FILM REVIEWS - Miscellaneous - http://maxpages.com/aeazine2/ISSUE_11_FILM_REVIEWS

The Fog Of War (2003)
Directed by Errol Morris
SenArt Films

"The Fog Of War" is the fourth documentary Robert McNamara has appeared in. The first three; "The Vietnam War: A Descent Into Hell," "Cold War" and "JFK Remembered;" were all TV documentaries that touched on one significant event from the last 60 years. Subtitled "Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara," this one goes all the way back to the second world war. McNamara retells his experiences from each stage of his career from when he was an army recruit to when he was Secretary of Defense for the U.S. government to when he was president of the World Bank. A backdrop of archive clips from latter 20th century events like World War II, the Bay of Pigs invasion, Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Gulf of Tonkin bombings and so on adds more weight to what McNamara recalls from those years.
McNamara's interviewer in "The Fog Of War" is Errol Morris, whose previous seven documentaries included portraits on everyone from cosmologist Stephen Hawking to engineer Fred Leuchter who made a career of designing equipment to execute Death Row inmates more humanely until he became a pariah upon meeting WWII revisonist Ernst Zundel and becoming a Holocaust denier. Here Morris is heard asking a few occasional questions, as the majority of his interviews with McNamara focus on his wartime accounts. Keeping our attention on McNamara's answers usually means jumping between footage during the course of the interview as Morris wants as much of McNamara's insight as possible. This sometimes makes for choppy results which may have flowed better if Morris' final editing had been less frequent.
It's possible that this editing existed as a process of trial and error in working with a new method in interviewing. The making of "The Fog Of War" involved 25 hours of interview footage with a recording machine ominously christened the "Interrotron." Designed by Morris, this device is described as a modified teleprompter constructed to enable interviewer and interviewee to maintain eye contact while addressing the camera, with a two-way mirror placed over the lens. The official website for "The Fog Of War" (http://www.sonyclassics.com/fogofwar) says this results in "a different kind of filmed interview" in that it fixes the interviewee's main focus on the camera as opposed to the interviewer. Production designer Ted Bafaloukos implied this device was a means to do an interview and watch television at the same time.
McNamara says one of his earliest memories was from the end of the first world war, when he was two years old. He comes close to bragging about how he retained the memory of crowds gathering on top of automobiles, embracing and cheering when it became known that the Americans won. Naturally this could have been something his family told him later, but from how he makes it sound there's a vivid enough recollection of the sights and sounds that surrounded him at an early age. "A city exploding with joy," as he's quoted as saying. It's funny that this should be the memory that shapes his life when you take a look at his track record, but with his occasional moments of evasiveness he seems at least a little more honest than most politicians have been known to show themselves addressing us on national TV.
This might lead you to believe that this paints the picture of the sort of gung ho warmonger from movies like "Crimson Tide," and he might have presented himself as one who would proceed with his decisions despite any objections to the contrary. But McNamara says today that the single mindedness that created controversy around him came from a drive to conduct war with the least risk of destruction to civilian society. His answers to Morris' questions say he wasn't any less intolerant of criticism than others with whom he was working, whose decisions resulted in much more destruction than he saw as necessary to win America's wars. For his supposed intolerance, he seemed the sole voice of reason among political and military leaders whom he suggests may have landed us in hotter water if not for his intervention.
