From Chapter Six: Case Study Analysis: Deep Impact (1998)

“Deep Impact (1998) is a variant on those blockbusters that emerged towards the end of the second millenium and which explored explicit Judeo-Christian apochrophal themes. Cynics would argue that they also capitalised on such fears. Within this doomsday genre, for example, we can include Independence Day (1996), Armageddon (1998), and, of course, Titanic (1998). In many respects, the film is a close version of Meteor (1979) which dramatised, however inadequately, the attempt by both U.S. and Russian astronauts to deflect a renegate meteor from its collision course with Earth.

In Deep Impact (1998), the autuerial stamp of Steven Spielberg is evident in its emphasis on family, God, community and heroic self-sacrifice, a character emphasis which leads in the last reel to a final saving purgation that returns America back to a land of renewed promise, still under God. Additonally, in an ironic Prodigal reversal that tracks his own corporate rise to the position of Exective Producer at DreamWorks, he was able to oversee the Z

anuck and Brown production team who twenty three years earlier had hired him as director for Jaws (1975).

Anchoring the Plot

One specific narrative feature, however, positions the film within those texts already cited. Though not strictly set within the conventions of the journalist genre, its epic narrative centre pivots on the career ambitions of another (white) female television/researcher/journalist (Jenny Lerner/Téa Leoni). It is her character arc to MicroSoft/NBC network star that holds the numerous narrative threads together - much in the same way that her function as news anchor secures the trust and that sense of security for the global television audiences as the asteroid hurtles towards Earth.

However, to secure this trusting effect for the film audience as well requires a very deft performance from Leoni the actress who must blend Jenny’s ‘real’ earnest persona ‘off’ camera with her new-found role as main anchor on television. Leoni’s own modest star status - with little carry-over from other films - makes her perfect casting for such a Cinderella role. The effect of transparency in performance, then, is vital if both film and television narratives and special effect images are to merge into an aesthetic whole and thus make both film and featured television audiences ‘one’ in the face of the coming catastrophe.

In this respect, the film and Leoni’s performance differ from Up, Close and Personal (1996) which goes some length to mark the tortured march Atwater must make from cable weather girl in Miami to network anchor in Philladelphia. Therefore, in Deep Impact (1998) there is no room for marked deconstructive ‘ironic’ juxtapositions between image and reality. On the contrary, as we will explore, it is part of the film’s overall agenda to secure in the mind of the film audience the reality of the epic encounter with the asteroid and the narrative events that surround it.

In the process - and as part of its rhetorical function - it also attempts to secure in the minds of the film audience that sense of trust in the news corporations which bring the news in the first instance. The fact that Paramount is owned by Viacom which owns CBS should not be far from our contextual frame. In addition, it also provides incidental moments of journalist research that, interestingly, go no further than a quick two-minute Internet browse.

The opening prelude allows us, the film audience, insight into the coming catastrophe - as scientists and amateur astronomers discover vital information that confirms the fateful collision between the asteroid and Earth eighteen months hence. A one-year jump cut takes us to the offices of MSNBC Washington, D.C. and a scene familiar to all journalist film genres - namely the day’s lead where assembled writers and their seasoned but engaging editor-in-chief haggle and pitch stories that might lead the coming day’s news agenda (Ehrlich, 1997). The chosen mise-en-scene here, however, reflects a lighter more engaging representation of corporate news journalism. While the board room suggests a corporate hightower building with the usual bank of television screens covering a back wall, this is neatly subsumed by a colour coding of soft pinks, light blues and gentle greys across office furniture, cups and wardrobe. The assembled cast of Black, Asian and Caucasian reporters of mixed gender all talk reasonably, listen thoughtfully and reflect wisely in considered phrases and weighted professional pauses. Set decor, polished performances and smooth editing all support the representation of a non-threatening harmonic professional working environment - without staff cuts, budget restrictions or pushy commercial sponsors lurking in the corridors.

Jenny is embedded at the back of the room amongst a number of researchers within the opening frame. Her first shot at prominance, however, comes with a statement that suggests a working, eager mind in operation when she informs the surprised reporters that the wife of the Secretary of the Treasury is an alchoholic and not sick, as they assumed. The information adds to the confusion concerning his recent resignation and will lead her, unknowingly, into uncovering the truth, as withheld by the government, that a collision with the comet is unavoidable. During the meeting she raises the possibility of taking a nighttime anchor role with her line manager, Beth/Laura Linnes. The resultant nettled exchange puts her career ambitions in quick check since she is firmly reminded that she is yet to establish her professional portfolio and that her expectations should, therefore, be more realistic. As Beth picks up her baby daughter from the office nursery and is asked by Jenny “are you protecting me or just holding me back?”, Beth asserts a short, clear but ambiguous “Yes” that stymies further discussion and returns Jenny dutifully back to her dull research routine. Following typical mainstream plot functions, this career block on the budding ambitions of our talented heroine helps establish audience sympathy and empathy for Jenny. More pertinant, though, is how this quick career appraisal in the corridor is undertaken by another, older white woman.

So while the plot point serves traditional functions, its gender inflection here positions the film firmly within a knowing 1990s contextual frame that serves two functions. First, it neatly and effortlessly underlines certain successes in the move towards securing greater equality in the (middle class) working environment that positively promotes the career chances of women. We should be mindful, however, that this remains an assumed and still qualified success, particularly in the media industry (Benokraitis and Feagin, 1995). Secondly, however, it serves to position such women in the traditional role of older villain to the heroic ambitions of the younger female generation. The sequence therefore neatly captures what Dow (1996) would recognise as the classic double-bind in the representation of minority figures within mainstream narratives that support and help structure hegemonic discourses. While one narrative level speaks for and seems to support Liberal agendas (look! nurseries in corporate offices!), a second, more sinister level of suggestive meaning, limits and controls that emancipatory move within more orthodox narrative frames: 1) you must get through the wicked witch to claim your goal, and, 2) it is still the mother who picks up the child. The fact that Jenny is also struggling and white would suggest by implication how successful the 1970s Feminist agenda has been in forwarding the careers of non-white females - of the kind we have already seen featured as star reporters in the White House conference room. In the competitive environment that seems the given, Jenny is therefore, a liminal character who must secure her rightful place over and above other women.

