The Milgram Experiment remains one of the most interesting (and controversial) psychological experiments of the 20th Century. Conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1961, the experiment was designed to test whether or not ordinary people were willing to administer a series of increasingly severe electric shocks on the orders of a figure of authority to a test subject who, in reality, was an actor pretending to be electrocuted. Astonishingly, 65% of all participants were willing to do so. Some great footage here.

Update: the old object to the video I linked to was removed from You Tube, so I’ve added in the new one.

I really love film, and for the last few years I’ve been getting more and more interested in watching documentaries. While I still think you can’t beat passing a few hours with some great storytelling, these documentaries have really inspired me to think more deeply about the world we live in. So, in no particular order:

1. The Corporation

Directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, and written by Joel Bakan, this film won an astonishing 24 international awards and 10 Audience Awards (including one at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival). The premise was rather unique: since the corporation is deemed in the eyes of the law to have the rights of a person (and sometimes more), what sort of a person would the corporation be? This was a highly enjoyable film exploring the history of the modern corporation and asked some incredibly pertinent questions about its impact in our age of globalization.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Official Website - The Book

2. Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media

An earlier film also directed by Mark Achbar (along with Peter Wintonick), it explores the life of Noam Chomsky, specifically focusing on his ideas about the mass media in democratic societies as put forward in the book “Manufacturing Consent”, co-authored with Edward S. Herman. This is an incredibly provocative film, and will make you question basic truths about Western society.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Wikipedia - Companion Book to the Film

3. The Fog of War

Winner at the Oscars in 2003 for Best Documentary Feature, the Fog of War was filmed by legendary director Errol Morris, often credited as the founder of the modern documentary. The film is loosely based around eleven lessons learnt by former US Secretary of Defense Robert S McNamara during his often controversial life. Covering both his personal life, the Vietnam war and the Cuban Missile Crisis, amongst other key events in US history, it’s often an extremely candid and insightful film in politics, war and international relations.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Official Website - Wikipedia

4. Capturing the Friedmans

Still one of the most amazing documentaries I’ve ever watched, Capturing the Friedmans was directed by Andrew Jarecki and won at least ten international awards for its harrowing tale. Originally intending to shoot a film about children entertainers in New York, Jarecki learns that the father and youngest brother of one of the entertainers, David Friedman, was arrested in a paedophile scandal. Astonishingly, the Friedman family documented the entire period through with a home video recorder, providing an incredible insight into the effect the episode had on their family. The more Jarecki digs, the clearer it becomes that the paedophile scandal was not all that it appears to be. Essential viewing.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Official Website - Wikipedia

5. Grizzly Man

Directed by the legendary Werner Herzog, Grizzly Man is about the life and death Timothy Treadwell, an environmentalist and bear lover who, over thirteen years of visiting and living in bear territory in Alaska, believed that he had been accepted by the bears he loved and protected. Ultimately, he was to be proven tragically wrong when he and his girlfriend were killed and eaten by a bear. The film is essentially an exploration of man’s place in nature, and the boundaries that exist between being human, and being a wild animal; a brilliant film.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Wikipedia

6. Bus 174

Winner of at least 23 international prizes and awards, including an Emmy, Bus 174 is a Brazillian film directed by Jose Padilha. It essentially tells two stories: the first is a bus hijacking, caught live on camera, where Sandro do Nascimento, a typical, young Rio de Janeiro street kid, held hostages on Bus 174 for over four hours while the police attempted (and failed) to control the situation. The second part, interwoven into the first, is what drove Sandro to this point, and reveals how society had constantly failed to try provide him and others like him any type of meaningful existence. Social commentary doesn’t get much better than this.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Official Website - Wikipedia

7. I Know I’m Not Alone

A film that I’ve reviewed before on here, the film follows musician and political activist Michael Franti as he goes on a journey to Iraq, Israel and Palestine to meet the people affected by war and occupation. This was a truly outstanding piece of political and social commentary that tried to help build bridges between real people.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Official Website

8. Koyaanisqatsi/Powaqqatsi

These two films, as well as the third film in the trilogy called Naqoyqatsi, remain as beautiful, inspiring, and thought-provoking now as when the first film, Koyaanisqatsi, was released in 1982. Directed by Godfrey Reggio, the films have no real dialogue, and consist of just simple and moving imagery of our world overlayed with the wonderful music composed by Philip Glass (the third film, however, focuses more on image manipulation rather than simply film). These timeless films explore the relationship between mankind and nature, urban life and technology versus nature, and between the so-called first and third worlds.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Wikipedia - Official Website

9. The Devil And Daniel Johnston

A film about genius and insanity, director Jeff Feuerzeig documents the life of singer and songwriter Daniel Johnston through Daniel’s own film and tape footage, as well as interviews with friends, family and supporters. Hailed as a musical genius and inspiration to some of the most influential bands over the last twenty years (such as Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Sonic Youth), he also suffered from deep mental problems that lay unrecognised for many years (he was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder). A deeply moving documentary.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Wikipedia - Official Website

10. Planet Earth

Probably the most stunning nature documentary ever made, the critically-acclaimed BBC series is a landmark in nature film-making, providing some of the most unique cinematography ever put on film. Enough said, really.

Amazon - Internet Movie Database - Wikipedia - Official Website

Honorable Mentions:
Supersize Me
Winged Migration
Microcosmos
Baraka
The Yes Men
American Blackout
The Power of Nightmares (Available online)
The Century of Self (Available online)
The Thin Blue Line
Beyond the Gates of Splendour

In a recent post on the John Hopkins study of 655,000 deaths in Iraq since the US invasion, William Arkin asks: “Is the Hopkins study correct, and can reasonable non-partisan people feel comfortable with the conclusion that Iraq has suffered about 15,000 violent deaths a month every month since the U.S. invasion, about 500 deaths a day? I think not.”

