Author: Laura Bowen
Last Thursday Oct. 9, director Robert Greenwald, known for his politically minded documentary films like Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers and Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices, gave a presentation on his approach to the film industry and how it impacts social change.
Greenwald’s methods of distributing his films for free online have significantly impacted the political climate, and how information becomes available to the public. Although his films are all politically minded, Katie Mills, professor of media studies at Oxy who also helped coordinate the event said, “Even if someone doesn’t like Greenwald’s politics, his use of the Web 2.0 signals a significant shift in politics.”
Greenwald began by explaining that there is a “mythology” in American culture that attributes bad events to being exceptional cases. Greenwald said, “There are systemic causes. It’s not one lousy apple that caused the Enron collapse [. . .] It’s a system at work.” The analysis of this system is where Greenwald and his production company, Brave New Films, come in.
For many years Greenwald had directed television and commercials, and he said, “When I made the transition into documentary films, I literally knew nothing about it . . . We broke all the rules because I didn’t know any better.” With his first documentary, 2004’s Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, Greenwald realized that he had, as he said, “a political imperative to get the movie out there.”
Greenwald decided to team up with the political organizations MoveOn and the Center for American Progress to distribute the film, segmented into shorter videos, for free online. They used YouTube, which was relatively new at the time, because, as Greenwald said, “it is a free distribution system. That’s huge. That’s a revolution of major, major proportions.”
To everyone’s surprise, within 24 hours the film had 10,000 hits — 7,000 more than they had anticipated. The film was “really shockingly successful,” Greenwald said.
Greenwald showed a few clips of his work, including one about Michelle Obama from his series of Fox Attacks where clips from Fox News are edited together to highlight various prejudices held by the network. Greenwald and Brave New Films have done several of these, on everything from bloggers to the environment.
Greenwald said: “[It is important to] let different constituencies know that they were also under attack by Fox.” Character attacks, however, especially during the presidential campaign, are seen as important to Greenwald on both ends of the spectrum. For example, Greenwald and his company recently made a video about the numerous homes that John McCain owned (seven), and how Senator McCain was unaware of the actual number of residences he had.
This video became the second most viral video on the Internet and the idea was used in an Obama political ad. However, Greenwald said, “We legally can not work with the Obama campaign [. . .] which is fine by the way,” because many of his videos tend to “push the envelope,” and could prove more harmful than helpful to the campaign.
Looking to the near future, “We started a campaign about McCain [. . .] that he should release his health records, ” Greenwald said. Already, the campaign has led 2,700 doctors to write an open letter to McCain asking for him to make his records public.
In regards to his work, Greenwald stressed the importance of viewer participation. “These pieces only are valuable if you spread them, ” Greenwald said, “Doing something proactive is the key.”
In response to the question posed by Mills at the beginning of the presentation, “Can a film change the world?” Greenwald answered, “I don’t think a film can change the world [ . . . but] as part of a strategy you can have a significant impact.”
Prior to his presentation, Mills said, “The impact I hope Greenwald’s visit has on the Oxy community is to create awareness of the changing political mediascape, to have us all here (students, fault, administration, and staff) stay abreast of new internet opportunities to create political dialogue and civic discussion so that we engage with it [. . .] we should not just blindly receive the new type of political communication he produces.”
Oxy students responded with mixed enthusiasm. Andy Garon (sophomore) said, “I really support his political views, and it was pretty cool that we were able to get him to come to Oxy. I definitely want to check out more of his work.”
Conor Anderson (sophomore) said, “I liked his presentation, but I didn’t think he answered all of the questions people asked him fully.”
Regardless of the impression Greenwald left, his appearance drew a sizable crowd of students and faculty interested in understanding how much a video can change the sociopolitical environment.
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