A British Attempt to Mimic Hollywood War Movies with a Pretentious Humanitarian Flavor
Dr. Ibrahim Alloush
A humanist perspective theoretically encompasses a wider scope than a nationalist dimension. However, when the humanitarian perspective becomes a cover for humanizing the invader in Iraq or Palestine independently of politics, it changes into an arrogant, orientalist mechanism of reducing the Arab cause to a form of shallow humanitarian advocacy at best, and political misguidance based on conflation of henchman and victim at worst.
The Hussain Cultural Center in Ras Al-Ayn in Amman, Jordan, displayed the movie The Battle For Haditha, by British director Nicholas Broomfield on the evening of Saturday, December 15, 2007. The movie had not yet been released in North America and Europe, with the exception of Spain which showed the movie on December 14, 2007, according to the various websites. The movie will not be released in France and Britain until February 2008. Various film festivals showed the movie in Toronto, Canada; London and San Sebastian, Spain, where it won the Silver Shell award.
The Hussain Cultural Center played the movie (without Arabic translation) on December 15, 2007, before its official release in theatres internationally, because it was filmed in Jarash, Jordan. Hence, the director Nick Broomfield and a number of actors were available at the Hussain Cultural Center where Broomfield spoke, thanking Jordan.
Nick Broomfield gained widespread fame as a documentary film director. He established this particular model in filmmaking, which is taught in colleges and schools of theatre. Some of the most famous documentary film directors subscribe to this filmmaking model, including Michael Moore, Louis Theroux, and Morgan Spurlock. The Broomfield school of thought refuses to treat a documentary as a cold reflection of reality. Rather, it aims to convey the filmmaker’s point of view, considering that reality is subjective and malleable according to various interpretations. Nick Broomfield also introduced to documentary filmmaking the idea of taking the audience behind the scenes to expose its creation process, including failed attempts at interviews or dead ends or even showing the director and photographer’s faces and movements. Michael Moore’s movies typically exemplify these film strategies.
However, The Battle For Haditha, is not a documentary movie. Instead, it is the second non-documentary film by Nick Broomfield, after Ghosts. The Battle For Haditha has no written script, only a general plan for the viewer. By keeping the scenes open to likely possibilities, The Battle For Haditha seeks to construct a dramatic plot around the Marines’ massacre of Iraqi civilians in Haditha on November 19, 2005. The background of this massacre was the killing of one of the Marines and the wounding of two others by an explosive that targeted their convoy. This compelled their cohorts to barge into adjacent houses and slaughter 24 innocent Iraqi civilians, among them women and children who were killed in their own houses. The story surfaced several months later, and American Forces reluctantly pressed charges against four of the Marines for committing the massacre. The most serious charge of first degree murder was dropped from all defendants in spite of the fact that the trials are still ongoing as of the date of this writing.
Nick Broomfield borrowed from the documentary movie tradition to his dramatic movies so they seem more realistic. Specifically, he uses more dialogue scenes than battle scenes, which is the usual standard for war movies. His actors are largely unknown, and some were Iraqi citizens who had fled to Jordan from Haditha. Broomfield assigned the protagonist roles to actual Marines who had fought in Iraq, some of whom were present at the Hussain Cultural Center, which gave the dramatic movie another realistic touch of chaos and spontaneity.
The movie's politically naive and “humanitarian” message, which is suspicious if we look beyond supposed good intentions, is delivered on three different wavelengths simultaneously. The movie presents perspectives of three groups 1) the Marines in Iraq; 2) the Iraqi civilians in Haditha; 3) the resistance or “terrorists”. In each of the three, Nick Broomfield attempts to present the scene through the prism of the particular beholder.
Marines in Iraq: according to Broomfield, the Marines are merely victims. While this is the most dangerous message in the movie, it fits in perfectly with the left liberal current, especially in the United States, which carries a contradictory slogan about the war on Iraq, such as “Oppose the war, support the troops and bring them home!”