In this movie McNamara speaks less like a politician addressing TV and newspaper reporters and more like a former president doing an interview for Time magazine. The movie isn't even a documentary, but an interview stretched close to two hours. McNamara's candidness surpasses how much we might have learned about the last half-century than if we were simply watching old war footage while being dictated to by an impersonal voice. He discusses certain points in history when we were "looking down the gun barrel into nuclear war," as when the United States wanted to invade Cuba. Saying we came closer to war than the newspapers were warning the public, McNamara never lost touch with the implications from that point in history through the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Having been involved in wartime decisions since the 40s, McNamara said nuclear war is not like conventional war, in which generals can learn from past mistakes. One mistake in a nuclear war can result in entire nations being destroyed with no window open to rectify it. Back then McNamara was publicly referred to as an "arrogant dictator," but this label seems to have stemmed from his taking another view of warfare's long term effects based on the logical conclusion of armed conflict, and taking charge of the situation to prevent those effects from taking shape. Pointing out the threat has increased in proportion to the nuclear weapons that were built since WWII, he stresses threat of global destruction has become even more genuine these days, now that one person has the authority to order the use of nuclear warheads.
The reason I wanted to hear Morris asking more questions is because when McNamara seems to least expect it, he gets him to reveal more about his involvement in said events than he might have planned to before the beginning of the interview. At one point, Morris forces McNamara to retrace his steps as far as 20 years, to clarify the consistency of his actions. The suddenness in which Morris does this catches McNamara off guard with the clarity he was showing up to that point, and he has to offer deeper explanations of why he felt he was following the correct procedure. You could argue that the "lessons" he discusses are a result of his having made the wrong decisions as a military advisor, but McNamara presents clearer arguments as to how his hard headed personality proved more beneficial than not.
McNamara's arguments to support this position sound convincing enough. He maintains that it was unnecessary for America to use nuclear weapons at the end of WWII, citing the plan he helped devise to firebomb Japan. He prevented a nuclear conflict between America and Cuba, he likewise maintains, by convincing both Kennedy and Castro of what would happen to both countries if such a conflict broke out. He recalls the similar threat of war between Kennedy and Khruschev. In both cases he insists blind luck was the reason there was no war. On the other hand, which may make you doubt whether he was always right, he agreed with Curtis LeMay, whom he planned the bombing raids on Japan with, if the Allies had lost WWII they would have been tried as war criminals due to the casualties from the raids.
The war in Vietnam is another subject that receives close scrutiny from McNamara. Mentioning the policy on Vietnam that Kennedy devised before his assassination, in which he planned to withdraw American troops from south Vietnam by 1965, McNamara says the war should have ended sooner, and would have ended sooner if not for the coup. Later, McNamara would resign as secretary of defense after memoing President Johnson that he'd become convinced it was impossible for the United States to win the war. McNamara suspected that his memo led to his being fired, even though it wasn't long before Johnson's resignation as president was to come soon afterward. The length of that conflict says volumes about the unspoken message of "The Fog Of War." Though it's not stated outright, the message is to address the current wartime situation Americans are living through today, in the hope that past mistakes can be learned from. - Dave Wolff