Having set the career obstacle within a skewed Feminist frame, the narrative then underscores Jenny’s difficulty with yet three other troubled woman - namely her smoking/drinking mother Robin/Venessa Redgrave, the alchoholic wife of the Secretary of State and Jenny’s new young step-mother.

Her meeting with her mother underscores their loving relationship at the moment Jason their father/former husband is getting married - “you now have a new step-mother”, Jenny is reminded, “who is two years older than you”. After a warm exchange and loving words, the camera then holds and pauses on the watching mother as she thoughtfully watches her daughter leaving the riverfront restaurant. At this point film audience and mother share the same point of view that frames Jenny in a departing lingering long shot.

With her personal life (subplot) now locked into the main plot, Jenny persues her research into the life of the Secretary of the Treasury, Alan Rittenhouse/James Cromwell. From his wife she learns of the name Ellie who everyone assumes is another woman and thus the reason for his sudden resignation. Her confused interview with the Secretary himself - busy loading his yacht for a long-term sea journey - is rich in narrative foreshadow. Initial attempts by Jenny to make friends with his young daughter are notably unsuccessful. Despite her wrong assumptions about Ellie, the former Secretary soon realises Jenny will unknowingly uncover and make public “the biggest story in history” (and indeed in a short time she will discover it as E.L.E. - Extinction Level Event). He therefore makes a final quiet appeal to justify his resignation, “…Look,“ he says, after pausing to consider his young daughter, “I know you’re just a reporter…but you used to be a person, right? I just want to be with my family, can you understand that?”.

The awkward exchange of looks across the scene from reporter to daughter are rich in subtextual weight and close the scene as the daughter is carried away by her loving, wary and anxious father. This subtextual motif of family togetherness very quickly weaves the epic scope of coming global catastrophe around Jenny’s professional and personal life - a life that will end in the arms of her father looking out to sea.

The invitation, then, to share her father’s recent marriage is more gruelling since it comes at a narrative point where, through her own investigative initiative on the Internet, she has fathomed the truth about E.L.E. - but for sound professional and security reasons, cannot share it. So while her father celebrates his future, she is aware of the severely limited time they all have available and urges him, much to his confusion, to return to his wife and her mother. The family dilemma underscores Jenny’s insecure hold on adult life - and what remains of it. Her parents’ estrangement makes her an orphan without a home, a woman lacking secure identity at a time of possible global destruction and interestingly in this regard we never see her domicile, her place of retreat and privacy. This gap is answered by her move towards news anchor at MSNBC which provides an arena of security that allows her to speak and perform the role of adult to her own parents, and, in time, the world. Her special invitation to the White House press conference provides such an early platform.

“we will prevail…”

It is at the conference that the President Beck/Morgan Freeman explains in graphic detail the path of the approaching asteroid and the Russian-American plans to deter it away from collision with the Earth. Jenny, now suited in sharp red, is allowed the opening questions and the extended exchange with the president that follows and which she leads brings her stage front before envious colleagues, family and in full view of a nationwide/global audience of television viewers. Her performance during this sequence remains wholly consistent with Leoni’s screen persona so far achieved - honest, unswerving, forthright, selfless - and leads as if naturally to the all important anchor position deemed essential if under such extreme conditions the news is to be fully trusted and understood by a worldwide audience. She has, after all, confirmed with President Beck himself that, “I’m not interested in using E.L.E. to further my career…” and, further “I always thought the truth was in the nation’s interest…”

Thus, distinguishing herself from the perceived stereotype of the hustling career obsessed journalist, she can shine above the fray and, in the glow of pure untainted professional competence, perform as a modest but forthright hero in her own right - a model of grace under cataclymic pressure. The film even goes to some length tracking her smooth competency in data mining the Internet where the worldwide web seems the only reliable means of sourcing information - her character does, after all, work for MSNBC itself.

This promotion comes five months later at another office conference where she sits at the table alongside Beth/Laura Innes. Her first anchor role is to cover the daring attempt by the astronauts of the Messiah mission to destroy the asteroid. The opening shot of her programme pans uncertainly down from the screen headlining her name and then holds on her eyeline delivery to the film audience who are - by extension - interpellated by her direct delivery as an assumed television audience as well. The uncritical weaving of both aesthetics is a feature already touched upon in Up, Close and Personal (1996).

Her initial uncertainty and slight stiffness gives way to a polished yet very human performance wherein Leoni’s role as Jenny Lerner meshes brilliantly with her new television role as lead anchor. This meshing of performance, then, supports the film’s own strategy of integrating film and (staggered) television audiences as combined watchers for whom Lerner performs as reliable witness, confidant and explainer of the mission tasks as they turn from hope through uncertainty to final disappointment and then disaster; for as she reassures the watching millions and without irony “we will stay on the air - we will stay with you through all of this…”.

Supporting this representation of professional naturalness is the absence in the script and on the screen of any studio factors that would otherwise remind us of the manufactured environment of news delivery as all shots or references to auto-cues, prepared scripts, or backroom countdowns to commercial breaks are rendered invisible by this film representation of broadcast news, circa 1998. In other words, the mise-en-scene of television’s representation of events is echoed and duplicated by the mise-en-scene of the film to the point where both narrative and film frames coalesce into one. In this respect, the film seems to make viable Fiske’s (1991) understanding of news broadcasting and the role of anchor, wherein,

“The relationships which are established between programme and audience, which set the viewer in place in a certain relation to the discourse here, a relation of identity and complicity - are sustained…by the presenters, who have a key role in anchoring those positions and in impersonating - personifying - them.” (Fiske, 1991, p. 54)

In our case, a Hollywood narrative produced and distributed by Viacom/Paramount, owner of CBS and featuring MSNBC, makes attempts to secure this process of legitimisation via the controlling mechanism of the widescreen cinema. The ‘master’ text, therefore, interpellates the film viewer as television viewer into accepting the authenticity of the ‘minor text’ which is the news telecast.

This theme is itself neatly fashioned as we enter act three and Jenny is given the responsibility to cover the last attempts to destroy the approaching asteroid. With the failure comes the news of a “New Noah’s Ark“ - the plan already in place to select and draw by lottery 1,000,000 representatives and secure their future and, through them, the hope of mankind in the caves of Missouri.