This is just the latest in a long line of statements coming out against the study. Bush, for example, declared that, “I don’t consider it a credible report. Neither does General (George) Casey (top U.S. commander in Iraq) and neither do Iraqi officials”, calling the study’s methodology “pretty well discredited.” Casey commented that the figure “seems way, way beyond any number that I have seen. I’ve not seen a number higher than 50,000. And so I don’t give it that much credibility at all.” (Although Casey couldn’t confirm where he got his 50,000 figure from). A spokesman from the Iraqi government said, “The report is unbelievable. These numbers are exaggerated and not precise.” UK Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett was a lot more reserved, saying, “The report gives a figure which is orders of magnitude different from any other source… nobody else has come up with figures on this scale… the report has been criticised by the Iraqi government as unreasonable”, but a spokesman for Blair was more forward: “It’s not [a figure] we believe to be anywhere near accurate”.

What annoys the hell out of me is not that people question the study - that just makes good sense - but that they pick and choose which studies to question. For example, in the Sudan, the press routinely takes estimates of deaths there also generated from studies also using estimates and, in some cases, using very similar methods, without question.

A recent study (by Hagan and Palloni) concluded that around 170,000 to 255,000 thousand people had died in Darfur (but the authors believe it much higher at near 400,000), while a Coalition for International Justice study caused Hagan, in an earlier analysis using the CIJ data, to conclude that the death toll was at around 390,000. The CIJ study, incidently, was “based on semi-structured interviews with 1,136 randomly selected refugees at 19 locations in eastern Chad. … The field data for the 1,136 interviews were compiled using a standardized data entry process that involved the collection and coding of detailed information from each refugee respondentâ??s set of answers. The researchers then used a statistical program to aggregate the data and analyze the results.”

My, that sounds very familiar. As pointed out in the John Hopkins newspaper, “These same survey methods [for the Iraq mortality study] were used to measure mortality during conflicts in the Congo, Kosovo, Sudan and other regions.”

Don’t know about you, but I have yet to read in the press refutations of the figures presented for these countries. Does the press publish columns or articles lamenting the fact that this is impossibly high? That it’s incorrect or too high? Of course not. The Washington Post went on about “Why has the world failed to act?”, pointing out that “Darfur has all ingredients for international intervention”, while citing the Hagan/Palloni study that the death toll was around 200,000 - 400,000. MSNBC also said that Hagan and Palloni’s study was the “first scientifically rigorous estimate of the death toll” and it showed “that the pessimists were right”. And so on. I also note with some amusement that, in 2005, the WaPo concluded in an editorial that Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick needed to “cite better numbers” - referring to Hagan’s original study - because if “his international partners … are allowed to believe that the death toll is one-third of its real level” the killing in Darfur will continue.

The real bottom line is that it’s easy to accept the Sudan estimate because they’re not, strictly speaking, “our” victims, but the Iraqi’s are. Of course the John Hopkins study will not be correct but it is by far the most accurate measurement we have to date; that’s the crucial point. The state of the country at the moment means it’s impossible for there to be any proper way of knowing the real figures (one of the reasons why the Sudan estimates and studies are also likely to be the most accurate assessment of casualties).

Read some sad news today: The renowned Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was found murdered in a lift on Saturday, the 7th of October, believed to have been killed by a man “in his twenties dressed in a black cap, seen just before neighbours discovered her body in the lift”.
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Perhaps European investigators who are complaining of stonewalling by the US government in their investigation into the secret CIA detention centers and prisoner rendition should give ABC News and the Washington Post a call. Chances are, they know something they’re not telling. Have a look at this very interesting exchange between Brian Ross, Chief Investigative Correspondent for ABC News, and Ed Schultz provides wonderful insight into how the media will often apply self censorship to themselves:

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It seems the NSA snooping scandal has taken a little twist. ABC News journalists Brian Ross and Richard Esposito have claimed that a federal source told them “the government is tracking the phone numbers we … call in an effort to root out confidential sources.”

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One day a girl college student in Canada asked me to define reality for her, for a paper she was writing for her philosophy class. She wanted a one-sentence answer. I thought about it and finally said, “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” That’s all I could come up with. That was back in 1972. Since then I haven’t been able to define reality any more lucidly.

But the problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groupsâ??and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener. Sometimes when I watch my eleven-year-old daughter watch TV, I wonder what she is being taught. The problem of miscuing; consider that. A TV program produced for adults is viewed by a small child. Half of what is said and done in the TV drama is probably misunderstood by the child. Maybe it’s all misunderstood. And the thing is, Just how authentic is the information anyhow, even if the child correctly understood it? What is the relationship between the average TV situation comedy to reality? What about the cop shows? Cars are continually swerving out of control, crashing, and catching fire. The police are always good and they always win. Do not ignore that point: The police always win. What a lesson that is. You should not fight authority, and even if you do, you will lose. The message here is, Be passive. Andâ??cooperate. If Officer Baretta asks you for information, give it to him, because Officer Beratta is a good man and to be trusted. He loves you, and you should love him.

So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another.

From Philip K. Dick’s work, How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, 1978

The Guardian has a damn interesting article about the new Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology about to hit consumers with HD and Blu-Ray: The Advanced Access Content System backed and co-developed by Sony, Toshiba, Intel, IBM, Panasonic, Microsoft, Warner Brothers and Disney. This quote from Mike Evangelist of HD Boycott puts it in perspective:

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