Rodrick Gorden's blog ::... out the new corporate direction... But my direct supervisor du jour came over and ...to go get some food from the meeting room (and of course promptly was startled...
Renowned filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker's The War Room is one of the most famous of political documentaries. The subject is the 1992 presidential election, primarily the Bill Clinton campaign. The film is done in the "direct cinema" style closely associated with Pennebaker. Meaning there is little or no narration, background, context, explanation, etc., except what can be gleaned from the footage of the subject matter itself. The camera takes you along for the events themselves--showing them to you rather than telling you about them--leaving it up to you to interpret them and draw conclusions from them. I have mixed feelings about this style. I like the immediacy of it; I wouldn't want to just have people talking about something rather than being able to see it myself. But I don't think it needs to be all one or all the other. I'd like such footage to be used rather than just displayed. I don't find it insulting to my intelligence or manipulative for a filmmaker to provide explicit answers to questions like "What are we watching, and why does it matter?" The material should be illustrative of something, it should fit somewhere in an argument. As someone with some college teaching experience, I suppose I think of the ideal documentary as like a very skillful, logically organized, learned lecture, only better because of the visual aids vastly superior to anything you'd see in a classroom. This kind of documentary is the equivalent of getting the visual aids and nothing more. As such documentaries go, though, this movie is not particularly difficult to follow. Most or all of it is in chronological order, it typically isn't too hard in any given scene to figure out what's going on, and enough snippets from other contemporaneous campaign events and broadcast reports and such are included to give at least some sense of where what we're seeing of the Clinton folks fits in the grand scheme of things. But I still came away feeling like this footage--as valuable as it can be--would function better as a part than a whole. I wanted to talk about this material, or hear other people talk about it, in order to consider and debate how to interpret this raw data and what lessons to learn from it. And it's not as if just because there's no narration or other "extras," we're somehow getting unmediated reality here. For one thing, this isn't Candid Camera we're talking about. Everyone being filmed knows they're being filmed and has agreed to be filmed, so what they're doing and saying is tailored accordingly. We're not really being taken "inside" the campaign, not fully anyway. This is George Stephanopoulos and James Carville putting on a show, probably with an eye toward improving their future career prospects. I mean, I'm sure some of it's genuine, and sometimes people kind of forget about the cameras and aren't behaving much differently than they would be anyway, but some of it is also phony to varying degrees. But whatever my misgivings, there are a good number of striking moments and interesting elements to this documentary. One is that no one seems "larger than life." I'm struck by how routinely when I get somewhat of a more in depth look at public figures, "successful" people, etc., they don't seem any smarter or any better than me. I don't have a consciousness of being in the presence of greatness. I feel like I'm a teenager and these are just other nobodies in class. I'm at least as likely, and probably more likely, to come away from an encounter with a "regular" person feeling impressed or like I could learn from or emulate this person. Maybe because the rich and the famous, in order to be rich and famous, need to be so focused on the pragmatic and amorally strategic that it's more the exception than the rule when any of them turn out to be decent human beings, or just evolved in any sense beyond being good at "winning." Clinton himself seems like an OK guy in many respects in this film, but not someone to be in awe of. If I were with him, it feels like it would be natural to interact with him as equals, not like I would have felt, say, as a child meeting the Heavyweight Champion of the World. And his minions--primarily Stephanopoulos and Carville--come across even less like big shots to me. They're confident and they're calling the shots and all that, but the intangibles just aren't there, not for me anyway. They're like mildly unpleasant kids managing a fast food restaurant. Morally I find campaign managers and strategists and such distasteful. Even if they genuinely believe in the ends they're seeking (which only some do, and only to varying degrees--there are also plenty of mercenaries in their line of work), that is, that the country and the world will be better off if the candidate they're working for wins, the means are the usual spin, fallacies, manipulation, sloganeering, and all the rest. On the other hand, as little as I admire dubious means in pursuit of "lesser of the evil" ends, it was markedly more nauseating to watch the occasional snippets of Mary Matalin or others on the George Bush team, or even the candidate himself. That's more pure deceit and evil. Bush Senior's reputation I think has been enhanced a bit just by comparison with other candidates and presidents of recent years, most notably the disastrous presidency of his son, but his scenes in this film serve as a reminder of what a typical nasty little weasel politician he was. One scene that stood out to me, because it illustrates how corrupt all this is on multiple levels, is when Stephanopoulos is on the phone on the eve of the election with someone from a newspaper that is evidently considering whether to report a rumor that Clinton had an illegitimate baby with an African American woman. He words it carefully, but basically what he tells the person is he'd be a lot better off betting on the side that's much more likely to win. As he notes, you can make a bunch of people happy who are going to be out of power after the election anyway, or you can "do the right thing" and know that it'll be remembered. He explicitly says he doesn't mean the person will be rewarded by the party or the new administration in any kind of direct quid pro quo, but that idea is certainly there in creepy implication. I found it somehow intriguing--maybe partly in a humorous way and partly in a disturbing way--when these guys are sitting around on election day, knowing it's almost in the bag but not wanting to celebrate yet, and to break the tension they start ad libbing a Clinton concession speech. As mostly Carville composes and recites it on the spot, the others laugh along. And it is funny in a way. But like I say, it's disturbing as well, in that it sounds exactly like those speeches always sound. The fact that such a speech can sound so real without ever going beyond the generic, highlights the insincerity of the whole process. None of it has to do with what the person's really thinking or feeling. It's all about doing what "works," which is often just doing the expected, doing what you "have to do," because "that's how it's done." In this case, because that's the ritual speech losing candidates must give to manifest that they've learned the game and will abide by its rules. The movie on the whole is certainly worth seeing. I do still think of it more as raw data (of what the inside of a presidential campaign looked like during a certain historical period, always with the caveat that people were aware of the cameras and able to do some spinning) that should be embedded in something larger that analyzes and explains more. It's a valuable starting point for a historian or a citizen discussion group or whatever, not an end point. You still have to "do something" with what the camera reveals from the Clinton campaign, even if the filmmaker didn't. |
Image of data room direct
data room direct Image 1
data room direct Image 2
data room direct Image 3
data room direct Image 4
data room direct Image 5
Related blog with data room direct
- fancypanties.blogspot.com/... to give me some actual data to get a ”feel“ of what it... lady came in the room and was directed to where I was sitting...
- ibloga.blogspot.com/...York Review blog, Kenneth Roth, director of Human Rights Watch... Internet data, continue on to wherever they...duplicate beam goes into Room 641A, the NSA’s secret room...
- aninconvenienttruth.blogspot.com/...name-call: have fun. The rest of us look at the data and think "hrm... what IF what we are... too much" crap. There is no room for extremism. There is no point in ...
- talesofthenewworld.blogspot.com/.... At the town level this sense of immediate participation was even more direct because the franchise for town offices and affairs in Windsor was...
- wretchedtoad.blogspot.com/... savage pain endured by Sue the Book and Missus B.Snr are as a direct result of the latest 'toy' given to our Area Controller to play with...
- anti-strib.blogspot.com/... with outdated job security expectations that were in direct conflict with what we were experiencing in the market. There also ...
- trejrc0.blogspot.com/...will last 300 years ... for really important data, etc. * Virtual sales top $100M * ... up and going to the other's room to say good night we IM each other good night that...
- labyrinthwalk.blogspot.com/... out the new corporate direction... But my direct supervisor du jour came over and ...to go get some food from the meeting room (and of course promptly was startled...
- christiangunslinger.blogspot.com/...tax. This time, we DO HAVE a direct say in the matter. We can say... in portable class rooms for a number of...: “I have no data yet. It is a capital...
- talesofposeidoniabydennislsiluk.blogspot.com/...in her own way And left behind A grand old time Room for another Love and Butterflies… That...tripod.com you can also order the books directly by/on: www.amazon.com www.bn.com www.SciFan.com...
Data Room Direct - Blog Homepage Results
... in a good position to cope with swine flu as he visited an NHS Direct centre in Beckenham, south-east London. Quick treatment “There will be more ...
...Force EU to Close Emission Trading System Bank of America Sets Up War Room, Hires Army of Lawyers Yippee! Another European Stress Test Festival! Mass...
Related Video with data room direct
data room direct Video 1
data room direct Video 2
data room direct Video 3
댓글 없음:
댓글 쓰기