One element of the plan, though, deems that all those selected by lottery must be younger than 50 (this is another aspect of secret government planning that journalists and the film seems to uncritically accept). As Jenny delivers the news as a professional anchor we cut across a range of audiences for assumed responses - and particularly her own mother now watching and listening (in appropriate solemn sepia) to her daughter delivering the news that she will not be amongst the chosen few.

Both text and subtext merge as we acknowledge both the public and personal message that Jenny must deliver within the same frame and to the same camera lens and ‘directly’ to her mother. At this point a lens turn to close-up narrows the film frame to fully encompass the television frame and so we, as her mother, see Jenny the performer and Jenny the daughter becomes one in delivering the ominous news. Ironic juxtaposition is then employed in cutting from her mother’s darkened isolation to the colourful nursery where Beth watches the screen with her own daughter in her arms.

The cut across daughters and mothers foreshadows Jenny’s own fateful last-minute decision to substitute herself for the daughter of her line-manager, Beth. Her sudden grasp of the child and her leading run to the waiting helicopter posits her for the first time in a parental role. Her valiant selfless act of bravery foreshadows then the heroic self-sacrifice of the astronauts that splits the asteroid in a way that brings some major destruction to the East Coast of the United States, but saves Earth from destruction.

Genre Representation of the Female Reporter

The theme of identity is of course common amongst those films that track the female news journalist’s rise to success. While male journalists track the story, as in All the President’s Men (1976), females, alternatively, must negotiate the binary oppostion that sets professional against private role as already noted in both Broadcast News (1987) and Up, Close and Personal (1996).

To support this developmental character arc, the film employs visual and narrative motifs that attempt to explain in a more sophisticated way what actually propels Jenny towards the role of news anchor in the first instance - a role which allows the performer to achieve true self before millions of unseen watchers. It is a crucial motif which is introduced by her father as a last-minute attempt at reconciliation and after her mother’s lonely suicide towards the denouement of act three. Reference to one other important strand in contemporary film theory can help structure this specific analysis at this point.

Lacan on the Beach - Motivations and Identity Creation

The motif in question lies in the beguilingly simple black-and-white A4 phototgraph of her father on a beach with a five-year-old Jenny held aloft on his shoulders, and is the same photograph which her mother lovingly takes to her own carefully prepared death. He presents it to Jenny as “proof” that she is not an orphan, a record of “..a beautiful day…such a good day for all of us…don’t you remember…?”. But, still the little girl, she affects not to remember.

The photograph, then, records a primal scene of family togetherness, made all the more resonant by the choice of natural location - a desolate white sand-duned beach - and whose significance is sharpened by the fact that the source image maker is the unseen mother who frames and captures this singular moment of family ecstasy, since “there was no-one there to hold the camera…but she insisted…”.

References to female identity, ‘images’ and ‘primal scenes’ lean invariably towards a theoretical discourse that embraces Lacanian film theory and, indeed, it could be argued, the film operates, however crudely, as a narrative outline of key Lacanian principles as explored in media/literary theory. From this critical frame, then, this frozen moment can be seen to exist in that unified imaginary world which for Lacan functions ambiguously but very powerfully as the mirror stage. The realm is an ambiguous one since,

“The child finds itself reflected back to itself a gratifyingly unified image of itself and although its relation to this image is still of an ‘imaginary’ kind - the image in the mirror both is and is not itself - it has begun the process of constructing a centre of self.” (Eagleton, 1992, p. 164)

In this universe, the self is an abstract sign, always constructed by the surounding language which, like any other sign, finds only temporary surity amongst the flux of changing, often more dominant contexts. In this respect, Jenny’s earlier quest for meaning from her surrogate mother Beth - “are you protecting me or just holding me back?” - is doubly frustrated by the clear yet highly ambivalent answer of “Yes” that denies such helpful context from her line-manager. The corporate line-manager thereby makes entry into the adult world impossible since, ideologically speaking, contexts and identities change only within the guiding determinants of overriding power relations that here, in the case of Beth, denies Jenny access both to her chosen career and her adult life. So, in this particular narrative frame towards the end of the film, the photograph takes on increasingly weighted significance. In this respect we are reminded - however tentatively - of Fiske’s (1991) own account that pointedly describes how,

“Thus a photograph of a scene (which maybe understood as a “fixed“ reflection) is often more pleasurable to look at than the scene iself, for it can close the gap between the imaginary and the real, and pleasure derives from the extent to which the unity is achieved, this gap is closed.” (Fiske, 1991, p. 59-60)

However, the object of identity confirmation - whether it be a photograph, another person, or, for 1970s film scholars, a film sequence - functions through the process of interpellation that hails ourselves yet remains somehow alien to ourselves.

For clarification in what can be, for some, a notoriously tortured account of psychoanalysis as applied to literary/film theory, we can return to Eagleton (1992)

“The imaginary for Lacan is precisely this realm of images in which we make identifications, but in the very act of doing so are led to misperceive and misrecognize ourselves… As a child grows up it will continue to make such imaginary identifications with objects, and this is how its ego will be built up… For Lacan, the ego is just this narcissistic process whereby we bolster up a fictive sense of unitary selfhood by finding something in the world with which we can identify.” (Eagleton, 1992, p. 165)

That process propels the growing ego towards changing loci of identification throughout life, always approaching but never arriving, with only momentary assurances of self that never quite satisfy the lingering lack of former assumed completion. Beth’s “Yes” is the positive and negative that fixes us uncertainly both ambiguously ‘in’ and ‘out’. In the broader field this may explain the extended longevity of U.S. broadcast anchors whose regular appearances over the decades provide for the television audience this very sense of unitary selfhood that, particularly in times of crisis, merges the ‘you’, the ‘we’ into the ‘us’.

So, as the remains of the giant asteroid swerves to crash into the Atlantic, Jenny evacuates her office, but returns momentarily to retain the beach photograph. With it, she arrives at the primal scene itself - the same beach where her father waits amongst the sand dunes for the inevitable coming end. Despite her earlier protests to the contrary, in her reconciliation with her father she admits that,

JENNY

When you came to the studio and brought those pictures, I lied when I said I didn’t remember. I remember everything. I remember we were right over there and that’s when mum got the picture of the house. It was a perfect happy day.