In reality, Nick Broomfield gives maximum exposure to “the Marines’ suffering”, the victims of politicians and political decisions who are targeted at all times. The Marines are stressed because they are subject to the politicians’ abandonment and crumbs of pity if they resign from the military due to injury from battle. So they become out of control and end up committing massacres, but that should be understandable because they feel guilty afterwards and they even incur psychological problems and sometimes they cry! So they are the victims, not the enemies! The most pathetic scene in the movie is perhaps the last one in which the commander of the battalion that committed the massacre holds an Iraqi girl’s hand and walks towards the light, exiting the dark house, after he and his buddies killed her entire family!
We cannot accept these false messages based on propaganda under the excuse that the director made the movie for a Western audience. The movie treats an Arab cause and should therefore be evaluated by Arab standards primarily. A Western, not an Arab audience needs understanding of that cause.
Some elements in the West attacked Nick Broomfield’s movie. There is an entire website devoted to criticism of the movie. It contains letters from American current and ex-soldiers in Iraq who didn’t like the movie’s dramatic spin which “presumes” that a massacre did in fact take place in Haditha. The plot, according to this website, should have explored whether or not soldiers committed a massacre, especially since military courts, known as Section 32, have not yet found any of the defendants guilty!
Haditha’s Residents: Haditha’s residents are victims of the resistance who threaten them with death if they do not cooperate, and victims of the Marines who commit massacres and attacks. For example, the first part of the movie shows the corpse of an English language teacher who the main resistance fighter says was killed by al-Qaeda. He does not mention reasons for his death, which gives the implication that he was killed only because he knows English. In addition, the Iraqi people are portrayed as cooperating with the resistance because of fear only, not patriotism or religion or the desire to resist the occupation. The movie also portrays the Iraqi people as facing the Marines’ attacks, arrest and arbitrary killing in the streets as victims of the Jihadist ideology embodied by Al-Qaeda or the sheikh whom Haditha residents consult. They are victims not only literally, but also victims of a specific kind of political or religious discourse.
After the massacre we see women at a funeral calling on Arab and European countries to find a solution to Iraq’s problems! The youth, on the other hand, were victims of the sheikh’s (a spiritual leader) speeches on the necessity of resistance and revenge. It is noteworthy here that according to a western audience’s perspective, the Iraqi resistance seems as a reaction to Marines’ mistakes. The movie implicitly requests an understanding of this interpretation. But in reality, the resistance is not the result of errors or miscalculations. To portray it in such terms is incorrect. Instead, resistance is a legitimate right and a duty that stems from the occupier’s very existence, even if the occupier does not commit a single mistake.
The Resistance: there are two types of resistance. The first type is the main resistance fighter, who is an Iraqi ex-officer, Ahmad, who plants an explosive that destroys the Marines’ convoy. Ahmad is a young Iraqi man whom he successfully recruits to the resistance due to his obsession with the war movies he sells and rents. The movie presents Ahmad as an ex-soldier entering old age who drinks alcohol and receives five hundred dollars in return for planting the explosive. He decides to resist only after Paul Bremer, the US occupation’s administrator, dissolves the Iraqi army. Later, Ahmad regrets planting the explosive after seeing that it led to the civilians’ massacre. Ahmad also introduces us to the second type of resistance fighter, “the ones who killed the English teacher.” This second type gives Ahmad five hundred dollars to plant the explosive “as a material reward, not to mention the reward in the hereafter,” then they threaten to harm him if he drinks! At this point, the ideologically-driven resistance fighter becomes the Iraqi counterpart to the Western politicians who decided to wage the war. Both Iraqi and Western decision-makers use other bodies to advance their respective agendas. The movie portrays Haditha’s leader, Mr. Nabil Kuni, as a malicious character who watches the massacre and orders to videotape it so he can use it for propaganda purposes.
Undeniably, the movie’s message is tricky: it is in an effort to exonerate the Marines in Iraq and the non-ideological resistance; present the residents as aimless barn animals ready for slaughter; and to indict major politicians in the West and ideologists in the East. Ultimately, it is a liberal message and stems from lack of comprehension of the ongoing battle between the occupation and the resistance on Iraq’s soil.
It is naturally difficult for those who do not understand our land, culture and heritage and its language to understand the essence of its ongoing battles. I attempted to draw the director’s attention to that fact after the movie ended: “Mr. Broomfield, in the scene where the Marines’ battalion enters Haditha (Jarash), you forgot to remove from the clip a Jordanian government sign that appeared behind them that said “The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan”!
