This Film is Not Yet Rated

This Film is not Yet Rated Is a documentary about the rating system run by the Motion Picture Association of America. It is not in the style of cinéma vérité but instead has an expressed purpose of attacking the system in place and exposing inconsistencies and biases that exist in the way films get rated in the US.

The film gives a brief history of cinema censorship and talks about how the film industry has chosen to “self regulate” itself to avoid government censorship. The filmmaker hires a private detective to infiltrate the MPAA and find out the identities of the film raters, which are kept secret (the process of which is chronicled in the film). The film contains various interviews with directors and their experiences with the rating system. It goes on to surmise the characters of the film raters and suggests that they discriminate against films with homosexual content and treat sexual content more strictly than violence. Also it uses animated figures to paraphrase the filmmaker’s interaction with the MPAA, instead of using actual transcript.

The film is has a clear bias and makes little attempt to represent both sides of the argument. The founder of the MPAA is made out to be a devious liar, and his words are also hand picked in a way to make him reflect poorly, as opposed to interviewees who agreed with the filmmaker who got ample screen time and opportunity to explain their views. It tries to make the case that the raters do not represent the ideologies of everyday Americans, even though the MPAA claims they do. It also claims that the MPAA and the studio system are in cahoots and act in mutual benefit of each other, but offers no explanation how or why they benefit from each other.

While the film does expose inconsistencies and lies of the MPAA, it does not offer any alternative idea or seem to value any form of rating system. It offers very little viewpoint from people who have benefited from or used the rating system and makes it seem that few people take the rating system seriously. Which if this was true, NC 17 movies would not average millions less in revenue, and filmmakers wouldn’t be getting upset over the power wielded by the MPAA. Overall the film suffers from a lack of clarity in its purpose, and a lack of balance in its viewpoints, which seems to reduce the impact of the film by diminishing its ability to facilitate open-minded thought. However it also carries with it many valid ideas regarding the way America thinks about and reacts to the content in our films, and can be a valuable tool in gaining a better understanding of the way films are created and distributed in America.

Joe Steigerwald

 

Born Into Brothels

Zana Briski’s film Born Into Brothels seems to be divided into many separate parts and roles.  The first part evokes the normal introduction to the film’s concept, that the lives of children whose mothers are prostitutes can be changed for the better.  The director of the film sees photography classes as a way to expose the lives of prostitutes without intruding as an American filmmaker often can.  The children each seem to have a voice and a certain aptitude for exposing their normally hidden lives.  The first part of the film also has the characteristic low-budget documentary feel, as we see only hidden camera video footage of the Sonagachi Red Light district, and only a few interviews with the children, followed by the still images the children take with disposable film cameras.

Once the film escalates to more urgent situations, where female children are preparing to “join the line” and male children seem to spiral towards a path of poverty and eternal slum-life, the film transforms into a more message driven film: that the lives of the prositute’s children must be changed, by being accepted into a boarding school or otherwise escaping their future lives.  The first part of film has a simple role, to introduce the topic, but this escalation offers a new role for the film, to instill a sense of despair for the viewer, that the children may never escape their life as the child of a Calcutta prostitute.  This despair however, has raised numerous criticisms for the film, mainly that of all things to give to these children, photography classes may be more sensationalist than life-altering.  Only one student was allowed to travel abroad to a photography conference in Amsterdam, and according to some updates, that student never really escaped his inevitable life as a lower-class slum citizen of Calcutta.  Overall, the photography collection raised an estimated $100000, which is a substantial amount of money when converted to the Indian Rupee, so some children were able to afford boarding school and other forms of education.  But the film seems to use the children’s photography more for its own benefit, whereas English and Math classes might have been a better choice for a long-term plan to influence the lives of red light district children.  