Their sense of momentary family wholeness is achieved ultimately in submitting to the tidal wave of death that engulfs them (we should note again how the scene is neatly foreshadowed in act one in the weighted comment by the Secretary of the Treasury who, in the knowledge of coming doom, wanted simply to be with his family: “can you understand that…?” and by Chloe’s own most recent decison to be with her mother)

In this way Jenny’s work before the television camera is an attempt - and, in Lacanian terms, an inevitable failed one - to duplicate that imaginary wholeness that father and daughter celebrate in their photograph and try to accomplish in death. Her mother, of course, oversees both images - as creator of the defining photograph and as viewer of the televisual image.

So, under this critical paradigm, it can be tentatively argued that while Jenny persues her enquiries as a researcher and while she then becomes the safe and secure voice of calm and authority in a world given to growing panic and despair, she is at the same time trying to secure some permanent sense of self-fulfillment at the focus of the studio camera eye - and, moreover, the controlling and defining presence behind it, her watching mother.

“They trust you” - The Female Anchor as Everyman

With just four weeks and two days to go before the fatal impact, both mother and daughter walk peacefully along the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. for what will be their last screen time together. Under telling stately shots of Capital Hill and the Lincoln Memorial her mother calmly reflects on, “…how liberating it is not to be called…”. Jenny, though, is characteristically racked with modest self-doubt, claiming “It seems kinda unfair that I got picked…I’m not a doctor or a scientist…”, to which her mother confidently answers, “…people need continuity, everyone knows you and they trust you…”

That sense of continuity is clearly emphasised in those scenes showing the professionalism with which Jenny calmly reports the mayhem and global panic that then engulfs the world during the final days before impact. However, such mayhen seems not to touch the safe secure zone of her own television studio where (less) people still have meetings and drink designer coffee from large paper cups.

The claim that Jenny represents continuity and trustworthiness exposes the film’s ideological agenda that furthers the cause of corporate news broadcasting in America at a time in the 1990s when, as we have gathered, public and academic concerns about such corporate ownership was growing. In this respect we can summarise a number of points that position the film firmly within the corporate culture which it claims to represent and realistically portray and for which, as a product of that culture, it speaks.

We have already touched on Leone’s finely tuned performance(s) that seamlessly web her worthy selfless character profile to her effective trustworthy anchor position. The same can be said of Morgan Freeman’s President Beck who meshes his roles on and off the television camera. In one interesting instance during his first press conference he actually performs the role of television anchor himself by interviewing the crew of the Messiah, thus giving further legitimacy both to the role Jenny will later take and the thankless task of news anchor generally. In addition, we should be alert to the dramaturgical significance of the news conference itself - which, beyond the screens (or only ‘on’ them), exists as a simulacrum in the real world of Washington, D.C. politics, an entirely fabricated forum specifically designed to provide only certain access to the White House administration updates yet which serves only to canal ‘information’ to hailed journalists who perform their assigned role as invited supporting players. The realistic and non-critical duplication and representation of such a staged arena merely serves to legitimise this highly questionable process of White House news delivery and journalist practice/capture.

Transparency Fallacies

To return to earlier themes, the representation of broadcast news itself is in keeping with this agenda of transparency. As Jenny seems always ‘on’, so the script never allows for costume change decisions, make-up calls or line rehearsals, no on-air instructions from the control booth direct her delivery, no technical glitches interrupt the smooth flow of the broadcasts and no executives confer about ratings or advertising revenue. Indeed there is no reference to any commercial break - which is significant in an operation depending entirely on such a vital income source. The broadcaster, we are led to believe, seems only focused on delivering relevant public service news programming to the mass audience, thereby fulfilling its mandate as a responsible and responsive public utility with a social conscience free of political or economic agendas. Performance and mise-en-scene work towards a visual aesthetic that in its representation on film supports news television’s claim to record and report unmediated reality.

The first Presidential conference is notably interesting in this respect since it cuts seamlessly from the ‘live’ event to its reception amongst various groups in the United States - these include families, Jenny’s parents, the Messiah crew in Houston and crowds in New York’s Time Square (foregrounding a billboard for Panasonic). The representation of audience response - always engaged, receptive, believing - is itself a crucial element in the interpellative loop that attempts to co-align the film audience with staged television audiences and their belief in the unfolding drama. By seguing the action and dialogue across both film and television screen reifies the Realist aesthetic that underpins their overall ideological projects of both film and television modes of address - something which both MSNBC and Viacom/CBS would have a vested interest in.

The casting of Morgan Freeman as a black President Beck alerts us to the film’s surface Liberal coding, though in keeping with mainstream agendas this is continually contradicted by more traditional and orthodox plot strands that ensure a final closure that ideologically seems to settle these tensions. The only young couple who are foregrounded to survive, for example, are white, they marry and are last seen atop the Adirondacks with a shrouded baby having undertaken their perilous Biblical flight from “the waters”.

Freeman’ casting, though, as the honourable and dignified U.S. President Beck who believes in a (Christian) God and the power of prayer, should alert us to a more significant ideological manoeuvre that touches on the representation of Washington, D.C. politics in general. In this context, the film aligns itself with a range of Hollywood films that serve to remind the lawmakers of how central the mass media is in securing their own legitimisation in the public sphere. This is particularly the case when, as at present, Hollywood films are more than ever produced by the same media conglomerates that produce news broadcasting in the first instance (ABC/Disney and CBS/Viacom) and whose expensive commercial air time the politicians must submit to during election times (McChesney, 1999).

Hence, though the film makes initial gestures towards questioning Washington, D.C. practices and agendas - the Secret Service and White House staff are presented in act one in threatening postures, even colliding with Jenny’s car - the film soon turns towards a more reconciliatory representation of Washington, D.C. politics that shows the media obligingly report policies that have already been secretly set but which emerge only when circumstances deem appropriate. The Noah’s Ark scenario, for example, wherein 200,000 special representatives are chosen, is dutifully explained but never questioned by the station’s journalists, or the film itself.

The transparent effect, then, that weaves actor performance, mise-en-scene and twinned aesthetics takes on wider more worrisome ideological ramifications since it neatly segues the ‘innocent’ operations of the corporate media with questionable central administration policy that legitimately withholds vital information highly relevant to the future of the planet. The aforementioned shift by the role of President to anchor/interviewer would be symptomatic of this overall alignment of special political, ideological and aesthetic interests.

