Category: media

Michael Moore’s incendiary documentary trashing the politics and policy of the Bush administration has captured the top prize at Cannes. It was the first documentary to be awarded the Palme d’Or since Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World took the prize nearly 50 years ago. Moore was the darling of Cannes this year, though some observers noted that, if his film won, it would be more an expression of European outrage with current American foreign policy than a true reflection of the quality of the picture. Still, in a year when no one film blew away the competition, Fahrenheit 9/11 stood out from the pack.

Michael Moore has crafted a well-constructed image as a man of the people, a spokesman for the downtrodden, and a lone voice howling against the American corporate, political, and economic elite. But those who have worked with Moore tell a different story, of a money-obsessed power broker who exaggerates his supposedly working-class roots and hides his own excesses behind his populist bluster.

It seems almost absurd now to recall that, only a few years back, documentary films were considered box office poison, and were treated like the bastard stepchild of the industry. Then came Michael Moore, whose Bowling for Columbine “turned the tables on the conventional wisdom that America was full of Bible-thumping, gun-toting conservatives: in fact, it was full of people who wanted to see their private stirrings of dissent put out there by someone who had a few facts at his disposal and dared to poke fun at the powerful.” Moore’s humorous but stinging criticism of conservative America, and of its current president in particular, is defining a new generation of documentary film, and helping to throw the polarization of the U.S. into stark relief.

“Where, it has been wondered — even before the coming together of the Coalition of the Willing — are the great French film directors and novelists of today? Where, in particular, given France’s reputation as the world headquarters of sexy romance, not to say plain old sex, are the great French erotic novels and films? Such questions have been reawakened recently by two events.”

David Mamet hits out at the development process in Hollywood, where supposedly movie projects are whipped into shape. “The young, warped by an educational system selling them perpetual adolescence, mistake the battleground for the struggle: they believe that make-work in that one-time area of strife and creation, Hollywood, somehow conveys to them the status of actually working in the Movie Business. It is as if a picnicker at the Gettysburg Memorial Park considered himself a soldier. Just as the Scholastic Aptitude Test measures the ability of the applicant to take that test, the bureaucratic rigours of the ‘development’ process probe the neophytes’ threshold for boredom, repetition, and nonsense.”

Norman Lebrecht doesn’t think much of the modern BBC. “Do not mistake the BBC for what was once the British Broadcasting Corporation. It has become an uncontrollable conglomerate whose activities extend from urban regeneration to webcasting in America. These enterprises were never envisaged in its limited public licence. The BBC is an organisation that has lost its sense of direction, stumbling hopefully into virtual incoherence.”

“As they try to stave off fierce cable competition and chase the young adults prized by advertisers, networks are loading up on high-concept reality shows and rejiggering lineups at the last minute. As a result, they’re using reruns more sparingly than ever or, in many cases, banishing them entirely. Admittedly, this is one funeral that might not attract many mourners.”

Where’s the juice in today’s cinema? “You have today in Latin America a generation of directors and actors who grew up after the redemocratization of the continent. That makes a dramatic difference. They are not only talented but socially and politically conscious, and this combination is nurturing a different kind of cinema. The films have a desire for new stories, often stories of identity. We are a young continent, and the countries are in movement, in the process of defining ourselves, and this process creates extraordinary cinematic possibilities.”

Should TV customers be allowed to buy only the channels they want from their cable and satellite companies? That’s what Congress wants to know. TV execs say it’s not a good idea – that popular channels subsidize less popular channels.

“If there’s been a story that has actually managed to prick the bubble of star-struck and self-absorbed Cannes Film Festival, it’s been politics. Politics of all kinds, local and international, electoral and cultural, screen and off, but especially the war in Iraq. If the premiere on Monday of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 made the biggest explosion in that regard, further rumblings have been felt just about everywhere.” If film is a reflection of society, there can be no question that the current American government, with its neoconservative bent and aggressive foreign policy, is the hottest cultural topic in the world today, and no one at Cannes seems to be above throwing in his/her two cents.