from
Violence and Nonviolence: Pathways to Understanding by
Gregg Barak
Two films from 2002, Bowling
for Columbine (a Cannes Film Festival winner) and Bloody Sunday (featured at the Lincoln Center Film Festival in New
York), represent documentary works that capture the complexity of violence and
nonviolence. Both films, for very different reasons, are tours de force. Both
films are ideological works that present multiple sides of issues in very
direct and unbalanced ways. Neither film exploits violence for the sake of
violence, yet each uses techniques of cinema vérité; the first incorporating
news footage and surveillance video shots of the actual assault at Columbine in
combination with a series of interviews with various known and unknown
Americans, the second employing hand-held cameras and a Brechtian newsreel
technique that invites the audience into the action of murder and mayhem. Both
films are also disturbing, if not infuriating, and each is intensely emotional
and political. Yet, these two films are quite different; one is presented as a
comedy of sorts and the other as a Shakespearian tragedy. One will be a box
office hit and go on to be a contemporary classic antiviolence film; the other,
with little popular audience other than Irish people worldwide, will quickly
fade from repressed obscurity into artistic oblivion.
Bowling for Columbine,
written, produced, and directed by Michael
Moore, is a provocative and complex
examination of violence, culture, and American social structure. Moore’s
brilliance in delving into the relationships between the layers of
interpersonal, institutional, and structural expressions of violence are unmatched
by other commentators. It matters little whether you agree with Moore’s
analysis or not, because either way you are appalled by or caught up in his
message. Moore actually raises questions and makes his audience think. He has
few answers and does not preach per se. However, in his narrative, he does away
with all of the simple explanations of violence offered up by media pundits,
politicians, and experts alike. More important, he addresses the repressed
histories and the denied social realities of America that envelop its relative
propensity for violence, especially lethal violence, in both the individual and
the nation-state as a whole.
Moore brings a passion and sensibility to his work that
resonates with the little guy or girl; a class consciousness that energizes the
popular masses and infuriates the power elites. Certainly, Moore is “over the
top” and “in your face” because he realizes that if one is going to tackle such
issues as gun violence, foreign policy, health care, community development,
paranoia, racism, and more, one had better “bury the message” (as it were) in a
barrage of scattered bits of humor. After all, we live in an age in America where
Jackass: The Movie, a spin-off from a
much-maligned MTV series, can become a number-one box office smash.
Accordingly, Moore reaches the masses with serious questions about
controversial issues vis-à-vis the medium of pop entertainment, incorporating
the likes of South Park, contemporary
arms manufacturers and military installations, classic media footage from eras
past, and inserted lessons of history rarely found in traditional texts. In the
process, Moore captures an American culture that is as belligerent and callous
as it is immune to compromise or compassion.
By contrast, writer-director Paul Greengrass’s magnetic and
impassioned melodrama Bloody Sunday [reviews,
factual
background] a story about the 1972 massacre in Northern Ireland in which British troops
shot and killed 13 civil-rights marchers and IRA sympathizers, succeeds with
strong and shocking images of violent horror. There are no laughs of any kind
in this serious docudrama, which takes the side of the 15,000 Irish Catholic
demonstrators who turned out to make a nonviolent statement on their grievances
against the Protestant majority in the Ulster Government. Indirectly,
Greengrass captures the real-life tragedy of that day, a day that was inevitably
taken over by historical circumstances and by the institutional and structural
forces of violence.
Greengrass is able to tap into the unconscious movements
attached to other timeless civil-rights struggles from around the world. For
example, the protagonist in this movie, Ivan Cooper, is a Protestant member of
Parliament. His behavior is full of gestures and nuances associated with the
likes of Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Cinematically, the
director’s work is reminiscent of such classic political–civil-rights films as
Costa-Gavras’s Z and Gillo
Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers. All in
all, the artistry of Greengrass’s work is plain, as he is able to move his
audience beyond the bloody bodies of the 13 unarmed civilian marchers to the
rush of the blood within the institutionalized hearts and minds of the
unprepared British paratroopers who were assigned, that fateful day, to police
a situation that had already been established as volatile.
In the end,
both Bowling for Columbine and Bloody Sunday work because they capture
the interchange between the politics of violence and the violence of politics. Both
films, although very different, are nevertheless able to make the necessary
connections between the private and the public domains of violence as they
examine the everyday relationships between the interpersonal, institutional,
and structural levels of social engagement.