Deep Impact (1998) was one of several blockbuster epics which emerged in the closing years of the second millenium. Like those films it became itself a media event that ritualised the fears that many had about the coming Armaggedon, and like several other films on our list it had as its representative Everyman a television news anchor.

One other title, Costa Gravas’s Mad City (1997) explored the nature of threat in more pedestrian terms - as something emerging not from outer space, but from the inner contradictions of the Republic itself.”

Where Now?

How about another film, this time from 1986:-

• http://wethemedia.edublogs.org/1970s-case-study-film/1980s-case-study-film-broadcast-news/

END

This weblog is based on the 2005 publication, “We,the media…”, a history and working practices of US broadcast news, cable news and Reality TV and as represented by Hollywood  since the 1970s. Published by Peter Lang…London, Vienna, Frankfurt, Brussels, New York, Berlin, and Oxford.

Further such representations continue into 2008:

 

REVIEW…

“Alan Taylor’s penetrating study examines how the U.S. media shape the public discourse and, consequently, American foreign policy…

Taylor identifies how cross-ownership is used to reinforce this ideological message - specifically, how film is used to reinforce the legitimacy of another medium: news broadcasting.. .

Taylor takes a historical approach to the evolution of U.S. corporate media, from the beginning of the U.S. broadcast system in the 1920s to the media coverage of the Iraq war, paying particular attention to the events of 9/11. The author declares: “The question to ask is: have we invited a press to witness a war, or have we created a war to prove that this freedom of expression is possible?”…

Taylor employs elements of a number of approaches - Rhetorical resp. Dramaturgical Perspective, and certain key elements of the Auteur theory - sometimes moving from one approach to another. He establishes a historical overview, generating a chronology that demonstrates the development of the concentration of ownership n the U.S. media…

One of the objectives of the book, then, is to encourage a more active citizenry: a “wakeful political literacy” that promotes critical understanding of the current state of American mainstream media. The book also examines the pedagogical implications of this ideological function of the U.S. mass media., calling for a curriculum that encourages critical thinking skills…

Altogether, this is a very thorough, penetrating study that furnishes a valuable perspective into the American media system”

(Art Silverblatt, Dept of Media Literacy, Webster University, Missouri, 2006, see sidebar for full transcription).

 

 “Since when has the paragon of investigative journalism allowed lawyers to determine the content on 60 Minutes?”.

The following sequence from Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999) should provide a helpful trailer to this on-going study.

 This is the Act 2 plot point where CBS 60 Minutes producer Lowell Bergman/Al Pacino confronts his compromised managers with the seedy side of corporate media mergers at CBS itself (we should note that the film was made by Touchstone/Disney, owner of CBS rival ABC):-

 “We, the media…” is designed, therefore, to serve the related interests of media educationalists, specialists in film, and students of U.S. media law and broadcast news histories.

 Film titles under analysis in this blog include, Network, Broadcast News, Up, Close and Personal, Deep Impact, and The Insider. These are complete chapters from the published book, copyright retained. Other film titles analysed in the book are: All That Heaven Allows, All The President’s Men, Quiz Show, Independence Day, Mad City, EDtv, The Truman Show, and Wag the Dog.

 

 

 

 

Where Now?

How about the Introduction?:-

• http://wethemedia.edublogs.org/introduction/

Or A Case Study film from 1998?:-

• http://wethemedia.edublogs.org/1970s-case-study-film/1998-case-study-film-deep-impact/

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Finally, in dedication to Charles Swann, American Studies, Keele University

“To be taught by him, to know and care for him was not to be comforted; rather it was to be nudged towards the intense pleasure of rethinking by a generous and courageous intellectual presence.”

 UPDATES: http://kinowords.wordpress.com

 

 

 

 

Alan Taylor has been delighted to be invited by Uni. Prof. Dr. Winfried Fluck to teach at the prestigious J.F.K Institute for North American Studies, Freie University of Berlin for the 2007 Spring/Summer Semester. A further course in FIlm Studies will follow for the Fall Term of 07-2008.

July 16th 2007: The course has now come to a close, though we do have 23 students currently working on their Research Papers. In fact, as of July 17th 2007, the first are coming through the system (!). Suggested reading list for essentail sequence analysis: Film Art (Brodwell) & How to Read A Film (Monaco). Both books stand side-by-side in the JFK-I library.

For a review of the course, here is the Weekly Schedule, though subject to changes as we proceeded: at-jfk-i-sum-07-week-schedule.pdf …and, as requested, highlights from the PowerPoint Presentations:at-film-jfk-i-sum-07-pp-hilites.pdf

Details of the Fall 2007-2008 Film Studies Programme at the J.F.K.I can be found here: http://kinowords.edublogs.org/jfk-fu-berlin/

Requirements for a Schein for the Spring Term - ‘The Conference Project’

1. Regular attendance (80% pus)

2. Productive and regular seminar contributions that forward and deepen our interest area, and which would be highlighted by a short descriptive account in the paper below…

3. “No text without context”: A research paper (20 pages). The hypethetical (or real?) audience for the paper is to be one of the many 2007 conferences on our subject and as listed, for example, in the links below. There will need to be a recogniseable U.S context to the paper.

• http://www.nordicom.gu.se/eng.php?portal=conf

• http://www.conferencealerts.com/film.htm

Submission of the research paper would of course be supplemented with an introductory descriptive account of the chosen conference details, its assumed audience profile, expectations and the contemporary relevance of the research to such an audience.

One core element will be a descriptive analysis of a film/media text and, of course an abstract that will be undertaken as a first draft.

DEADLINES & GUIDES

THE DEADLINE for the Research Paper (RP) is Sunday September 30th, 2007. All necessary details (content, structure and contact/delivery procedures) are now here:

• rp-jfk-i-su-07-guide.pdf

::::::::::::::::::::::::::TICKERTAPE UPDATES:::::::::::::::::::::::

• June 2007, JFK-I Newsletter profile on Course Leader, ALAN TAYLOR, page 11, by Tobias, JFK-I Student Journalist: http://www.jfki.fu-berlin.de/newsletter/newsletter04.pdf

• In construction: As of May 2007 we have a latest J.F.K.-I student website that incudes reviews, research plans and sample work: http://americannight.uniblogs.org/ (the title might change..).

