Omar Amiralay and Michael Moore
The documentary camera and the quest for truth
The Assad regime never considered any Syrian movie director as its enemy like it did with Omar Amiralay (1944-2011), and the ‘American Right Wing’, represented by the New Conservative Republicans, never hated an American movie director as it hated Michael Moore. Looking at the first one as an enemy and hating the second one are in fact medals on the chests of both directors which honor their quests for truth. The second factor that gathers these two geniuses is the camera of the documentary cinema.
As the Syrian people have been traumatized by the ghoulish Assad regime since 1970, we can also say that the regime itself has been traumatized since then by solid and daring opponents. Omar Amiralay, without any doubt, was at the top of their list. The man obviously chose to oppose the regime from behind his documentary camera where he videotaped the defects of the regime, unveiling its lies to the Syrians, the Arabs and beyond. He chose that peaceful path because he believed that path would let him keep going with his task longer than if he chose to carry arms against the regime or oppose it openly. All who opposed the regime that way ended either in the graves or in the jails and dead or jailed people can’t oppose from those two locations. The luckier people who dared to oppose the regime openly were those who made it outside Syria, but where the margin of opposition is limited.
Here in particular, the brightness of Amiralay can be defined; he had to expose one of the most sectarian and brutal regimes in modern times, while he is sitting in its lap and under its eyes and ears without being hurt. One of the regime security officers once talked angrily about him using the popular proverb “He is sitting in our lap and plucking our beard”. So his skill was to say what he wants to say with his camera, but at the same time, to keep walking the fine line that goes in parallel with notorious regime ‘Red Lines’ without crossing them. His job was like someone who has to move with his camera in a field full of poisonous snakes and serpents, one wrong move and he will earn the title of ‘Deceased’.
Omar graduated from the Cinema Institute in Paris 1968 and never denied his adaption to the French left ideology. But he, at the same time, never incited in any of his films to practice the revolutionary valiance or to carry arms. He was sure that the Assad regime was paranormal and would go away sooner or later. He, therefore, decided that the best thing the documentary cinema could do until then was to keep reminding the people that the miserable life they were suffering from, especially in the country side, was not their destiny or bad luck. But it is the results of the policy of a totalitarian regime that does not care about them or their suffering. A regime that all what it cares about is robbing the country and deepening its own roots in order to oppress any rebellion against it. Omar managed to deliver that message successfully in many of his films (which were about twenty). The viewer of “The daily life in a Syrian village”, 1974, may think that he is watching a movie about the life in a village from the stone ages, not from the twentieth century.
No doubt that his best movie was the last one “A Flood the country of Baath”, 2003. It looked like, in this movie, that, he for the first time crossed one of the ‘Red Lines’ of the regime which resulted in his arrest by the political security forces known as “Al-Mukhabarat”. That arrest came right after the movie was premiered by an Arabic TV channel. He was charged with “Harming the image of the state”, especially by the title of the movie. He was released the same day by the efforts of local and foreign interventions; otherwise he might have spent the rest of his life inside Assad’s jails. The movie was great in all its sections, but the most powerful section in my opinion was that when Omar was interviewing the head of the tribe in the Euphrates “Al-Mashee” village. He lured the man to tell him in front of the camera all that he wanted to videotape. He told him that he was also the village representative in the People Assembly, and that his nephew was the principal of the only elementary school and also the head of the Baath political party branch there. The nephew’s real job was to train the young students to be like parrots by repeating the slogans of glorifying Assad all day long, while they belonged to poor families which could barely feed them. This village, As Omar introduced, was the smaller model of the bigger motherland, Syria. Wealth and authority are in the hand of one family, and the jobs are distributed according to the family, tribal and loyalty relations. Those elite enjoy exceptional benefits, while the rest of the people live under the poverty line and consume the elite’s leftover.
The job of Michael Moore was also not easy; being a socialist documentary cinema director in the country that wears the crown of world capitalism. He came from a middle class family from Michigan, where many of his family members worked for GM car makers. But in the late eighties, he started eye-witnessing the fall of his family, and thousands of other similar ones towards the poor class. It was the result of a decision made by the company to move its factories from Michael’s home town, Flint, to Mexico to take advantage of the cheep labor and save the taxes and the cost of the health insurance and work injuries here in the U.S. That action of moving the factories, by GM, left a deep scar in Michael’s heart, and let him take the issue ‘personal’. So he determined to resist it by using his skilled camera to reveal to the public the huge social destruction that decision inflicted on his family, town and state.