The director was very surprised!!
Dr. Ibrahim Alloush
A humanist perspective theoretically encompasses a wider scope than a nationalist dimension. However, when the humanitarian perspective becomes a cover for humanizing the invader in Iraq or Palestine independently of politics, it changes into an arrogant, orientalist mechanism of reducing the Arab cause to a form of shallow humanitarian advocacy at best, and political misguidance based on conflation of henchman and victim at worst.
The Hussain Cultural Center in Ras Al-Ayn in Amman, Jordan, displayed the movie The Battle For Haditha, by British director Nicholas Broomfield on the evening of Saturday, December 15, 2007. The movie had not yet been released in North America and Europe, with the exception of Spain which showed the movie on December 14, 2007, according to the various websites. The movie will not be released in France and Britain until February 2008. Various film festivals showed the movie in Toronto, Canada; London and San Sebastian, Spain, where it won the Silver Shell award.
The Hussain Cultural Center played the movie (without Arabic translation) on December 15, 2007, before its official release in theatres internationally, because it was filmed in Jarash, Jordan. Hence, the director Nick Broomfield and a number of actors were available at the Hussain Cultural Center where Broomfield spoke, thanking Jordan.
Nick Broomfield gained widespread fame as a documentary film director. He established this particular model in filmmaking, which is taught in colleges and schools of theatre. Some of the most famous documentary film directors subscribe to this filmmaking model, including Michael Moore, Louis Theroux, and Morgan Spurlock. The Broomfield school of thought refuses to treat a documentary as a cold reflection of reality. Rather, it aims to convey the filmmaker’s point of view, considering that reality is subjective and malleable according to various interpretations. Nick Broomfield also introduced to documentary filmmaking the idea of taking the audience behind the scenes to expose its creation process, including failed attempts at interviews or dead ends or even showing the director and photographer’s faces and movements. Michael Moore’s movies typically exemplify these film strategies.
However, The Battle For Haditha, is not a documentary movie. Instead, it is the second non-documentary film by Nick Broomfield, after Ghosts. The Battle For Haditha has no written script, only a general plan for the viewer. By keeping the scenes open to likely possibilities, The Battle For Haditha seeks to construct a dramatic plot around the Marines’ massacre of Iraqi civilians in Haditha on November 19, 2005. The background of this massacre was the killing of one of the Marines and the wounding of two others by an explosive that targeted their convoy. This compelled their cohorts to barge into adjacent houses and slaughter 24 innocent Iraqi civilians, among them women and children who were killed in their own houses. The story surfaced several months later, and American Forces reluctantly pressed charges against four of the Marines for committing the massacre. The most serious charge of first degree murder was dropped from all defendants in spite of the fact that the trials are still ongoing as of the date of this writing.
Nick Broomfield borrowed from the documentary movie tradition to his dramatic movies so they seem more realistic. Specifically, he uses more dialogue scenes than battle scenes, which is the usual standard for war movies. His actors are largely unknown, and some were Iraqi citizens who had fled to Jordan from Haditha. Broomfield assigned the protagonist roles to actual Marines who had fought in Iraq, some of whom were present at the Hussain Cultural Center, which gave the dramatic movie another realistic touch of chaos and spontaneity.
The movie's politically naive and “humanitarian” message, which is suspicious if we look beyond supposed good intentions, is delivered on three different wavelengths simultaneously. The movie presents perspectives of three groups 1) the Marines in Iraq; 2) the Iraqi civilians in Haditha; 3) the resistance or “terrorists”. In each of the three, Nick Broomfield attempts to present the scene through the prism of the particular beholder.
Marines in Iraq: according to Broomfield, the Marines are merely victims. While this is the most dangerous message in the movie, it fits in perfectly with the left liberal current, especially in the United States, which carries a contradictory slogan about the war on Iraq, such as “Oppose the war, support the troops and bring them home!”
In reality, Nick Broomfield gives maximum exposure to “the Marines’ suffering”, the victims of politicians and political decisions who are targeted at all times. The Marines are stressed because they are subject to the politicians’ abandonment and crumbs of pity if they resign from the military due to injury from battle. So they become out of control and end up committing massacres, but that should be understandable because they feel guilty afterwards and they even incur psychological problems and sometimes they cry! So they are the victims, not the enemies! The most pathetic scene in the movie is perhaps the last one in which the commander of the battalion that committed the massacre holds an Iraqi girl’s hand and walks towards the light, exiting the dark house, after he and his buddies killed her entire family!