Naqoyqatsi (2002)
Directed by Godfrey Reggio
Qatsi Productions/Miramax

"Naqoyqatsi" translates from Hopi Indian as "civilized violence" or more literally "war as a way of life." For as long as Godfrey Reggio has been a filmmaker, he's watched mankind become dependent on technology. Dependent to the point where a mechanized cyberspace collective has been created that encroaches closer on the physical world with each new invention made to replace older inventions deemed outdated in the information age. Reggio's 1984 is not a future in which a nation's government controls its citizens with surveillance, propaganda and brainwashing, but a future where cyberspace governs the lives of the people, who contribute to their own assimilation by keeping up with the Joneses.
"Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" touched on this establishing John Connor (who deserved better than the whiny Nick Stahl) as having removed himself from DMV databases and census records so technically he didn't exist anymore. Though even more frightening than a future where Skynet takes over the world by instigating full-scale nuclear war is one where Skynet decides the easiest, most efficient way to rid the world of the human race is by leading it to believe it has what it wants most in life with cyberspace as its tool, perhaps even tricking it into mass suicide while preventing it from realizing it's being eliminated by a supremely intelligent computer system. I'd like to see if "T4" could pull that off.
2002's "Naqoyqatsi" is the third quasi-documentary Reggio made on this idea, the first being 1983's "Koyannisqatsi" (Life Out Of Balance), the second being 1988's "Powwaqatsi" (Life In Transformation). All these films, which are more like montages of animation and sound, reflect on a global society that is exposed to so many layers of technology that all awareness of nature has been purged from the collective psyche. Humanity lives above nature, not with it, even if nature has continually supported the mechanized society we live in. Perhaps Reggio chose the word "naqoyqatsi" to name his third installment of the "qatsi trilogy" to say cybertechnology seems to have declared war on nature itself.
I imagine what shaped Reggio's desire to preserve the integrity of nature through film was the years spent studying to become a monk. From the time he was 14 until he turned 28, Reggio entered a Roman Catholic pontifical order known as the Christian Brothers where he practiced meditation and prayer. Spending that much time away from technology in an environment where there is nothing but nature, such as a monastery, would likely leave a lasting impression on you. This is especially true if you were in this environment while your world view was being shaped. Now picture yourself reentering a world that technologically moved ahead while you were living in relative solitude for more than a decade.
If this sounds uncannily like Alvin Toffler's novel "Future Shock," such a comparison would not be too removed from reality if you remember the mass hypnosis that came from innovations in technology occurring faster than most people could adapt to the societal changes they caused. "Naqoyqatsi" premiered in the States at the 2002 Telluride Film Fest a month before its release in New York and Los Angeles. This far Reggio's work hasn't gotten him an award nomination, but considering the impact "Koyannisqatsi" had on TV and filmmaking that lasted to this day, it wouldn't be a surprise if we saw more of his work duplicated by Hollywood. The trick photography some filmmakers use to make cars look like they're traveling so fast on the freeway that they resemble serpents of light that stretch on forever? That was his.
The film introduces itself with a sense of irony and hope, though it may not appear so from the stark black and white camera work and the somber cello solo accompanying it, as if Reggio is taking a moment to say nature always endures despite man's efforts to establish himself as earth's dominant species. Shots of ruined buildings appear as empty shells of their former greatness; the camera pans along crumbling walls and through decayed interiors with slow, painstaking motion, giving an impression that you're not watching buildings but dead giants. Signifying nature's defiance, an ocean storm cuts in, followed by what could be a Biblical reference to armageddon in the form of stars falling from heaven.
The following image is an endless sea of people heading for an unknown destination. They seem expressionless as they walk by in droves, the negative white-on-black image they're filmed with giving them an otherworldly appearance. Shown after the symbolic destruction of the previous shot, you could say that man is abandoning his former creations in search of the bigger and better. Still, it may be suggested that man has become enslaved by his own ambition when what could resemble bar codes cover their faces, slowly forming the Hopi Indian word that is the title of the film.
Each of the nine montages that follow has its own concept on mankind's propensity for violence while leaving room open for interpretation of how they reflect history and which of them can be associated most closely. Reggio leaves it to the viewer to decide, rather than dictating how it should be interpreted. Note that the descriptions I gave the opening shot were just one way to perceive the images crossing the screen. On the film's official website, Reggio is quoted as saying: "The film's role is to provoke, to raise questions that only the audience can answer. This is the highest value of any work of art, not predetermined meaning, but meaning gleaned from the experience of the encounter."
Accompanied by a brilliant soundtrack by classical composer Philip Glass, Reggio's montages are thought-provoking enough to inspire much speculation on what they convey. "Primacy Of Numbers" is the first montage after the opening sequence, showing what could be the stars that fell to earth from the heavens. Or they could represent the millions of bits of information that exist somewhere in cyberspace. If it's the latter, these at first take form in binary code; later on in complex mathematical equations. These shots are interspersed with shots of soldiers marching in formation, and the scientists of the world building bigger and better weapons of war we see put to work by those same soldiers.
Other montages here, not to mention the questions it's possible they're raising, are equally powerful. "Massman" can be interpreted as asking if cloning will ultimately improve the human race or if man is simply trying to become God. "New World" compares natural landscapes to man-made landscapes, possibly dealing with a massive increase in population that caused the demand for improved technology to help them live comfortably. "Point Blank" deals rather blatantly with the conflicts that have arisen between mankind throughout history and the symbology meant to represent their causes while "Intensive Time" explores the logical progression of warfare and how it would very well lead to disaster for all.
The images put together by Reggio are given more weight by the musical score composed by Philip Glass, who also composed the music for "Koyannisqatsi" and "Powwaqatsi." The soundtrack is being touted as a major breakthrough in American music as it's the first collaboration between Philip Glass and cellist Yo Yo Ma who composed the solo for the film's introductory montage. Glass wanted the soundtrack for Reggio's third "qatsi" to have a unique voice, and a cello piece by Yo Yo Ma seemed most appropriate. Both musicians admitted in a recent interview to being equally surprised that their ideas complemented each other so closely after the writing, recording and final editing. - Dave Wolff

Sign Guestbook

View Guestbook

Visitors: 00098

Page Updated Mon Jun 12, 2006 4:30pm EDT