Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning

2 Evidence

36 2 Evidence Documentary films and videos do not simply represent sociohistorical experience; they have to convince us that what we see on screen did happen. How do they do this? What kinds of evidence do they use to persuade us to accept them as truthful and accurate? Why do we believe this evidence? These are easy and important questions to pose but tough ones to answer. Jehane Noujaim’s 2004 documentary Control Room offers a powerful attempt to engage these questions. It looks at the way the American-led invasion of Iraq was represented by al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite channel. The war itself serves as the underlying context of the documentary. But the real subject of the film is the media battle that was fought alongside the military conflict. In March 2003, just before the war started, the filmmakers began following television reporters and producers from al-Jazeera. As the military campaign unfolds on the screen, we see the journalists working and watch their reactions to the bombing of Iraq. Control Room makes us think about the way the news media handle information , how evidence is used by media producers, and what consequences their choices may have. It asks us to compare factual information presented by the Arab news channel with material gathered by Western TV channels. Watching the film, we realize that “evidence” of the same event can have significantly different meanings when seen from dissimilar sides of the political spectrum. Noujaim’s documentary, too, involves an effort to gather and present evidence, Evidence 37 and it, too, uses that evidence to support a particular point of view, a more positive opinion of al-Jazeera than Western audiences might have expected in 2004. Control Room questions managers, producers, and reporters (including indepth interviews with senior producer Samir Khader and correspondent Hassan Ibrahim) about what al-Jazeera’s journalistic goals are. We also see and hear correspondents from major U.S. news outlets, a member of the U.S. State Department , and even a U.S. marine spokesperson expressing respect for al-Jazeera. But most importantly, we see and hear some of al-Jazeera’s footage from the war, much of which contradicts the information we get from press conferences with U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Vincent Brooks. For instance , Noujaim shows us images of hospitalized bloodied children inserted in the middle of a speech in which Rumsfeld states that “al-Jazeera has a pattern of playing propaganda over and over and over again. . . . When there is a bomb that goes down, they grab some children and women and pretend that the bomb hit women and children. . . . We are dealing with people who are perfectly willing to lie to the world to attempt to further their case.” The sequence asks us to question what we may have come to take for granted: the information conveyed by top U.S. officials in charge of the war. It also asks us to question why some evidence does not appear in the U.S. media, and if that omission is not taking a position on the war. Some of the most potent evidence is the photographic substantiation of an event that the filmmakers could not have anticipated. The morning of April 8, U.S. missiles fired on the Baghdad office of al-Jazeera, killing a correspondent, Tarek Ayyoub, on the rooftop of the building. We hear Samir Khader explaining that he had received a call from Baghdad saying that there was air fire near their office. Next we see Ayyoub with a helmet on his head, dressed in a bulletproof vest, huddled by the sandbagged perimeter of the roof. Soon we hear and see a plane flying nose down, in attack formation, followed by missiles falling from the fuselage into the sky. A CNN correspondent reports on the day’s events: the strike against alJazeera , one against Abu Dhabi Television, and a shot fired at the Palestine Hotel where many journalists were housed. Later that day, at a press conference, we hear Ayyoub’s wife via telephone, emotionally telling the audience, “My husband died trying to bring the truth to the world,” entreating them to give an honest account of the incident. And we see the tears of the journalists assembled. Whethertheypresentawell-reasonedargumentorofferenduringcomplexities over which to puzzle, all documentaries take “facts” or “actuality” and weave them into a coherent whole. The difference between a point of view that is questionable [18.118.7.85] Project MUSE...