Hani Mustafa follows the political overtones of a recent cinematic sensation Rarely has a documentary proved as successful as Bowling for Columbine, which earned Michael Moore an Oscar for best documentary film in 2003. In recent film history, indeed, it can only be considered an exception to the rule. For documentaries have stayed by and large outside the scope of box- office interest, seldom appealing to the general audience in the way that feature films do. Likewise the success of Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore's new film, which has a compelling, potentially explosive topic, can hardly be seen as typical of the genre. Yet the film may well raise the profile of documentaries in general -- a hopefully lasting effect. Earning first prize in the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, Fahrenheit 9/11 has proved so compelling it achieved commercial success comparable to that of Hollywood hits. Some attribute this fact to the film being loaded with anti-war propaganda, arguing that it is artistic in style but not in content. Based on this point, several critics have questioned its right to one of the world's most prestigious film awards. They believe that it was in response to the marginalisation that the Cannes Film Festival suffered in 2003 as a result of Hollywood producers refusing to participate in it -- a reaction to France's opposition to the war on Iraq -- that Cannes chose to promote a film that goes against the grain of the American status quo. And yet the presence of Quentin Tarantino, a respected mainstream American filmmaker, at the head of the Cannes jury, is sufficient to counter any such charge. As to the question of whether or not the film rallies against the Bush administration, following Bowling for Columbine, Moore himself declared that he intended to make a film against Bush, followed by one targetting Tony Blair. He thus openly acknowledged the fact that this film, and also the one to follow, would have a component of propaganda. The film opens with events that take place a few months after 11 September, with the narrator recollecting the last four years as if in a dream. In the opening scenes, after it is announced that Al Gore has won the elections in Florida, the Fox News Network announces George Bush as the winner, and it is as if the next four years never happened. In the following scenes, all still before the subtitles, we see the angry reaction of voters protesting the results of the elections that brought Bush to power, with petitions presented by some congressmen calling for the ratification of the results on the grounds that many African-Americans were not allowed to vote -- petitions that were never even viewed since in the end not a single senator agreed to sign them. In this segment of the film Moore, relying on thorough research, convincingly portrays the recent political past of America as laden with conspiracy. First, the viewer realises that one of the top executives at Fox is Bush's cousin, that the governor of Florida is his brother and that there exist close ties between the supreme court judges who settled the disagreement over the Florida votes and former President Bush senior. The subtitles roll over separate shots showing members of the American administration -- George W Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Attorney- General John Ashcroft -- applying make-up and doing their hair in preparation for television interviews. The film continues, with Moore resuming his attack on Bush. According to newspaper reports, from his inauguration until the 11 September attacks, the president spent 42 percent of his time on vacation. While the attacks take place he is visiting a school, and news of the attack on the first tower fails to interrupt his schedule. After the second tower is hit -- at this point it is announced that the United States is "under attack" -- he continues to read The Pet Goat with the children for another seven minutes. Moore implies that the president's failure to react was due to the fact that there was no one at hand to tell him what to do. From this point forward the filmmaker pays much attention to the Bush family's relationship with Bin Laden and other Saudi royals. The viewer finds out that 24 members of the Bin Laden family were flown out of the United States during the ban on flying by special order from the White House, for example. Moore has a former FBI agent describe this as a big mistake, since the family of a suspect have to be interviewed after a crime. This real-life interview is followed, to rather humorous effect, by footage from 1950s detective films showing the families of alleged suspects being questioned by the police. Moore uses this technique throughout, alternating factual material with shots from a wide variety of films. In commenting on the war in Afghanistan, for example, he uses shots from Westerns, superimposing the faces of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Tony Blair on the bodies of the actors. He also presents a string of different situations, one after the other in quick succession, with Bush saying "We will smoke him out" in each case; the sentence is finally uttered by a character in a Western. As well as being humorous, this technique acts to emphasise the shallowness of the American administration's approach to crisis management. Conspiracy theory notwithstanding, some critics and audience members think racism underlies his contention that there is Saudi involvement in 9/11. Moore's intention however seems to be to expose the Bush administration's double standards, rather than to implicate Saudis. It is eagerness to underline secret American collaboration with Saudis that prompts him to include a Larry King interview with the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, in which the latter states clearly that he was privy to the transfer of the Bin Laden family outside of the US. The prince speaks of the Bin Ladens as "good people", saying that he encountered Osama only once when the latter went to thank him for persuading Americans to back the mujahidin in their struggle against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan -- conversations that hanker back to the by now well-known three-way collaboration of the Reagan administration, influential Saudi figures and Afghan mujahidin. Two more issues are brought up using similar techniques: that several members of the American administration, including George W Bush himself, are shareholders, if not employees, of oil companies; the Bush family's own company, in fact, was losing until Saudi money was pumped into it under President Bush Senior. The most telling piece of information revealed in this context is that Bush Junior had the name of a man called Bath blanked out in his service records, of which Moore just happened to have a copy. Bath was to become the financial manager of the Bin Laden family's investments in the US. Moore moves from suspense to melodrama when it comes to delineating the events leading up to the war on Iraq. In introducing the factors leading up to war Moore's wide-ranging research eventually leads to a loss of coherence, with the sequence of scenes jumping from one issue to the next. An otherwise unimportant interview between Moore and the CIA man responsible for the Al-Qaeda file assumes extraordinary importance as evidence that Bush's decision to wage war on Iraq was predetermined. The music to which American soldiers listen while stationed in Iraq -- this part of the film shows killings and break-ins perpetrated by the American army and against them -- gradually takes over the score as tragic scenes are ironically juxtaposed with Britny Spears declaring that she trusts Bush and calling on others to do so. Moore also shows the poverty of American districts in which unemployment is prevalent. Rather than receiving support from the government, young inhabitants of these neighbourhoods are used as fuel for war. This is confirmed further when Moore shadows and interviews a women who works in his birthplace (an area with a declared unemployment rate of 17 percent), who says that most of her family members were in the army and that her son is enlisted in Iraq. In a highly dramatic coincidence, that selfsame son dies in Karbala when his Black Hawk aircraft falls. The viewer sees the mother crying before the White House. Moore ends the film as he started it with shots of administration members removing their microphones, having given their television interviews, subtly implying that it is time for them to leave for good. Using such a cyclical mechanism and other methods, the film demonstrates the principle that cinema should not be classified into documentaries and feature films but rather into short and full-length features. It also opens the door to general-public screenings of documentaries whether in the US or elsewhere. Control Room, a film by the Egyptian- American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim that looks at the war in Iraq through the control room of the Al- Jazeera Channel in Doha, Qatar, is a case in point. Though less of a hit, it was commercially screened at the same time as Moore's film.