• For added interest, our course is now listed amongst others that promote the advancement of Media Literacy across Europe http://www.euromedialiteracy.eu/index.php?Pg=index&Ug=allnews …and the advancement of new technologies in education, the Pro-Learn Virtual Competence Network: http://www.prolearn-online.com/links.php

• Berlin/NPR from the U.S.: The U.S. National Public Radio broadcasting channel (no ads!) now extends to Berlin. The 24 hour schedule of radio news, views, insights and reviews from Washington. D.C is excellent: http://www.npr.org/worldwide/berlin/ …as is their website.

OUR SUMMER 2007 SCHEDULE WAS AS FOLLOWS:-

WEEK 1. April 16th

• Coverage: Broad overview, issues and debates, core texts & film samples, ie:

•  

•  

•  

•  

• Links of the Week: US media histories, cultural theory & 2006/7 journalism…

• Excellent PDF Map on U.S. Media Today: http://www.thenation.com/special/2006_entertainment.pdf

• Kenneth Burke: http://nightfly.googlepages.com/kennethburke

• http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i32/32a02601.htm

• Gramsci: http://www.victoryiscertain.com/gramsci/

• USA Media now: http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2007/

• US Media & Iraq War. Timeline from FAIR: “This timeline is an attempt to recall some of the worst moments in journalism, from the fall of 2002 and into the early weeks of the Iraq War. It is not an exhaustive catalog, but a useful reference point for understanding the media’s performance.”: http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=3062

WEEK 2. April 23rd

• Coverage: US Mass media beginnings: Signal Corps,GE, RCA, NBC, CBS, radio developments, Radio Act 1927, “toll broadcasting”.

• Links of the Week: RCA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RCA

• Communications Act of 1934: http://www.fcc.gov/Reports/1934new.pdf

WEEK 3. April 30th

• Coverage: From Radio to TV, into the 1930s, to the 1940s.

• Link of the Week: http://www.mztv.com/mz.asp

WEEK 4. May 7th

• Coverage: 1950s, the TV network & Hollywood, Universal Pictures.

• Link of the Week: http://vlib.iue.it/history/USA/ERAS/20TH/1950s.html

WEEK 5. May 14th

• Coverage: into the 1970s, advertisers or terroritsts? Network, 1976

• Link of the Week: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_%28film%29

WEEK 6. May 21st

• Coverage: The 1980s, Reagan, media deregulation, new technologies, Fairness Doctrine, Broadcast News, 1987

• Link of the week: http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/F/htmlF/fairnessdoct/fairnessdoct.htm

Week 7. NO SESSION MAY 28th

However, core reading for next week is: The Communications Act of 1996: http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html

Search also, Bill # S.652/ENR, 1996 below.

Also, now that we are engaging with vital developments in Film Theory since the 1970s, all students and researchers would do well to review coverage on Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasure, by Laura Mulvey, ie:

• http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Mulvey

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hafvm/research/staff/staffMembers/MulveyLaura

WEEK 8. June 4th

• Coverage: the 1990s: Washington & Hollywood. Independence Day, 1996, Up, Close & Personal, 1996; Contact, 1998.
• Link of the Week: Search Communications Act, 1996, in 104th Congress, Bill # S.652/ENR:
• http://thomas.loc.gov/home/multicongress/multicongress.html
• John Gregory Dunne’s MONSTER, Living Off the Big Screen. Scripting the Film. http://www.amazon.com/Monster-Living-Off-Big-Screen/dp/0679455795
• PM Film: MAD CITY

WEEK 9. June 11th.

• Coverage: Detalied whole film anaylsis, staged viewing of Deep Impact, 1998, part one.

• Link of the Week: on Corporate Media of the 1990s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_media

• PM Film: EDtv 8(1998)

WEEK 10. June 18th

Core feature: Deep Impact, part 2….

• Tonight’s film:

WEEK 11. June 25th.

Round Table: Students now on the research project have an opporunity to introduce their work in progress; ie:

1. Conference source…?

2. Theme - the general aea of interest…why important…?

3. Core area of analysis…sample texts…

CL will show a sequence from a film as a core sample…

• Tonight’s Film: The Insider (1999, dir. Mann)

WEEK 12. July 25th, 2007

A pick-up on general themes, subtexts, narratives, representations, histories…Core analysis:Wagthe Dog (1997). Part One

 

The FINAL Evening screening will be Quiz Show (1994, Dir. Robert Redford)

 

• Links of the Week: Female Journalists in Herstory: http://www.goddesscafe.com/FEMJOUR/femjour.html

• 2007 Katie Couric & CBS: http://www.nypost.com/seven/03152007/tv/couric_picks_up_speed_tv_adam_buckman.htm

WEEK 13. July 9th.Screening, part 2 of Wag the Dog (1997)

WEEK 14. July 16th

• Coverage: Reviews, Conlcusions, Extract Specials
• July 16th 1969, commemoration sequence of Apollo 11 launch
• Review of 1990s broadcast news insights - Bosnia, USA
• Review of film sequence from Deep Impact (1998)
• Final (!) FOX News Sequence, Guerilla Shopping & Bible sales, 2001
• The final sequence from the Heroes Charity, 2001: Hollywood sings farewell

• Links of the Week: http://www.corporatewatch.org/
• Excellent On-Line exhibition from the Museum of the Moving Image on the History of Televised Presidential Commericals entitled The Living Room Candidate, & running through 2008…
  Download

And as our course comes to a close, we note the contemporary relevance of our study: MSNBC makes its own news about the news….June 2007:

• http://zeitgeist.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2007/06/29/249575.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage

• And the You Tube recording of Mika Brezezinski’s on-air contention against the prevalence of celebrity WAS here, now deleted (!) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAcU3HSMKPU. Amongst other things, we can also consider the uncomfortable gender relationships that is also revealed in the exchange with her ‘fellow’ male leads.
• Here is the Act 2 follow-up report from MSNBC, as posted, again on YouTube and, again WAS here, since deleted…
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQAmMBQSLj4&mode=related&search=

• Finally, an excellent authoritative snapshot report of US Journalism/Media, 2007:
• http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2007/

AND: North American News Outlets and Related Government Websites from The Guardian, UK:

• http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldnewsguide/northamerica/0,,618255,00.html

ADIOS Amigos

For Details of 2007 Fall Term Seminar Programme, Hollywood on Hollywood, and Evening Screening Programme odf Documentaries, see:-

• http://kinowords.edublogs.org/jfk-fu-berlin/

Where to Now?

