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The Corporation / Power Trip
/ Struggle
One of the fascinating things about living in the U.S. is how conditioned we are to believe in the capitalist system. Especially in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, it is hard to find anyone in this country outside of academia who will even question this "bedrock" of our society. Hard-core Marxists would argue that when capital controls almost every instrument of the media, it marginalizes or co-opts any opposition, and they might be right. Certainly, it's hard to imagine a capitalist critique showing up on television, even PBS, or in mainstream newspapers and magazines. Yet, the rise of the film documentary format has also led to a ground swell of politically engaged movies (Fahrenheit 9/11 being the most prominent example), at least a few of which are posing critical questions about our basic economic assumptions. Coincidentally, three of them open in Chicago this week. The most prominent of the trio is the Canadian documentary The Corporation. Directed by Mark Achbar (who co-directed Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media) and Jennifer Abbot, the film was inspired by Joel Bakan's book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. As you can imagine, it does not present a favorable portrait. The word 'pathological' is central to the film's argument, as it compares a corporation to a severe mental disorder. A corporation, like a psychopath, is callous to the needs of others, lies repeatedly, inflicts harm without emotion, breaches social and legal standards to get its way, and does not suffer guilt. The problem with this argument is that it's not terribly compelling to anyone who doesn't already believe it. There's something odd about assuming a corporation should be like a person, and the movie does little to justify the analogy. Furthermore, though the film opens with a hilarious montage about the "bad apples" of industry, the movie soon becomes as dry as an academic textbook. Full of talking heads talking abstractly, the documentary seems to be striving to be one of those movies you watch in a 12th-grade economics class. You know, the kind that puts everyone to sleep. The only relief from the babble are ominous music and shots of sick animals and polluted rivers. Again, the film will enrage the already converted, but it's hard to imagine it working on a more neutral audience. The Corporation finally hits its stride in the final hour (the movie approaches three hours in length) when it provides two compelling case studies. The first is how Monsanto, working with Fox News, was able to quash a damning television story about human growth hormone in milk. In one particularly telling moment, a federal court rules that Fox was not at fault because "falsifying the news is not against the law." An even more alarming example is how Bechtel has privatized the water supply in certain Bolivian towns. But that story has a happy ending, as the movie chronicles how the people rose up and threw off their oppressors. This allows the film to end with exhortations for the audience to do the same. Power Trip, a new documentary opening Friday at Facets for one week, has a much different perspective. It follows an American multi-national company in its efforts to bring capitalism to the former Soviet republic of Georgia. But instead of setting up the binary of evil corporation vs. helpless ethnic people, the AES corporation turns out to be the good guys, at least for a while. They purchased the troubled state electricity company a few years ago and are doing their best to bring it into the modern age. But the populace, having grown up in a communist system, aren't used to paying for anything. Since the movie largely follows around AES representatives, who seem amazingly altruistic, we get their perspective--how difficult it is to change the mindset of a people, how a company can't function if it doesn't receive any income, and how working with a corrupt government can hinder even the best efforts. Power Trip, by reminding us of the infuriating nature of totalitarian corruption, is a healthy corrective to The Corporation, which seems to imagine any alternative to the status quo as worthwhile. Regular readers of this column will know I'm not a mindless fan of capitalism, but it's useful to remember that some alternatives are simply worse. Power Trip also has the advantage of being genuinely engaging, focusing on people instead of abstract concepts. Still, Power Trip does merge with The Corporation at one key moment. Just as AES seems to be making ground in its relations with both the government and the people, the American shareholders force the company to sell its stake in Georgia, arguing the return on investment isn't worth it. Suddenly, the profit motive so disparaged in The Corporation seems genuinely pernicious. The most interesting critique of capitalism is a small Austrian film called Struggle that plays at Facets this Saturday and Sunday (July 17 & 18). It focuses on a young mother, who leaves her native Poland for work in Austria. At first, she picks strawberries, then guts turkeys, then works as a cleaner. All the while, she's desperately trying to avoid Austrian immigration authorities. Directed by Ruth Mader with cinematography by Bernard Keller, Struggle uses long shots to emphasize the oppressiveness of the mother's situation. The scenes in the strawberry fields are particularly strong, showing how laborers struggle to eke out any existence. Though it's a fictional story, the film's documentary style reinforces the notion that this is taking place all over the world. The movie loses some of its steam in the second half when it shifts its focus to a middle-aged businessman. Though the film portrays his ennui, it's not as compelling a situation as the mother's. I suppose it's trying to reveal how capitalism destroys even those it seems to benefit, but a more focused emphasis on the mother could've built that argument just as well. Nonetheless, Struggle is a stark example of the limits of capitalism, one that's even more compelling than its documentary cousins. J. Robert Parks 7/12/2004 Struggle
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