Control Room
From Jehane Noujaim, best known for her work on the tech boom documentary Startup.com comes Control Room, an absolutely riveting look inside the al-Jazeera network from the beginning of the Iraq War to the toppling of Saddam’s statue. As well as providing a great view behind the scenes of wartime news coverage, Control Room tackles how the United States manages its image in the Arab world, and even more complicated questions of how news media have the power to shape public perceptions.
All of that sounds like a recipe for a very boring film, but there isn’t a dull moment in Control Room, thanks mainly to the individuals it follows around the media headquarters in Qatar. Nouhaim has said that she sought “surprising, engaging, charismatic, complex people” and indeed, even if they weren’t real people involved in a real war, the “characters” in this film would still be compelling.
Interviews with Sameer Khader, a senior producer for al-Jazeera, appear throughout. Straight out of central casting both as an Arab and as a TV producer, Khader cynically extolls the importance of propaganda in war, and comments that he’d take a job with FOX News if they offered. Although Khader scorns the idea of objectivity, we see him berating a subordinate for arranging a live interview with Jeffrey Steinberg: “just a crazy activist…. he was just against America.”
Hassan Ibrahim, a journalist with al-Jazeera, is another exercise in contradictions. As the war goes on, Ibrahim grows more bitterly sarcastic towards the United States; bombs fall on Iraq and he mutters “democracy” under his breath. But all this resentment doesn’t stop him from expressing “absolute confidence in the U.S. Constitution and the U.S. people.”
Across the great divide, we also spend time with Josh Rushing, a Lieutenant in the US Marines working as an information officer at CENTCOM. Although Rushing makes the American case for war wholeheartedly, he craves dialogue with the other side, apparently spending a lot of time sparring with Ibrahim. Footage of American and Iraqi casualties, he says, “makes me hate war.”
Salon.com has reported that, following the film’s release, Rushing was ordered not to speak to the press again, and that he is now attempting to leave the Marine Corps. I agree totally with Noujaim’s own reaction: “"The smartest thing the Marine Corps could do right now is to have him as their spokesperson…. He’s someone who blasted apart all of my stereotypes about the military; he’s somebody who, on a daily basis, interacted with Arab reporters – he was on both sides – and he’s somebody with a great deal of useful insight into what was going on. I don’t understand it.”
At the opening of Control Room, George W. Bush tells the Iraq people (translated into Arabic and aired live on al-Jazeera), “If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you…. In any conflict, your fate will depend on your action…. And it will be no defense to say, ‘I was just following orders.’” But later in the film, American soldiers taken prisoner by Iraqi forces use that very defense, in interviews controversially aired by al-Jazeera. The terrified American soldiers are sympathetic characters, but the juxtaposition of their words with Bush’s shows that this war was nowhere near as simple as some on either side would have it.
The toppling of Saddam’s statue gets special attention from this film. Al-Jazeera staff are initially astounded by the spectacle, but soon begin to question its veracity. “I know an Iraqi accent when I hear one", scoffs Khader at the supposedly spontaneous crowd. “Did he just happen to have the old Iraqi flag in his pocket, thirteen years later?” asks engineer Deema Khatib.
Film Comment labeled Control Room “virtually a recruiting film for al-Jazeera,” an epithet my favorite critic, Sam Adams, called “preposterous“, but I’m not so sure. Although the film dwells on the death of reporter Tariq Ayoub in the US bombing of Baghdad, I still thought the network came out looking like a pretty damn exciting place to work. Morally, however, the film doesn’t take any side - other than maybe Bush and Rumsfeld, no one comes out unsympathetic. This treatment of everyone as a human being is what makes Control Room, although it can’t avoid being overshadowed by that other Iraq war documentary, possibly the best documentary of 2004.