I sat down the other night to watch Mai Masri's film Frontiers of Dreams and Fears. It was onvideotape; like most of her remarkable work about the Palestinians, ten films in all, it has not been shown inthe cinema or on television in this country. From Shatila refugee camp in Beirut and Dheisha camp inBethlehem, the film tells the story of two refugee girls and their journey to the chain-link fence thatdivides their homeland and separates them from each other. It is a rare glimpse of the truth behind therelentless news from Palestine.
I watched it on the night the Oscars were shown, and during pauses in the video, images of Hollywoodintervened: unctuous and jingoistic actors, and clips from blockbusting money machines that are the exactopposite of Mai Masri's truth. Perhaps the Oscars seem a harmless circus: until you stop and think of whatthey represent. David Puttnam, the Oscar-winning producer, raised this question in the Guardian recently. Hedescribed the failure of popular cinema to reach out to the "millions of young people [who] are growingup in refugee camps" and "the potential for a devastating explosion". He added: "If we [inthe west] simply become manufacturers of films which rely on technology, special effects, emotional simplicityand so on to portray the world, then I fear that the dislocation between mainstream cinema and any perceptiblereality will simply become too great - with consequences which will affect us all."
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The dislocation is now so great that the cultural propaganda that was always Hollywood accounts for morethan 80 per cent of the films seen in Britain and many other countries. The power of their message about"the American way of life" is such that it seems we are back to the post-Second World War era whenthe American business establishment promoted a paranoia about enemies within and abroad.
Foreigners fell neatly into categories of worthy or unworthy: for America or against America. In Hollywood,history was reduced to screen "epics" such as Exodus, in which worthy (Jewish) refugeessettled in the Holy Land and unworthy Palestinians, made refugees in their own land, were invisible. Thesedispossessed people are now portrayed in American action movies, along with other Muslims, as terrorists.Following the Vietnam war, in which around five million Vietnamese were killed during the American invasion,and their land was destroyed and poisoned by American weapons of mass destruction, Hollywood came to therescue with a string of Rambo-and-angst films that invited the audience to pity the invader. These filmsprovided a cultural purgative that helped clear the way for America to mount other Vietnams - in El Salvador,Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Somalia and elsewhere. The current "war on terrorism" is underpinnedby the same Hollywood caricatures. Films like Black Hawk Down, which promotes a mendacious version ofAmerica's killing spree in Somalia, act as cultural "softeners" before the bombing starts again forreal.
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Even in finely crafted films like The Deer Hunter and Platoon that look as if they mightbreak ranks, there is an implicit oath of loyalty to imperial culture. This was true of Three Kings, amovie that seemed to take issue with the Gulf war, but instead produced a familiar "bad apple" tale,exonerating the militarism that is now rampant. So dominant is Hollywood in our lives, and so collusive areits camp-following critics, that the films that ought to have been made are unmentionable. Name the mainstreammovies that have shone light on to the vast shadow thrown by the American secret state, and the mayhem forwhich it is responsible. I can think of only a few: Costa-Gavras's Missing, which was about thedestruction of the elected government in Chile by General Pinochet's puppet masters in Washington, and OliverStone's Salvador, which made the connection between Reagan's Washington and El Salvador's death squads.Both these films were quirks of the system, funded with great difficulty and, in the case of Missing, doggedby vengeful court actions.
The slaughter of up to 8,000 urban poor in George Bush Sr's attack on Panama in 1990 would make a fineaction movie. And why not a sequel to Black Hawk Down, this time with the 8,000-10,000 Somali dead (aCIA estimate) who were airbrushed from the original? Or how about a David and Goliath epic set in modernPalestine, with young Palestinians facing down American tanks and warplanes operated by Israelis?
"The appalling images of [11 September] had all the resonance of a contemporary Hollywood movie . .." wrote David Puttnam. "The temptation to try to comprehend these images in cinematic terms was atestament to the power of film. But the analogy felt entirely inadequate . . ." That may be true if yourule out film-making that allows us to comprehend why 11 September happened. The title of such a movie couldbe Operation Cyclone, the code name the CIA used when it set up an Islamic terrorist organisation in1979 on the secret order of President Jimmy Carter. Funded by $4bn of American taxpayers' money, the tutors ofOperation Cyclone trained terrorists at camps in Pakistan and in Virginia, and recruited them at an Islamiccollege in Brooklyn, New York, within sight of the fated twin towers. Indeed, the terrible spectacle of 11September could be the final sequence, with the patriotic Bruce Willis playing George W Bush.
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(John Pilger's new book, The New Rulers of the World, will be published next month by Verso.Taken from Pilger's Site)
