Daily Times - Cinema as agitprop —Rashed Rahman Pakistan

Daily Times - Site Edition: "The film shows the neo-cons around Bush treating 9/11 as their heaven-sent opportunity to implement long cherished plans to invade and occupy Iraq and control its oil wealth

Michael Moore is a maverick as far as the Bush administration is concerned, and a hero for dissident opinion in the US and abroad. With his first, immensely successful, documentary film Bowling for Columbine, in which he exposed the US - gun culture, Moore announced his arrival with a bang.

Now, with his latest offering Fahrenheit 9/11 breaking box office records in the US and being eagerly sought (even in pirated versions) the world over, Michael Moore has established himself as the guru of political documentary film-making.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is currently the top box office movie in the US, despite initial fears that it may never see the light of day after Disney - for fear of offending the White House - asked its subsidiary Miramax to drop it. The largest grossing documentary film ever, it has surpassed everyone's expectations of public response - including those of the director.

The film is a devastating expose of George W Bush's presidency. Starting with his controversial ascent to the White House, courtesy the US Supreme Court, it goes on to show the Bush presidential style in the nine months before September 11, 2001. During this period, the president was on vacation 46 per cent of the time. The film shows that serious warnings by Bush's security and intelligence experts about an attack on US soil by Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda were totally ignored by the president.

The film shows the neo-cons around Bush treating 9/11 as their heaven-sent opportunity to implement long cherished plans to invade and occupy Iraq and control its oil wealth. From day one, this cabal worked feverishly to establish Saddam Hussein’s guilt for 9/11. Having failed to achieve that, they started spinning stories about links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. These stories came to nothing (like the search for WMD in Iraq) as US intelligence agencies were unable to back these with any substantive proof.

As a film, Fahrenheit 9/11 is compelling. As cinema, it promises to set a new trend in documentary film-making, one that sees art and film at the service of truth, no matter how unpalatable. It could well be the harbinger of a new genre of cinema, one that employs the techniques of traditional agitprop to the contemporary issues."


Rashed Rahman