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| Cologne following Allied bombing raid in 1944. |
What else to say, it's been "all 9/11, all the channels, all the time" on TV lately and of course today will be no exception. As a welcome counterpoint to this 9/11 media/political necrophilia (attaining satisfaction from the bodies of the dead), SBS1 is screening THE BOMBING OF GERMANY on FRIDAY night at 8.30pm. Although the blurb suggests that this documentary will tie itself up in liberal knots judging the morals of the industrial-scale massacres of German civilians by US bombing raids in World War II, and although it is extremely unlikely that SBS programmers have scheduled this documentary for this purpose, it will at least serve as a reminder that Al Qaeda did not invent the use of aeroplanes as a means to inflict carnage on innocents.
It's a big week for programmes about the War on Terror and not just the obvious 9/11 features. On TUESDAY night at 8.30pm SBS1 is showing WIKI SECRETS, a documentary about Bradley Manning and the mass leaking of US military secrets last year. SATURDAY night (10.15pm) has the same channel showing the film SECRETS OF STATE (2009), a thriller depicting the abuses of the French secret service, the DGSE, in its hunt for "terrorists". I'm a bit torn by this film. It depicts the kind of abuses engaged in by the French secret service, the DGSE, in its hunt for terrorists. The French anti-terrorist apparatus is shown to be highly amoral and an enemy of basic human rights, both of its own agents and also its victims. It's also got a gripping story line. But it doesn't really question the underlying motives of the French state and indeed, at the film's finish the director appears even to justify these abuses in the name of "whatever it takes". So, be warned.
And then there are two films that explore the effects of ideological conditioning similar to that to which we have been exposed in saturation doses over the past ten years. First, on WEDNESDAY night at 10.05pm, SBS1 is showing THE WAVE (2008), a German movie that explores how easily fascistic "groupthink" can operate in a classroom context. The movie is based on a real-life 1967 experiment by Californian teacher Ron Jones who got students to role-play a microcosm of a fascist state in class over several days before having to cancel the experiment abruptly as it got completely out of hand. More on this at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave. The same totalitarian conformism is also evident in Danish film DELIVER US FROM EVIL (2009) on SATURDAY night on SBS2 at 9.30pm. A small-town neo-Nazi successfully blames a refugee for the death of an elderly resident and mobilises the wrath of the townsfolk against him.
Finally, for something completely different, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) is showing on ABC2 on SATURDAY night at 8.30pm. A remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954), it's lighter in tone and considerably shorter but doesn't suffer much in being so. A Western, in which seven unlikely characters all operating with mixed and usually quite selfish motives band together to save a town. Fair doses of cool humour and glimpses of human frailty amongst the tough guys keep it humming along. I suppose if you look at it critically you could say that it has a liberal imperialist tone to it (terrorised Mexican villagers ask an American gunslinger to save them from a heinous bandit when in fact the main danger Mexicans faced was the US itself which stole one third of their land mass in the 19th century) but I'm willing to put this aside in favour of its many virtues.
Not a vintage week then, by any means, but some stuff worth catching amidst all the 9/11 militaristic tub-thumping.