The first work of Michael’s 14 films was “Roger & Me” in 1989. We follow him all the time in the film while he is chasing GM Chairman “Roger Smith”, from place to place and city to city to ask him whether he is aware of huge social catastrophe he caused by moving the car factories from Flint to Mexico. He meant the catastrophe of the 40 thousand employees who lost their jobs and their 40 thousand families who lost their source of income. Michael had a hard time meeting Roger face to face, as if Roger was trying to avoid him. But when he finally managed to meet him and ask him that question, the man smiled and said that he did so for the general benefit of the country, and that the general benefit was more important than the personal one. And here we discover a common factor between the dictatorship regime, how Amiralay painted it in his movies, and the capitalist regime, how Michael painted it. Each one of these two regimes claims that it works for the benefit of the homeland and the people; meanwhile it works only, and only, for its benefit. The essential difference between both regimes is that the first one kills the people and impoverishes them, while the second one impoverishes them only.
So Michael adopted the social believes because of the agony inflected on his family, town and state, the agony that was caused by a decision made by a rich individual. Michael does not live in dreams; he knows that the elected governments in the democratic countries like the U.S. win the elections by the support of giant companies like those of the oil, military arms, insurance and others. So the elected governments have to pay back and help those companies in their businesses. He does not deny that, but he looks at it from another angle. He wants the government to help the rich by protecting the middle class on one hand and ease the pressure on the poor class on the other hand. By doing that, the government will benefit the rich in the long run. The middle class has always been, through history and around the world, the safety valve of the society and the first line of defense for the rich against the rebellion and anger of the poor. And if the middle class became part of the poor class, then that defense line is demolished, and a revolution can start at any time and inflict catastrophic damages.
That is why Michael chose to support the Democratic Party in his country. He believes the polices of that party are more realistic and closer to his solutions to keep the American society united and keep its classes in harmony with each other. He does not hide his admiration of the European and Canadian socialist experience in which he finds a solution to a lot of the social problems that face his country. Meanwhile, he believes that The Republican Party is the opposite. Especially the Ultra-Right Neo-Conservatives who snuck into the White House during the Reagan era then re-enforced their influence during the elder Bush’s administration, to completely dominate it during the time of the younger Bush. That Ultra-Right republican slice came back recently in an even more radical fringe called The Tea Party. Michael sees in all those politicians a complete contradiction with his theory for social justice. He sees the Republican Party as one whose job is only to make the rich richer without caring about the others.
No doubt that Michael’s hardest attack on the Republicans and their allies was his documentary movie “Fahrenheit 9/11” of 2004, in which he exposed the real targets of invading Iraq a year earlier. He explained in it how that war was a commercial one to benefit the gigantic companies of oil, military arms and construction at the same time, and also to politically benefit Israel, its closest ally in the area. The funny thing about this issue was that Iran, supposedly the biggest enemy of Israel and that American administration, was the biggest benefiter of that war because it placed Iraq under its sole influence. I don’t think that Michael, or any other, is against his country going to war to defend its citizens against aggression (as with WWII). But when a country goes to war for commercial or political benefits, then that is unacceptable, and that is what Michael rejected in his movie. He accused the administration of the younger Bush openly that it sent the poor Americans, who form the majority of the army, to accomplish the benefits of the rich, he even described that war as trading “Blood for Oil”. Here, Michael again, has the same vision of Omar; “Power”, after all, is in the hands of those who have the fortunes. If they don’t use it for good purposes, then they will use it to wage wars. War for them is a benefitting business and they have no problem with the bloodshed that will result as long as it is not their blood.
There is still a lot to say about the art of Omar Amiralay and Michael Moore and to compare their experience in the field of documentary cinema. But I would like to say one last thing before concluding this article which I wrote in the second memorial of Omar (February 5). No doubt that his job was much more difficult and complicated than that of Michael. Any opponent in Syria, no matter whether peaceful or not, is always under a great danger. In countries like Syria, the law and the constitution do not exist in reality, and that is why any uncalculated move from any opponent may lead to his vanishing. Obviously that is not the case in democratic countries. That is why Omar’s technique of using the camera was different from that of Michael. Since Omar couldn’t say what he wanted freely, then he had to develop exceptional skills in using his camera so it can do that job for him. That is why his camera is the real star in all his films and that is why almost all those films are silent. That is very similar to sign languages which were developed to help the mutes to say what they can not say. But since Michael can always say what he wants, where he wants, then his camera does not have to do any exceptional job other than just being a camera. That is why I carefully chose the picture of this article; Look how Omar is working in such a position as if he is trying to avoid a storm or a danger, while Michael looks like he is not going to work, but to a hunting trip.
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Translated from Arabic
Tarif Youssef-Agha
An Expatriate Syrian American Writer & Poet
Saturday January 26, 2013
Houston, Texas
http://sites.google.com/site/tarifspoetry