How About When Redford and Cruise came to visit us here in Berlin?:-

• http://wethemedia.edublogs.org/2007-lions-for-lambs/

END

 

Update October Bulletin & Film Review on The Berlin Premiere

“The Kino International Berlin on the Karl Marx Strasse - still rightly proud of housing one of the finest screens in Europe - was completed in 1963, the same year Robert Redford struck his first property claims in the Utah mountains and one year after Tom Cruise was born. In October 2007 both movie icons converged on the magnificent former GDR cinema showcase to attend a full evening’s exclusive premiere presentation of Redford’s latest directorial work, Lions for Lambs (2007) - as sponsored by Der Spiegel and the might of Hollywood synergies: 20th Century Fox, MGM, and Cruise’s own United Artists (Oct 23rd, 18.30-22.00).

The film was then followed by a podium discussion featuring Stefan Aust (Manager, Der Spiegel), Professor Heinrich August Winkler (Historian, Humboldt Berlin), Joschka Fischer (former Foreign Minister, Germany), and, sat between them, Mr. Redford himself.

Three hours before, though, the fresh October night was favourable to the hundreds of on-lookers who flanked the red carpet outside the International Kino, overseen by the Alexanderplatz TV Tower that glowed purple, gold and green in the Berlin night sky (original picture by author).

 

By 6. 40 Cruise, Forbes magazine’s most powerful world celebrity in 2006, was posing with his wife Katie Holmes for the bank of frantic camera personnel from Sat 1, Reuters, Spiegel, and Pro Sieben (right, orignial picture by author)

Studio Boss

When he and his production team as led by Paula Wagner arrived on stage to a packed audience at 7.50 empty beer bottles could be already heard underfoot clinking their way to the stage. Firstly, Cruise was quick to praise his director and co-producer, an artist and man he greatly “admired” and proud that their film together was the first off the block from the “new United Artists”, the company he bought soon after his 14 year relationship with Paramount was terminated in August 2006 by VIACOM CEO Sumner Redstone.

Studio Chief Cruise took the stage to kiss good-bye to Berlin where, for the last two months, he has been filming Valkyrie. Awkward press coverage on set accidents, injuries and location prohibitions were soon forgotten as he claimed to have “…studied and tried to understand the history of your country”, that it had been “a unique experience” and that he and his family were “…not ready to quite let go” of the city and the country that had been so hospitable. “When we leave tomorrow you will be missed” he made clear. With a warm applause and his prompt departure from the stage, the monumental silver laced curtains widened slowly and the celebrated trailers for News Corporation’s 20th Century Fox and MGM heralded the start of the film.

 

The Berlin event, then, following similar openings in New York and London, was more than just about a film. It was a statement of industry presence.

Redford in Reflective Mode

It easily escapes notice that despite the number and range of films (over 30) Redford has only directed himself in one other film - The Horse Whisperer of 1998. Now, at the age of 71, what fires the core conflict in his latest work centers upon the younger generation, which he feels, has been “distracted” by the onslaught of new technologies - the Internet and entertainment TV, he mentioned specifically as examples, and “for reasons we won’t go into tonight”. Concerns about the derelict state of U.S broadcast media, of course, are not new to Redford. Since producing and playing Bob Woodward in All The Presidents Men (1976) Redford has had a keen interest in the mix of corrupted politics and a failing standards in U.S news media.

In the seventies he depicted a noble presidential grassroots campaign ground down by polls, ratings and televisual good image (The Candidate, 1972), in the 1990s he undercut the seductions and subtle evasions of contemporary Reality TV in a retrospective unveiling of the NBC quiz show scandals of the late 1950s (Quiz Show, 1994); and two years later he played opposite Michelle Pfeiffer as the jaundiced cable news producer Warren Justice in Up, Close and Personal of 1996. The commercial pressure under which the former ace Washington D.C reporter must grudgingly operate - “if it bleeds it leads”- is a knowing measure of the failed aspirations of 1976 where two valiant underdog journalists (Woodward/Redford, Bernstein/Hoffman) were shown to be central in detonating the vilely corrupt Nixon administration.

 

Since then, as we know,  CBS is part of VIACOM, NBC belongs to General Electric and Disney owns ABC.

 

Answering the auteurist call, then, Redford, returns in Lions for Lambs (2007) to a theme he has been warming to for forty years - as hyphenate producer, director and actor in his own right. Again, according the genre, it’s the same tortured wrangling over media ethics, political deviations from truth, and played out against another foreign war.

As Redford acknowledged later, the film tries to tackle a central dramaturgical challenge, since there are “…very few films that use dialogue as a dynamic…(it was a) challenge to take the dialogue down to the bones”. This becomes increasingly apparent as the film crosscuts between two extended interview exchanges: in his California office Professor Stephen Lacey (Redford) tackles with the failing commitment of a promising student (British actor Andrew Garfield), while at the same time over in his Washington D. C office, Top Gun Senator Jasper Irving of West Point and Harvard (Cruise) attempts to convince broadcast journalist Janine Roth (Meryl Streep) of a new military initiative for Afghanistan - a story exclusive which she is expected to cover. What stitches these exchanges together is the third corner of the “triptych” (Redford), Irving’s military initiative now turning to disaster on a mountaintop in East Afghanistan. Here, African-American Arian (Derek Luke) and Hispanic-American Ernest (Michael Pena) and, as it happens, two of Lacey’s former students, are stranded Rangers fighting a nighttime contest against wounds, snow blizzards and the encircling Taliban. Within minutes, therefore, we are swiftly parachuted into the three main centres of power and influence that connect education, politics and media - the rich brew that, according the U.A marketing, generates Redford’s “wake-up call to America”.

Whatever  Happened to ‘Show, Don’t tell’?

