Control Room

directed by Jehane Noujaim

         Documentaries, like news media, are never entirely objective. They operate on a counter-Hiesenberg principle where the act of controlling what is observed and how it is shown changes the purity of observing something. Even without certain bias, unless the focus is recorded and displayed uncut and uncensored, the visuals represent favoritism with each image. Jean-Luc Godard’s statement that “cinema is truth at 24 frames per second, and every cut is a lie,” applies best to non-fiction.

         Jehane Noujaim is initially and intentionally a neutral documentarian. Her film with Chris Hegedus, Startup.com, had no sides to take as it fell under the often-boring subgenre of narrative portrait. If it hadn’t been for the dot-com crash, that film would have lacked necessary dramatic interest. Her new film which she flies solo on began as another portrait, albeit one with more controversy. Hoping for a mere profile on Al Jazeera, the Arabic satellite news network and the people who work there, she found more substance with the outbreak of war in Iraq. Born and raised in Egypt before studying and living in America, Noujaim would be apt to side with the Middle Eastern media but she sustains a general impartiality. That the film keeps its attention on the war coverage and does little to depict better the relationship between Al Jazeera and the rest of the Arabic world is a matter of the film’s success in America and that influence is just as inclined as any political stance.

           With it’s centering on the conflict, the film finds brilliance by illustrating how effective media propaganda is in military strategy. Opponents hypocritically criticize each other’s agitprop as being one-sided despite the obvious nationalistic motivation to do so. The excuse of propaganda is supply and demand. Where Al Jazeera is shown to cater nothing but nonpartisan truth to its audience, US news outlets are portrayed as too reliant on the Pentagon. Noujaim doesn’t put a lot of spotlight on CNN or Fox News as comparative to Al Jazeera but analogy can be made well through their familiarity. She sells to her distribution also in her attention towards those with remarkable understanding and appreciation for each other. The featured members of Al Jazeera have respect and faith in the Constitution and the American dream, pointing fingers toward the Bush administration specifically, while those representative of the United States lack the stolid and inexorable behavior preferential to a more radical filmmaker.

         Control Room remains a portrait though one that may be unrecognizable to its subject in order to fill an aesthetic interest and accessibility. There is plenty of room and reason for some Arabs and Americans to denounce the film for being tendentious or for being bilateral or for being detached. The one thing Noujaim simply cannot purport to be is objective.