On a personal level, as a student who has visited parts of India, and lived with residents of Thane, a suburb of Mumbai, photography is somehow symbolic of India’s need to let the rest of the world what India is like, and what the rest of the world’s involvement is with India.  However, when one actually encounter’s an Indian child begging for spare rupee’s while waiting for a street light to change to green, the first reaction usually isn’t to hand over a camera.  Of course, the documentary filmmaker’s developed a sense of trust and ultimately a family-like bond with the children, but one wonder’s what would have happened to the children if they could have been educated in more academic topics, and entered boarding schools with an education.  The children’s lack of any education was one of the main obstacles for getting the children into a school, as well as their family ties with Red Light District workers.

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005) by Robert Greenwald

This is a documentary about the company Wal-Mart and the people this company affects. The filmmaker starts off the movie with found footage of a highly pixilated scene from what could be a video taken off You Tube.com or some other internet source of a news networks publicized celebration event of a Wal-Mart convention. The CEO and President of Wal-Mart Lee Scott comes on stage around hundreds of people who are cheering and he starts talking about how great the company is. Robert Greenwald takes the viewers all around the United States to small towns and county’s that have had the most trouble with the Wal-Mart company. He provides both on the spot and sit-down interviews of people whose small town family business has had to shut down do to Wal-Marts stores. In this documentary Robert Greenwald even takes the audience to China to have people talk about what it is like to work for the Wal-Mart company in there country. He shows the poor living conditions and people talking about the low wage they are paid and the long hours they must work knowing that if they cause any trouble they easily can be replaced.

Robert Greenwald presents throughout the film this pixilated convention of the CEO & President Lee Scott talking about how great the Wal-Mart Company is, how fair it is, what the company does to help the environment, and the equal pay opportunities it gives it’s employees. Throughout the film Robert Greenwald breaks apart and places segments of this entire spectacle after each issue that the CEO Lee Scott talks about and reveals from interviews and documents of just how far off Lee Scott is. An example is Lee Scott will be talking about how far the Wal-Mart Corporation will go to protect the environment, then Robert Greenwald will fade to an image of a map of the United States, zoom in on a state and a check mark will appear and list the name of a small town or county were the Wal-Mart Corporation has violated either state or federal law when in comes to laws that protect the environment. In this film Robert Greenwald will occasionally fade an image to black and white and place red text over the image that will usually display facts from legal documents, telephone calls, and interviews about what Wal-Mart really did in one of these instances. This is an excellent scare tactic the filmmaker uses to get peoples attention. Considering this is what the whole film is about creating awareness and getting people’s attention to focus on the wrongs that the Wal-Mart Corporation has done in the past.

This film was an interesting piece to watch because you got to see an investigative look at the Wal-Mart Corporation. The audience never hears Robert Greenwald’s voice when he is interviewing a person about Wal-Mart. He presents a movie that all though may be biased to the anti-Wal-Mart side he still makes an attempt to present facts and let the audience decide what to think of the Wal-Mart company. During the movie you never really hear any instances of the good things the Wal-Mart company has done from anyone except the CEO and President Lee Scott. You only see the counter points to those statements from the filmmaker Robert Greenwald’s interviewees, video clips, documents, and phone calls. So the viewer is stuck in this jumble of facts and presumptions about the bad things the Wal-Mart Corporation has done without any latitude for the viewers to relax and weigh the facts and what the filmmaker is not bring to light. Overall this Documentary was a good film to watch, however this student would strongly advise the viewers to be careful when watching the film because one can get the feeling that Robert Greenwald is bringing on these strong scare tactics and anti-Wal-Mart message to get across his point but there doesn’t seem to be a place for the viewers to sit back, absorb what they have taken in from the film and find out for themselves what they think of the Wal-Mart Corporation. One should realize the audience must do this with every Documentary they see and always ask what is not being said by the filmmaker and what could I find out on my own about the Wal-Mart Corporation? The filmmaker present strong evidence that the Wal-Mart Corporation is not a perfect company, but he does use interviews, on location shooting, video clips, to bring across his message for his film.

Matt Gonia

Film 203 Introduction to Documentary Production