Change Your Image
dpaterson-1
Reviews
La batalla de Chile: La lucha de un pueblo sin armas - Primera parte: La insurrección de la burguesía (1975)
All US citizens should see this film.
The Battle of Chile is one of the greatest and most anguished of all documentaries. Given the US invasion of Iraq with the use of perfidious conservative lies, smoke, and mirrors, it is instructive that after thirty five years the US CIA, the conservative movement here, and military fellow travelers continue to con the people of our country into the most horrific of militaristic actions -- some spoken about, and some, as documented in The Battle of Chile -- buried with the same lies, smoke, and mirrors. Thus, this film is one all US citizens should see. So keep Netflicks busy because you'll never see it on the TV or a major film screen in this, the free-est of all possible nations.
Hair (1979)
It works.
Just watched Hair after a lapse of 20 years. It struck home. For those of us who tried to stand on the shoulders of the civil rights movement and fight the rule of privilege and power; who resisted the fascism of the Johnson/Nixon administrations; who now as veterans of civil wars fought the war in Vietnam every single day until finally the US beast died and fled; for all who said no in many different ways -- it's remarkable how unsuccessful we were. How large the real table was on which Treat danced. How driven the wizard behind the curtain. We were 20, 22, 24. We didn't know the nature of the enemy. The size of the monster who for the next thirty years and counting would continue to eat the world. How could we? Even with smoke and the bat (the bat!) in our hand, like Treat, we were too young, too middle class, too invested, too much a part of the actions we hated.
But there was a moment. As Andre Gregory observes in My Dinner With. . . , there was a moment or two somewhere back there in the late 60's and early 70's when perhaps we could have found something besides the yellow brick road. Something not fueled by Bechtel, prisons, Enron, and Dick. Something collaborative. Something innocent and critical at once. Something with dance.
But we missed it. Like Kong bending a girder, the "revolution" was turned in on itself. Into sexism. Racism. Homophobia. And class crushing politics. Until we got to "W". Treat would have hated "W". And Iraq and the pathological lies. If they were in that film. Then. But the moment passed and "W" was almost inevitable. Comprehensive incompetence riding the drunken, raging bull into estuaries, children's lives, and China shops.
We should have done something more. Something better. But we clearly didn't know what.
Now what?
Blood Diamond (2006)
a film that peels away layers
I suggest that the most important feature of this film is that it can help in the decades-long process of peeling the layers of baloney that the west has used to cover its catastrophic history of imperialism, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. Europe has never, ever, not once, taken full responsibility for the massive cultural, political and economic wreckage it brought to the Americas, to Africa, to the middle east, and to southern and south-east Asia. The US, moreover, stepped up to take Europe's place beginning in the late 19th century and has proved to be indeed a child of Europe's obsession with dominance over other peoples and cultures. While the film is still too much about white and European people, at least it points in the direction where most of the world's miseries stem: ongoing western imperialism. -- The struggle continues.