Truth Game (1983)

John Pilger's damning look at the lies and misconceptions behind the nuclear weapons game. Using government documents against the governments the film shows how not only is/was the nuclear weapons game in Europe not aimed at protecting Europe, rather it was set up only to keep America safe, so damage to England or where ever didn't matter.

Once more down the rabbit hole boys and girls...

You would think that the passage of 30 years has hurt the film but in fact other than the technology little has changed . We are still being lied to and still being told double speak.

What is so terrifying about the piece is that Pilger very clearly lays out what happened in Japan when the first bombs were dropped and what will happen in Europe if even the smallest bomb is dropped. He goes into the blast damage, the death rates, what the government wants from us, where they plan on burying the dead, who goes into the shelter and what the rules will be afterward- remember no dissension or subversion.

As if all of that isn't enough Pilger turns the opening of the TV show and movie MASH upside down with the use of the theme song Suicide is Painless used during a sequence on military maneuvers.

This film will rock your world.

Available on You Tube or DVD.

(If it isn't apparent I am in awe of John Pilger. How the hell can he make so many timely documentaries that 30 years or more on are just as timely?)

Do You Remember Vietnam? (1978)

Two years after the fall of Saigon John Pilger returned to Vietnam to see the state of the country. Pilger had been reporting on the war for a decade (one third of the war’s length) and he had in many ways come to love the people of the country. The occasion was the reopening of the country to foreign visitors

Pilger’s film is an affecting mix of file footage of the war mixed with footage of the strangely peaceful country. Pilger relates stories of what he experienced when the war was raging with scenes of the reviving landscape.

If you think you know about the war and it’s cost you can pretty much forget it because Pilger will show you wrinkles you probably never considered, from cities that had been bombed flat and thrived under ground to what it was like in Hanoi during the bombing to what really happened at the American embassy in the final days.

It’s a shocking tour that puts a a very real face on the war and it’s insanity.

We also get a look at the cost after the fact. As Pilger was filming the country was going through a terrible famine on a level that made even the one in Biafra pale by comparison. The lack of food was partly the result of similar conditions to those in Africa but mostly it was a result of the war which deforested almost half the country turning it into arid plains, poisoned the land with its defoliant and because there simply wasn’t enough people in the country to grow food that people had to be forcibly moved out to farm.

Do I need mention the mutating of the people and animals thanks to all of the chemical in the water and soil?

Shocking doesn’t even begin to describe it. And I say this as a person who grew up with the war on the TV every night. Seriously my memories as a child of TV are Batman, The Monkees, cartoons and Vietnam.

This film is a trip. Its a film that alters how you see the war, even if you've read histories of the conflict. It alters things because you see it on a you are what happened in the places shown.

If you want to really understand what happened in the war see this film.

The film can be found on Vimeo here.

(Pilger made several other documentaries on Vietnam at various time periods after this. I hope to review them down the line.)

Two by John Pilger: Mexicans and Street of Joy

Mexicans (1980)
John Pilger takes a look at the inequalities of class with in Mexico just as the oil industry was beginning to boom. Looking at the haves and have nots, Pilger found the society rife with corruption that was diverting any real money into the hands of the super wealthy. It’s a sad portrait of the country where many people seek to escape to the US in order to get by. Listening to a border patrol agent talk about the influx of illegal immigration you quickly realize that not only are people are saying the exact same things as they did 32 years ago, but the problems seem to have gotten worse on both sides of the border. Sometimes time really does stand still.

Street of Joy (1976)
John Pilger’s acerbic and quite funny look about advertising and how the same techniques used to sell things alike a toilet paper alternative are used to sell politics, in this case Jimmy Carter and his presidential opponents. Pilger’s take is that advertising makes you want to buy things while telling you absolutely nothing about what it’s selling. It’s an amusing and frightening look at how the name of game is purely manipulation (despite the ad exec who swears that people will never buy what they don’t want). Sure Pilger’s take is nothing new, but it somehow resonates more than other looks because it’s so damn straight forward and to the point…and damn funny as the repeated mantra “I don’t use toilet paper” becomes funnier and funnier over the course of the half hour. By the time Pilger states that politicians are like toilet paper you’ll be nodding in agreement