Four documentary shorts

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Four documentary shorts nominated by this year's Academy Awards can be seen
now at NYC's Cinema Village and in other theaters around the country. They
all involve topics of interest to progressives.

The first is titled "The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang-Bang
Club." It is a profile of a South African photojournalist who committed
suicide two months after winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. He was 33
years old at the time of his death. Although it is impossible to fully
convey the complexities of such a character in a 27 minute film, suffice it
to say that Carter was a tortured soul who always questioned the ethics of
his profession even though it was clear that he hated oppression of all
sorts. When he was in the Sudan taking pictures of starving villagers, he
apparently had little interest in what became of an emaciated girl who was
standing practically under the shadow of a vulture after capturing her on
film. Some of his colleagues actually compared him to the vulture, even
though this is not mentioned in the film. Shortly before taking his life,
he wrote "I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger
& pain . . . of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen,
often police, of killer executioners . . . "

The next film is titled "God Sleeps in Rwanda" and it is a grim account of
life for women in post-Genocide Rwanda. It reveals that in a bitterly
ironic twist, women have enjoyed a certain kind of emancipation in this
period since they have been called upon to take jobs formerly restricted to
men. Given the shortage of men following the bloodbath, women have become
farmers, cops, judges, medical practitioners, etc. Women have responded in
unexpected ways to the brutal consequences of rape, which was a central
feature of the Hutu assault. Some mothers, who lost all their children to
mob violence, have decided to give birth to children fathered by Hutu
militia men. They explained that all children are innocent and are in need
of love. When contrasted to the sanctimony of the anti-abortion Christian
right in the USA, such women are a tower of virtue.

"The Mushroom Club" is an extremely powerful study of the lingering impact
of radiation on the lives of people in Hiroshima today. Although modern
Hiroshima seems little interested in what happened in 1945, there are
activists and victims of the bombing who will not forget. We learn that
there was a big problem with denial on the part of the Japanese government
which refused to acknowledge that birth defects were a product of
radiation. An elderly Japanese man, whose wife was pregnant in 1945,
describes the burdens of raising a disabled child with no financial support
from the authorities. On a more positive note, the film demonstrates that
such children are making the best of their lives today, just as disabled
people have learned to do worldwide under the impact of a new social
movement that fights for their rights.

The last film won the academy award for best short documentary. "A Note Of
Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin" tells the story of the grand
master of radio drama. During the 30s and 40s, Corwin wrote, produced and
directed dozens of radio plays that featured some of the outstanding talent
of that era, including Orson Welles, Charles Laughton and Gary Cooper.
Although the film does not really provide much in the way of political
context, it is obvious that Corwin was a product of what Marxist scholar
Michael Denning called the "Cultural Front," which was the extremely broad
movement of artists and writers grouped around the CPUSA and the Roosevelt
administration.

His 1939 "They Fly Through the Air with the Greatest of Ease" is a stinging
attack on Italian fascism inspired by Corwin's reaction to his reaction to
Mussolini's son, a pilot, exulting over bombs dropped on the Ethiopians. He
described the sight of the exploding bombs as "beautiful" in much the same
way that the Robert Duvall character claimed that he loved the smell of
napalm in the morning in "Apocalypse Now."

Corwin was hired by CBS along with Orson Welles and John Houseman in 1938
in order to bring quality drama to the air waves. Welles and Houseman were
associated with the left-leaning Mercury Theater. Corwin had come to CBS's
attention after producing arts and poetry programs on WQXR in New York.

Corwin would enlist the talents of a virtual who's who of the cultural left
in the 1940s, including E.Y. "Yip" Harburg, Earl Robinson, Millard Lampell
and Josh White. In 1947 he produced "Hollywood Fights Back" that was an
early response to HUAC witch-hunting. The Hollywood cast included Humphrey
Bogart, Ava Gardner, Judy Garland, Danny Kaye, Gene Kelly, and Burt
Lancaster. From New York: John Garfield, Artie Shaw, Frank Sinatra, and
Senator Wayne Morse.

In a few short years, Corwin's career was over. The documentary attributes
this to his inability to find himself in television, a new medium, in more
or less the same manner one might surmise that Buster Keaton failed to
adapt to "talkies".

I can only wonder, however, if the witch-hunt had more to do with his
declining fortunes.

Corwin survived all that and is still alive and active at the age of 95. He
teaches journalism at the University of Southern California and attended
the Academy Awards this year where he was photographed with George Clooney,
who in his own way is demonstrating that Hollywood still fights back.

Norman Corwin website:
<http://www.normancorwin.com/>http://www.normancorwin.com/

Screening information:
<http://www.apollocinema.com/oscars06/showtimes.asp>http://www.apollocinema.com/oscars06/showtimes.asp



--

www.marxmail.org