Middle East Art Fusion

|* cinema. Control Room, 2004.

What I consider to be very important in our world today is the opportunity to get information from different points of view. We live in the age of propaganda and media wars. We can never be sure that media coverage from one channel corresponds with the coverage from another channel. Politics use media to manipulate people's minds, trying to win the game. But the sufferings and the loss is among the civilians and that is the saddest truth.

One movie I would highly recommend to anyone interested in the media coverage on the war in Iraq, which started in 2003, is Control Room. It is a movie about the role of the media, about the differences and similarities between opposing journalists and the media war. As Samir Khader, the producer of Al Jazeera, stated in the beginning of the movie: "You cannot wage a war without rumours, without media, without propaganda. Any military planner, if he doesn't put media propaganda at the top of his agenda, he is a bad militarist."

Control Room is the second film by Egyptian-American director Jehane Noujaim (she co-directed 2001's Startup.com with Chris Hegedus). It is trully amazing that the director is a woman and that the decided to deal with such a hard issue as documentary on politics, and specially documentary on politics around the war in Iraq. My respect to her.

As written in the article of Chanel 4, "Noujaim had intimate access to Al Jazeera's journalists and while there's no denying the channel's partisan position, the film avoids taking sides."

I got mixed feelings after watching this movie. It surely excited me, as I got the perspective on the war, but at the same time it horrified me.

It was shocking to know some facts. For example, that the US forces deliberatly bombed the position of Al Jazeera and two other arab channels in Baghdad just before the US troops came into town and "Iraqi" people took down the monument of Saddam. In the movie we get the same shots, but little bit from another angle and with comments. All "Iraqi" people going to the monument and portraying to be happy were of the same age, no women and coming together with the troops. There were no other people in the street. Noone else. All the scene looked very much being set up and fake.

A enjoyed the character of Al-Jazeera's journalist Hassan Ibrahim, who was the head of Arabic news for the BBC before he joined al-Jazeera. Being very skeptical about the Bush administration, he is rather optimistic about the US Constitution and the American people. ("The Americans will defeat the Americans. I have ultimate faith in the American Constitution.") Throughtout the movie he gave out many ironic comments and was always a person to make a sharp comment.

One more moment I would like to mention is when Al JAzeera is being criticized for showing the footage of dead American soldiers. The manager of AlJazeera.net, Joanne Tucker, is accused of having a "position on the war". And she responds: "Are any US journalists objective about this war? This word 'objectivity' is almost a mirage. If there was no agenda, if there was true neutrality there would be a welcoming of any and all information from all sides."

Of course, when Al Jazeera shows the footage of crying children and torn bodies, it has two reasons for that. First of all, there is a war going on and Al JAzeera is fighting on the side of the Arab interests. Secondly, they fulfill the requirements to translate news for more then 40 millions of Arabs and to match the expectations of them. All the media nowadays is build up like this in our market world.

Control Room is not a fancy documentary; it was filmed, I suppose, entirely on MiniDV, which has become the standard in home video cameras. The composition of some shots goes completely against all the rule of cinematography (like the shot where Samir Khader is giving a comment and you can see a big palm tree right behind his head, that makes his head look like in a funny outfit), but that is not the point. The point is that "Control Room" makes you stop and re-think many obvious facts. And it has sompletely succeeded in that.

posted by Aleksandra Birjukova @ 11.12.05