OT: No End in Sight very good documentary

busterkeaton wrote on 9/8/2007, 12:31 AM

I saw No End In Sight today. It's a very well made documentary about the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. It's first film by someone who was a political scientist and not a filmmaker. However, it's still a great looking film. The interviews are shot really nicely with great use of shadows. It's edited with nice use of splitscreens and great titles. The begining titles felt particularly modern.

The structure of the film is really effective, seguing easily from one aspect of the war into another. They cover a lot of ground, but the movie never bogs down. Two things that really sell the movie is they were able to get a lot of interviews with folks who were faily high level officials in either ORHA, the CPA or the military and that they shot some great footage in Iraq. They were able to get footage of Motaqdr Al-Sadr leading a rally and saying that the Little Satan has been replaced with the Great Satan. I was familiar with most of what they covered, but seeing the first hand interviews was still quite engaging. I think that is because the director knows about how policy is made and what and who to focus on. The filmmaker is a friend of George Packer who appears in the movie and the movie is essentially the film verison of Packer's book Assasin's Gate. He got the idea to do the movie because he would have dinner with Packer whenever he got back from Iraq and Packer kept telling him the situation was far worse than what was being reporting in the news. The best strength of the movie is the contrast between what was happening in Iraq and the burlesque that happened in Washington press conferences.
Rumsfeld: I picked up a newspaper today, and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest -- and it was just, 'Henny Penny the sky is falling.' I've never seen anything like it.
Cut to the footage of organized Iraqi looters driving construction cranes down the streets and American soldiers who were ordered not to intervene just watching them. Rumsfeld with his shtick and joking around seems like a sociopath.

Comments

craftech wrote on 9/8/2007, 6:05 AM

Thanks,

I'll have to watch that one. I have seen many.

If you haven't already seen it, Bill Moyers (the last television news investigative journalist in the United States) did a documentary called Buying the War about how the American news media helped the Bush administration sell the Iraq invasion to the public. He spent FIFTEEN months on it. It is well worth seeing.

My favorite part was footage of a 2003 presidential news conference where the press core people to be picked (like John King of CNN) were known to Bush in advance as well as the questions they would ask. The others raised their hands to play the game knowing they weren't part of the script. Gotta love it.

John

dat5150 wrote on 9/8/2007, 6:57 AM

I've seen the trailer for 'No end in Sight' and it looks a lot like the 4-5 Frontline episodes on the Iraq war. Not going to say I won't see it, but looks like that ground was covered very well by Frontline.

busterkeaton wrote on 9/8/2007, 1:08 PM

I've probably seen those Frontline episodes too, but this still grabbed me.
Possibly because the cinematography was great. It also does a full overview of how we got where we are pretty well. And it's still jaw-dropping to hear things like :

ORHA, which was suppossed to be the governing structure for a country of 25 million was something like 160 people by the time they got to Baghdad,
The coordinator for Central Iraq had no staff not even a secretary
The people planning the occupation were actively trying to keep US officials who spoke Arabic off the list of people goint to Iraq
As the government ministries were looted to the floorboards and massive ammo dumps were unguarded, Rumsfeld cancelled the deployment of troops who were originally scheduled to come into

riredale wrote on 9/8/2007, 6:47 PM

Must the the weekend, the moderators are gone...

Please do the forum a favor and take this antiwar antiBush antiUSA antiwhatever topic elsewhere. I know you all get tired hearing my personal opinions on this matter and I certainly get tired hearing yours. We've all seen that discussions of politics and/or religion on this board accomplish nothing here and make for hard feelings.

This is a video editing forum. If we want to discuss documentary techniques here, great.

apit34356 wrote on 9/8/2007, 7:12 PM

Busterkeaton, outside of the politics, did the political scientist do any editing or just wored the director's hat?

busterkeaton wrote on 9/8/2007, 9:59 PM

The political scientist wrote, directed and produced. He helped determine the structure of the movie because he wanted to focus on policy issues and how they were formed.
They shot a lot more interviews than they used. I think he had an outline of what he wanted in the movie and then he and the editors independently tried to figure which clips to use. Their criteria was A who said it best on Film and B who had first hand knowledge of the event. They often ended up agreeing.

In one case they actually went back and reshot two interviews because they wanted to nail down exactly how was the decision to disband the Iraqi army made. In that case the on-camera interviews were with an advisor to Jerry Bremer, Walter Slocombe and Col. Paul Hughes who was an official at ORHA was working to reestablish the Iraqi army and had gathered 130,000 names and addresses. If you remember ORHA was the first governing authority and it was quickly replaced by the CPA and one of the first acts of the CPA was to disband the army.

As for politics, I think the director of the movie was in favor of the war, but feels it was waged shortsighedly and without adequate preparation for the aftermath which is roughly the same arc as his friend George Packer who was also for the war.