Oscar-nominated Documentary Short Films

The Oscar-nominated short films are playing in select cities around the country. In New York I saw them at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village. Due to licensing issues, God Is the Bigger Elvis did not play in this program.

In the last decade or so documentary feature films have grown more and more to resemble narrative films. Not only are they often more professionally made than many documentaries were before, but they push a strong narrative quality that I imagine is a reflection of the need to compete at the theatrical box office with fictional films. Often they feel bloated, overblown and overlong. But what I discovered in experiencing the Oscar-nominated short films programs is that documentary short films are where really interesting work – in terms of both subject matter and style – is still being done.

Who Would Win in a Showdown: Gandhi or a Nazi?

I'm feeling political tonight.

This post at Goldblog reminded me of arguments I had with people back at the start of the Iraq War.

With the ongoing revolution in Egypt, some people are piping up with the claim that if we'd just stayed out of Iraq, the people there might have eventually risen up and overthrown Saddam without foreign intervention.

People were making that claim 8 years ago, citing the remarkable and virtually unique example of Gandhi vs. British colonials. I remember regularly making the argument then that Gandhi was lucky he was up against Britain and not, say, the Nazis. How long do you think it would have taken an SS officer to put a bullet in Gandhi's head the minute he started his passive resistance movement? Britain had a vested interest in not engaging in the wholesale slaughter of thousands of Indians. They had allies and status and trade to maintain.

Saddam hardly had any reason to worry about the International Community's image of him if he had to slaughter thousands of young protesters looking for his ouster. So the comparison is not apt.

Revolution from within would likely never have come. I'm not looking to debate once again the merits, or lack thereof, of the invasion of Iraq. But I think it's important not to live in some fantasy world in which thuggish dictators are not really as bad as our government would have us think, and patience and the will of their people will eventually drive them out.

What's happened in Egypt is incredible. And as much as Mubarak was a dictator, his was one of the least oppressive regimes in the Middle East. That doesn't make the revolution any less significant for the people of Egypt, but let's not pretend that Libya or Iran are next.

Okay, Glenn Greenwald, Why don't you actually go and visit Iraq sometime?

At the risk of venturing too far into politics on what should be a blog dealing in Mostly Movies, I thought I would point out this post from Jeffrey Goldberg in which he relates a conversation with the PM of Iraqi Kurdistan about the fact that Glenn Greenwald of Salon believes the Iraq invasion was criminally inexcusable.

The prime minister said we could invite Kurds from different political parties and media outlets to a big, public forum, and Glenn could explain to them his position that the invasion was immoral, and the Kurds could explain why they supported the invasion. (Of course, we would try to find some Kurds who opposed the invasion, and there are, indeed, some out there, to meet with Greenwald as well). We would also be able to visit Halabja, and the other towns and villages affected by Saddam's genocide, and I'm sure we could arrange meetings with other Kurdish leaders and dissidents.

I think this is such an important part of the conversation that is too often left out of the Iraq War discussion. People get so bogged down in the WMD meme that they forget that was not actually the casus belli, even if the Bush administration made a minor fiasco of making clear what the casus belli actually was. Not enough people mention the net positive result of the war which is that the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein was removed from power and the Iraqi people now have the potential to self-govern.

The poor job we've done there does not affirm the anti-war movement's personal vanity in which they asserted their moral superiority by shouting slogans like "killing is wrong", "war is bad" and "Bush is the real terrorist." Most of the anti-war movement was, like Greenwald, taking a very complex situation and trying to boil it down to moral absolutes.