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Charles Ferguson’s Documentary No End in Sight
Clearing the Dust Away But that is because, like a number of other documentaries in competition at the Festival this year which cover everything from prison abuse to outright war, No End in Sight is not just about Iraq but something more expansive: how violence becomes sanctioned, institutionalized, condoned, and supported:how it gets maintained – even coddled – and eventually seems normal. The broad range of styles and approaches filmmakers are using to cover that subject are notable. “I think what documentary delivers to us is the ability to step back and see the larger picture,” Caroline Libresco, a senior programmer at the Festival, said. “They’re untangling a morass of cloudy information that has been clouded by news reporting, so it’s almost like they’re trying to clear away the dust for us, to crystallize what the problem is.”
It should come as no surprise that documentaries tackling as much material as No End in Sight are relentlessly, painstakingly clear – the ethical missteps and evasions they excavate are so elusive, that the content demands a commitment to document the observable truth. Take No End in Sight, for example: About halfway through, Ferguson sets his sights on Paul Bremer, the former administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), and, as if he were writing a textbook, Ferguson produces a list, numbered one, two, and three, of Bremer’s crucial mistakes. Like No End in Sight, Rory Kennedy’s Ghosts of Abu Ghraib interviews policymakers, in her case to discern precisely how the sad case of the prison abuse at Abu Ghraib evolved. But Ghosts of Abu Ghraib also tells the frank and intimate stories of the American military police and guards who were assigned to the prison.“That place turned me into a monster,” one soldier who worked there tells Kennedy. The film telescopes from an analysis of policy to a probe of the effect that that policy had on the men and women assigned, with increasing pressure from their superiors, to withdraw some kind of revealing intelligence about Iraqi insurgents – often by torturing the prisoners at Abu Ghraib. While researching the film, Kennedy learned that prisoners who entered Abu Ghraib were ordered to remove their clothes and did not receive them back unless they maintained good behavior. “When it’s normalized like that, even the most bizarre things become accepted,” Kennedy said. “When you have that coupled with people in authority saying, ‘Put them in stress positions or don’t let them sleep,’ it begins to make a bit more sense, to those of us who weren’t assigned to work there, how it might have happened. It doesn’t excuse it, but I have much more empathy and understanding for why these guys did what they did.” Interviewing the soldiers assigned to Abu Ghraib has the newsworthy effect of humanizing a recent scandal that compelled us to think of anyone associated with Abu Ghraib as monstrous. And as he set out to make a documentary about the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagaskai veteran filmmaker Steven Okazaki , like Rory Kennedy, had to puncture a particularly thick cloud of misperception. It is now more than 60 years since the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and it has been that long since a documentary profiled the survivors and actual bombers in-depth. Okazaki’s poetic White Light, Black Rain interviews a number of Japanese survivors of both bomb drops, and reveals the stark vulnerabilities the survivors and bombers still live with. “People seem to prefer the historian telling them history from the bookcases,” Okazaki said, “but when you have these first-hand stories that are so great and moving, for them to not be a part of the historical record is kind of shocking.”
Okazaki had been wanting to make a documentary about both the victims and the people who physically dropped the atomic bomb ever since he attended a film series in Berkeley 25 years ago that featured a number of films about the decision to drop the bomb, only one of which interviewed a survivor. What he discovered sometimes surprised him. “The Americans were really interesting – they were all adamant that they were doing their duty, and it was the right thing to do at the time, and none of them expressed any regret … but they all seemed really aware of the danger of the atomic bomb now.” Masha Novikova’s Three Comrades approaches Chechnya’s protracted and violent bid for independence from Russia, also, in an intimate and personal fashion, but two of the three subjects she uses to tell that story actually died in the conflict. Ruslan, Islam, and Ramzan grew up together in the Chechen capital of Grozny and had been tight friends since grade school – all ambitious and seemingly poised for success later in life.But in 1995, after war broke out between Chechnya and Russia, Ruslan was arrested for apparently no reason by Russian soldiers (and later executed), followed by Ramzan’s death while working as a cameraman for Grozny’s principal television station. Novikova uses the hundreds of hours Ramzan taped – time spent with his friends and of crucial news events – to create a document about war that is moving and indelible because of the human stories she tells.
When Israeli filmmaker Shimon Dotan opens his film Hot House with footage of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas addressing the newly elected Palestinian parliament last February, there is every indication that this will be another sober assessment of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Instead the film defies expectations mainly because Dotan managed to gain access to two Israel prisons– one that detains male Palestinians, and another their female counterparts. The prisoners are failed suicide bombers, planned suicide bombings, and people who have otherwise killed or harmed Israeli citizens –and Dotan lets them speak for themselves. It quickly becomes obvious that the Israelis are nurturing a system of violence that is creating breeding grounds within prisons for future Palestinian political leaders— effectively fostering violence in the very place meant to quash it. “What’s so extraordinary here is the access Dotan got and the Palestinians’ willingness to talk about really pretty insider information and how leadership is honed in prison,” Libresco observed. First-time filmmaker Jason Kohn managed to get his subjects to speak in a disarmingly frank way in Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), but he weaves their comments and stories into an incantatory, essayistic narrative about corruption and violence in Sao Paolo, Brazil, that is a thrilling indictment of a political system that institutionalizes corruption and violence. “Corruption is violence, of the most serious form, short of maybe genocide,” Kohn said, and to demonstrate that idea, he interviews a number of people affected by a single Brazilian politician whose penchant for corruption appears to have no limit. All of these documentaries cover vast amounts of material and are about conflicts that often seem interminable. They are also documentaries that stand a good chance of pulling in audiences. “There’s a lot of trust in the public’s mind right now of documentarians,” Libresco said. “You don’t expect independent documentaries to toe the corporate line. The public is flocking to these films because we need some way to make sense of what’s going on.” |
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