumphant re-release forces young progressives to consider not only the paucity of progressive representations of race and poverty within American media but also questions of multicultural access and visibility within the American film industry. The film’s 30-year journey out of the shadows reminds us that the same asymmetries of power that progressive students seek to resist in their activism are frequently reproduced in the very processes of media production and distribution through which progressive messages are disseminated. There could be no more vital lesson for young progressives to consider as they look to creative media for guidance in the struggles of 2008 and beyond.
Will Di Novi graduated from Wesleyan University in 2007.