The French director Jean-Luc Godard called unedited film "truth at 24 frames per second."
But is it?
What's the perception if, for example, you've only photographed the moments at which a long-provoked boy is caught finally hitting back⢠Or what if you shoot what we might call "the whole story," as if that were ever possible, and then edit it to show only the hitting backâ¢
That uncertainly is reflected in "Control Room," which identifies itself as a documentary and strives for a kind of quasi-objectivity but winds up being propaganda. As if it hadn't expected to be.
Its filmmaker is (Ms.) Jehane Noujaim, who made "Startup.com" (2001), an interesting look at a thriving dot-com company that collapsed.
Noujaim was born and raised in Egypt before moving to the States.
As the Iraqi war begins in the background, her "Control Room" concentrates on the staff of the Qatar-based Arab satellite news channel Al Jazeera, which President George W. Bush called the mouthpiece of Osama bin Laden.
The film shows Al Jazeera, which dates to 1996, representing events in Iraq differently from reports emanating from CentCom, the U.S. military's central command post about 20 miles away.
The contrasts might seem more telling on their own and more balanced -- propaganda from one side, then from another -- were an anti-U.S. bias, or to put a finer point on it, anti-Bush bias, not exhibited up front and maintained throughout.
The CentCom briefings by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and U.S. military officers have the rigid formality of a party line, and, in the way they're edited and alternated with other footage, an air of the impersonal, the misleading, the incorrect.
Watch it at an objective distance, observing the manipulation of viewpoint, and "Control Room" can be more enlightening than it intends.
Watch also how, one after another, the producers and reporters at Al Jazeera are presented as bastions of objectivity, reason and incredulity, even as senior producer Sameer (sometimes spelled Samir) Khadar admits, "If I'm offered a job at Fox News I'll take it."
The two participants who get the most screen time are Marine Lt. Josh Rushing, who is the primary American press liaison based at CentCom (or was then), and Al Jazeera reporter Hassan Ibrahim.
Unquestionably, Ibrahim is more familiar with the country and its complex political and military underpinnings.
Rushing is a virtual poster boy for the U.S. military -- earnest, intelligent, articulate and eager to understand and impart.
Noujaim delights in observing as the condescension-prone Ibrahim admonishes Rushing. The camera catches Rushing at moments of revelation. No one else has an epiphanyâ¢
A lot happens during the period of filming: The Jessica Lynch story breaks, and the U.S. Army irritates the media by withholding the soon widely disseminated deck of "Most Wanted" playing cards.
I watched "Control Room" the way I watch network news or, on occasion, "60 Minutes," wondering how much farther we can get from what we once thought of as balanced perspective. Additional Information:
Details
'Control Room'Director : Jehane Noujaim
MPAA rating : Unrated but R in nature for brief strong language and war images
Now playing : Squirrel Hill Theater; Denis in Mt. Lebanon
