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Review:
Patwarhan has made documentaries
challenging the social caste system in India
for three decades. But this film is an epic documentary of the escalation of
nuclear tensions between India
and Pakistan,
with pointers to the fallout on the rest of the world. India
resumed underground testing in 1998, on Buddha’s birthday. The filmmaker
travels city streets and countryside in both India
and Pakistan
like an underground tourist, capturing footage with a realism never seen in a
more “manufactured” Hollywood movie. In India,
he shows the damage done in the areas surrounding the uranium mines and
interviews cancer victims. In Pakistan
he displays group hatred not only of India
but of the West by Muslim. The United States
is shown as a blind and greedy conspirator, trying to make money for its
defense industry. There is one scene where Pakistani female students stage a
debate and repeat politically correct mantra about nuclear weapons for their
country, followed by off-stage discussion in which they call for peace. They
claim they say what they are supposed to say for points and grades, just like
politicians.
The movie has an intermission, and part II begins with an
excursion into the bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki to end World War
II. Truman, according to now declassified
papers discussed in the film, could easily win the war without the bomb but
really wanted to use the bomb to make a statement against the Soviet
Union. The political struggle over an honest display of the
story over the Enola Gay in the Smithsonian is shown; apparently much
controversial material has been removed.
The film ends with a silent rendition of footage from the 9/11/2001 attacks on the
World Trade
Center: both plane hits and the
collapse of the North Tower.
This film was apparently censored in India
and not allowed to be released. A screening at the YB Chavan
Centre in Mumbai was canceled by a Mr. Singhla of
the Police and Entertainment Tax Board in India.
It is not clear how the film was imported.
Could this film be professionally edited onto 35 MM, given
a digital sound track and then entered into major film festivals like
Sundance or Cannes? Let us hope
so. (It wouldn’t cost too much, maybe $2 million, to do this.) Could an American distributor then buy it
and create a public market for it and show that a film like this can actually
make money? A tempting idea for entrepreneurs.
A companion film for this could be Chris Marker’s A Grin Without a
Cat (2001, 180 Minutes), a news-footage essay documentary from France
in two parts about the demise of the traditional political left. Promoted in
art houses in the United States
as a Vietnam
era documentary, it provides a surprise with so much content about the left
in France
and, in the second half, in the Eastern European block (especially Czechoslovakia)
in the Post World War II period. The footage is in the old 4:3 format and is
often blurred, over-exposed and muffled, with a certain monotony that
suggests old-fashioned leftist propaganda. Yet much of the footage is
shocking (close-up of chest napalm burns on Vietnamese civilians), memorable
(Army basic training in 1968, when I was in it), or intellectual (the idea
the Left gradually squashed dissent within its own ranks and that this
process led to its demise by the end of the 1970s). There is a certain collectiveness to all of this politics that
seems to shield the individual from any responsibility for what happens.
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