We cannot accept these false messages based on propaganda under the excuse that the director made the movie for a Western audience. The movie treats an Arab cause and should therefore be evaluated by Arab standards primarily. A Western, not an Arab audience needs understanding of that cause.
Some elements in the West attacked Nick Broomfield’s movie. There is an entire website devoted to criticism of the movie. It contains letters from American current and ex-soldiers in Iraq who didn’t like the movie’s dramatic spin which “presumes” that a massacre did in fact take place in Haditha. The plot, according to this website, should have explored whether or not soldiers committed a massacre, especially since military courts, known as Section 32, have not yet found any of the defendants guilty!
Haditha’s Residents: Haditha’s residents are victims of the resistance who threaten them with death if they do not cooperate, and victims of the Marines who commit massacres and attacks. For example, the first part of the movie shows the corpse of an English language teacher who the main resistance fighter says was killed by al-Qaeda. He does not mention reasons for his death, which gives the implication that he was killed only because he knows English. In addition, the Iraqi people are portrayed as cooperating with the resistance because of fear only, not patriotism or religion or the desire to resist the occupation. The movie also portrays the Iraqi people as facing the Marines’ attacks, arrest and arbitrary killing in the streets as victims of the Jihadist ideology embodied by Al-Qaeda or the sheikh whom Haditha residents consult. They are victims not only literally, but also victims of a specific kind of political or religious discourse.
After the massacre we see women at a funeral calling on Arab and European countries to find a solution to Iraq’s problems! The youth, on the other hand, were victims of the sheikh’s (a spiritual leader) speeches on the necessity of resistance and revenge. It is noteworthy here that according to a western audience’s perspective, the Iraqi resistance seems as a reaction to Marines’ mistakes. The movie implicitly requests an understanding of this interpretation. But in reality, the resistance is not the result of errors or miscalculations. To portray it in such terms is incorrect. Instead, resistance is a legitimate right and a duty that stems from the occupier’s very existence, even if the occupier does not commit a single mistake.
The Resistance: there are two types of resistance. The first type is the main resistance fighter, who is an Iraqi ex-officer, Ahmad, who plants an explosive that destroys the Marines’ convoy. Ahmad is a young Iraqi man whom he successfully recruits to the resistance due to his obsession with the war movies he sells and rents. The movie presents Ahmad as an ex-soldier entering old age who drinks alcohol and receives five hundred dollars in return for planting the explosive. He decides to resist only after Paul Bremer, the US occupation’s administrator, dissolves the Iraqi army. Later, Ahmad regrets planting the explosive after seeing that it led to the civilians’ massacre. Ahmad also introduces us to the second type of resistance fighter, “the ones who killed the English teacher.” This second type gives Ahmad five hundred dollars to plant the explosive “as a material reward, not to mention the reward in the hereafter,” then they threaten to harm him if he drinks! At this point, the ideologically-driven resistance fighter becomes the Iraqi counterpart to the Western politicians who decided to wage the war. Both Iraqi and Western decision-makers use other bodies to advance their respective agendas. The movie portrays Haditha’s leader, Mr. Nabil Kuni, as a malicious character who watches the massacre and orders to videotape it so he can use it for propaganda purposes.
Undeniably, the movie’s message is tricky: it is in an effort to exonerate the Marines in Iraq and the non-ideological resistance; present the residents as aimless barn animals ready for slaughter; and to indict major politicians in the West and ideologists in the East. Ultimately, it is a liberal message and stems from lack of comprehension of the ongoing battle between the occupation and the resistance on Iraq’s soil.
It is naturally difficult for those who do not understand our land, culture and heritage and its language to understand the essence of its ongoing battles. I attempted to draw the director’s attention to that fact after the movie ended: “Mr. Broomfield, in the scene where the Marines’ battalion enters Haditha (Jarash), you forgot to remove from the clip a Jordanian government sign that appeared behind them that said “The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan”!
The director was very surprised!!
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق