#95: Funny signs
#96: Fall is almost over….
NYTimes Arts- The Egyptian Artist Wael Shawky Mesmerizes at the Venice Biennale
- The Triumphant Comeback of the Kamala Harris Meme
- ‘Time Bandits’ Review: A Flatter Adventure
- How a Ballroom ‘Cats,’ a Gay Kiss and a Black Marine Reclaimed Old Musicals
- ‘Veep’ Comparisons Dominate Social Media as Biden Endorses Kamala Harris
Week of Nov. 21st
Posted in Elana Lerner, Photojournal
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Fahrenheit 9/11
It’s funny that this is where you will begin to read my blog, because I feel like I have been writing it forever. I have been typing up a few different ideas that didn’t really work for me. So now, instead of speaking, to the T, about what I am suppose to talk about, I will speak about an aspect I would like to talk about.
Just as we discussed in class, Fahrenheit 9/11 is structured quite well to express the political opinions of director Michael Moore. It is no shocker that I will tell you he is not a fan of former president George W. Bush. In fact, a lot of the film is composed in a distinct way to undermine him. Satirical music, like stereotypical southern music to mock certain things he did. There is the song with the lyrics, “Vacation, All I ever wanted…” that blasts in the background and the film shows Bush on vacation during pressing times. He juxtaposes serious and comedic moments to impress upon the audience his opinions with out actually saying them straight out. It is interesting to me to see, scenes and music conveying ideas. It was smart for Moore to persuade the audience with out saying anything directly straight out. The film seems like a lot of clues that are each distinct in their own right. While watching the audience feels like there are not being convinced of a truth, but rather with Moore’s help, coming to a conclusion on their own. In this film Moore is being politically explicit while being completely ambiguous at the same time.
Not only did the way he pieced together the film impress his hatred of the Bush administration and his mockery of the President, but the seemingly simplistic way Moore displayed the information to the viewers helped make the points he was trying to get across, accessible. He feature an interview of Britney Spears, our formerly “All American Girl,” voicing her trust in faith in the president. Now in this scene she looks pretty stupid. This tells the viewer, wow stupid southern people love Bush, and maybe voting for him is not the smartest idea.
All these points are really interesting, and I could probably write an entire blog if I delved into them and expanded them further. But I do not intend to do that. Instead I have thought of something that really intrigues me. A kind of train of thought, a theme that I think is important to the roots of this film. What makes the war in Iraq and 9/11 so culturally and politically significant? Obviously, this seems like a pointless question.
What made me even ask this was a recent Art History class. My teacher does research in 2nd generation Asian American art and so when we spoke about Vietnam and art she had a lot to say. We spoke about time. About how certain wars and significant events linger in the present. Historian Rick Berg said, “Vietnam remains… What is left of the war, its fragments and its ruins, stay irrepressible and endlessly recuperable.”
I believe this concept can apply to 9/11. That is something really significant that Moore is doing with this piece. Even though the film was made three years after 9/11, it still dug deep for the day was still fresh in people’s minds. The events of that day linger especially in our culture. So Moore is able to connect to the American people through this unifying event.
Moore’s film is one of the many ways that culture keeps reminding American Society of 9/11. What’s specifically interesting is that culture will sometimes skew what really happened. Just like the many Vietnam War films, (Apocalypse Now and Born on the Fourth of July), that portray Vietnam in a specific way, Moore’s film is specifically a reminder that this terrible event and the war that ensued, did not have to happen the way they did. Moore is putting the blame on a single administration and specifically Former President Bush. The documentary, just like former films based on important and controversial historical events, is a form of revisionist history. Some people may tend to believe everything Moore is reminding them. Moore strongly believes it and can easily, through make the viewer follow suit.
9/11 and the events that followed are not simply the esoteric international events that most Americans will not read about in the newspaper everyday. They are events that hit close to home. Through strategic filmmaking, Moore was able to tap into that and remind Americans who was right and who was wrong.
Posted in 12. film/ political issues, Blog
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film/political issues
Documentaries fall pretty low on my list of preferred film genres, in fact it falls about rock bottom right underneath horror movies. Having to sit through a documentary is like torture, and to make matters worse, having to sit through a political documentary…just the thought made me cringe. Fahrenheit 9/11 was different than I expected though; made explicitly to show Michael Moore’s opinion of the president, the war and the media, its structure made it entertaining and lively. Moore’s film documented the controversy around the presidency of George Bush and the actions taken by him, painting Bush as the lucky fool who secured his victory through a series of family ties in high places.
Michael Moore reached deep into the controversy of the War on Terror and the connections between the Bush family and the Bin Laden family. He mentions the three decade long relationship between the two families (the amount of money invested between each other), and the evacuation of Bin Laden family after the attacks without any interrogation. Moore even mentions Bush’s efforts to halt any investigation of 9/11 by Congress and private investigations, and when Bush was unsuccessful in stopping Congress, he instead censored 28 pages regarding Saudi Arabia in their reports, claiming that revealing where they gathered this information from “[is] what the enemy wants, and we are fighting an enemy.”
Michael Moore criticizes politics in the media, using Fox news as a prime example, when Fox news calls Florida as a win for Bush, every other station thinks “well if Fox news said it, then it must be true.” Another criticism of how media and politics influence each other is during the scene where Bush and several other important political figures are getting their hair and makeup done before they appear on camera. This obsession with image and “looking good” for the public shows just how much effort they put into face value rather than their purpose. When watching an older man lick his hand an run it on his hair in an attempt to fix it, I could only wonder, “is he putting that much (and hopefully more) effort on his job? It also made me wonder what does the public think of politicians, if they weren’t as clean and neat as they look on camera, would we still listen to everything they?
Without outright saying it, he uses media footage that the public has already seen (like the My Pet Goat reading done by Bush) and music to state his opinion and also to break the tension. His usage of sound really did make a statement in the film, like when the scene cuts to Bush going on vacation, the music was lively and carefree, much like our former president was. Another use of sound that really leaves an effect on the viewer is the sounds of the attack on the World Trade Center. Rather than showing the actual footage of the planes hitting the Towers, he only played the sounds on a black screen, to better emphasize the seriousness of the situation, without showing such disturbing images that could potentially upset viewers.
Watching this documentary I found myself questioning Moore’s views, because while he was using real footage, his picking and pulling of certain pieces offered no room for opposing opinion. Every image of Bush was a negative one. Yes, Bush really was stupid sounding at times, yes, he did sit in silence for seven minutes when told of the Towers being under attack, but give him some credit. I’m sure somewhere in his presidency he did the “right thing” and took the “right course of action.”
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11.22.10-11.28.10
#98: Gingerbread Woman
#99: Gingerbread Man
#100: My brother’s Christmas tree
#101: All I want for Christmas is you
#102: New locations
#103: Sugar, we’re going down…
Posted in Photojournal, Vanessa Budhan
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“I think I was unprepared for war” -Bush
“And what did Bush do…He went on vacation.”
“Vacation all I ever wanted!”
Michael Moore’s entertaining documentary, Fahrenheit 911, which focused in on a time in America that is not considered a laughing matter at all, is extremely intelligent. What we don’t realize in his film is that none of what he says should be taken at face value. In fact, much of his documentary is solely his views about the tragedy on September 11th and the Bush administration. Whether we chose to believe his views or not was our choice—but a very hard choice.
Moore’s persuading tone and evidence invites us to join him in his “I hate Bush” campaign, without ever explicitly stating that he actually hates George W. Bush. Moore criticizes Bush’s decisions prior, on, and after the September 11th attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon including warnings of terrorist attacks, the day of the attacks, the war on Iraq, and the election of Bush.
Throughout the film, Moore uses different sources such as news reports, news videos that weren’t aired on television, clips from the war in Iraq, interviews (he tried) with other members of the administration and Congress, interviews with the Iraqis, and interviews of people who were directly affected by the war. Many of the scenes he portrayed were scenes of things that we had already witnessed such as the scene of the atrocities of the Iraq war and the scene where Bush continues to read a children’s book to a room full of adolescents while America is under attack.
However, even though we had already witnessed many of these events, Moore presents them in a very different light. I’m sure that many of us have seen pictures or videos concerning the war in Iraq numerous times, but we’ve never actually heard an Iraqi woman screaming at the top of her lungs. The other scene regarding Bush’s story time on September 11th has been portrayed in a very different light in other documentaries. Moore thinks that Bush was a coward and instead of taking action he just sat back and watched our country come to ruins because he is unable to make decisions on his own. On the other hand, other documentaries say that Bush had to stay there because of security purposes, because they didn’t want him to scare the room full of children, and because a decision could not be made in a few minutes.
One of the reasons why I really enjoyed Moore’s film is because he took facts that I had already known a lot about, but made me think differently about them. Another choice that Moore decided to take in his documentary is juxtaposing “sad” scenes with “comic relief” scenes. For instance, he would show a scene from Iraq with dead babies covered in blood in the back of a pickup truck and the next scene would be of Britney Spears being interviewed about Bush’s presidential decisions. I think the reason why Moore does this is to show that he’s not trying to make a sad documentary on 9/11 and its aftermath, but instead he’s documenting this moment in time and putting his own point of view out there on all of these events.
One thing I really liked about Moore’s narrative tone is that he never really blatantly states his point of view but it is noticeable through his choice of images, tone, videos, etc.
My favorite choice of Michael Moore’s direction of his own film in the beginning scene where everything was dark and all we heard were screams, fussing, and commotion when the Twin Towers were falling. Since we all saw this video and many others taken by tourists, news stations, and others, we were familiar with seeing the attacks. When the image was taken away and all we could hear were sounds that hit home for me and was a stronger emotion than seeing the towers fall. That darkness symbolized our country. In essence, we were in a state of darkness, from those of us who were in the Twin Towers, in the hijacked places, those of us watching on the news, on the streets, even Bush—we were all in a state of darkness.
Michael Moore is very deservingly the director of the most watched documentary. This film has influenced a change in my views about the war and the Bush administration. Although I do not hate Bush as much as Moore does, I do dislike him a little more after watching this documentary. Fahrenheit 911 is hands down, the best documentary I have ever seen.
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