Yet it soon becomes obvious, that’s where scriptwriter Mathew Michael Carnahan wants us to stay, and in a film, which for Redford, is designed to make us “stop and think”. However, the High Noon momentum (both office meetings are scheduled for an hour) is punctured by flashback scenes in classrooms, lecture rooms, and a restaurant, which leads to Lacey’s frustrated attempt to derail his student’s (respected) voluntary enlistment. These sequences, though crucial for the plot and the shading of Arian and Ernest, merely stagger the little progress that’s made on the West Coast - where Lacey now tries to engage with his student’s cynicism and on the East where Roth/Streep is confronted with her own complicity in the post 9/11 rush to war. The news media as a Windsack, as Irving caustically puts it.

The kaleidoscopic coverage of headline themes, the wasting consumer culture, political disengagement, news bias, Washington D. C ambitions, war as industry by other means, is for a brief moment lightened as we scan Irving’s office and zoom with Roth/Streep on a supportive press image of Irving/Cruise with Bush 43.

Despite such moments, the story as a drama quickly becomes a domestic labour of angst that, for two hours, entraps its audience in an extended trek through post-60s U.S cultural history, and with none of the sexy outtakes. The visceral effect of such claustrophobia is an ironic one, since while we remain genuinely concerned about the nighttime fate of Ernest and Arian on the other side of the world, tension is finally relieved in tracking Steep’s post-interview daylight escape into the Washington D.C streets. Look! Taxis, movement, air!

In fact, there was a point - perhaps twenty minutes into the film - when this writer put aside his notes (Acts 1, 2 and 3 were already demarcated but left blank) and closed his eyes. It was a useful test. The film ran perfectly well, in fact better. I wasn’t anchored to endless medium shots in Lacey’s agonized tutorial, I didn’t have to struggle with actor Streep as she dug (brilliantly) deeper into her limited role, nor have to admire Cruise mimic someone else’s smooth sell. The intractability of the rich but stodgy material was confirmed by Redford’s later acknowledgement that it “…was a difficult film to edit…difficult thing to work together“. This no doubt explained the special thanks to Oscar winner Walter Murch that is tucked way in the end titles. In hindsight, the grand location and honorific manner of the exclusive presentation in Berlin seemed bloated and inappropriate in the case of a film which tries nobly to be smaller, more intense and intimate than the combined studio marketing of Fox, MGM and U.A. would allow (in an effort to please everybody, the film’s protracted end credits - that might compare with those of Ben Hur (1959) - even include ‘Mr Cruise’s Bus Driver’).

Screenplay or Radio Script?

Despite post-production tinkering from the estimable Mr. Murch, Lions for Lambs (2007) remains an awkward display of strangled star turns that, despite grand marketing displays across the world are stuck in a constricted Hollywood production that, in another world, would otherwise easily pass as an excellent radio script.

Its advance to a workable film script would require, for example, a condensation of all present elements into what, in the old days, would be the five minute opening credit sequence. Mr Murch would ride supreme on that material. With the set up in place, we would then follow through to the Classic centre - the teaming of West Coast Professor Lacey and East Coast Journalist Roth and follow then their noble attempts to thwart the Presidential ambitions of Irving. But that might reek of John Grisham and the kind of film that Cruise might feel he needs to mature away from. Or, more positively, it would be suggestive of the old United Artists of Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin which, between 1955 and 1977, won 10 Best Picture Oscars and gave truly great character studies such as us High Noon, 1952: Marty, 1955; One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest, 1975; Network, 1976; and Raging Bull, 1980.

As it is, the present film has its eye on both keeping the Cruise/Wagner production budget within effective limits and following through with Mr Redford’s political commitments that value “Democratic values…of debate and dissent…” which, he emphasised at the beginning of his podium appearance, he has always “taken very seriously…” In this respect, at least, the new U.A shares a vital heritage with the old. As such, it could have been written by any one of the current crop of Democratic candidates - establishing its clear anti-war principles, while being pro-troops, and therefore, in its own way, pro-American.

On reflection, and in consideration of Redford’s disillusionment with news media and the current administration (“Anything but what we got now”), his film seems to attempt the kind of direct prolonged engagement with audiences that U.S. television used to champion as its prime remit. Networked points of stopping and thinking.

The Director in Berlin

The uncertain dramatic arc of the present film may have explained the audience’s respectful but limp applause at its falling end. They were expecting a second act. What we are left with is a young man with a decision to make. However, Redford’s spirited appearance on stage, dispelled any audience qualms about the film (in a surreal mirroring of the film itself, he and Cruise were choreographed separately across the evening, never actually appearing together).

Answering questions about the relevance of art in general, it could function, Redford said, “…as a translation of cultural situations…to put before the public issues that can be seem more clearly and more strongly…” Not that Redford is naïve about the power of film itself or art in general to change any status quo. Drawing on his own arc of realization that began with The Candidate (1972), Redford repeated earlier accounts on the failed ambitions of that film: that its message would have an impact, “As you see. No”.

Sitting forward towards the audience, Redford cast across his life - from World War 2, through the McCarthy Era, Vietnam, Watergate, Iran Contra to the present, and outlined his main aim in his present film…to make clear the “repeated pattern of the same mind set” at work. Since Sept 12th 2001, for example, “they were playing the fear card very heavily”.

Towards the end of the discussion, Redford tried to lighten the mood by suggesting that the only direct influence that film had was in the area of fashion - his Sundance moustache of 1968 became a celebrated example in what was obviously a patterned closing trope.

The savvy deflection towards self-mockery worked. On that engaging note, the bouquets arrived, thanks and plaudits were exchanged, and Mr Redford, renowned filmmaker, Oscar winner, environmentalist, political provocateur, inspiration, and actor edged through the assembling crowd to exit in a side door and back to Utah.

For this writer, Redford has taken a quick opportunity to make an eager righteous film, based on what could be a passable radio script, which would be more suitable for what used to be classic TV drama. And there might be something in this as Redford’s wary Professor Lacey finally closes to his demanding student and to the worldwide audience beyond the camera lens: “Here’s my last bid”, he says slowly, “ So bear with me”.

Hopefully, if reports are right, this won’t be the director’s last bid. A re-make of The Candidate (1972) is on the table, and, with the Presidential Elections of 2008 approaching, a timely opportunity for Redford to stake his claims on those genuine creative risks, which his own Sundance Institute expects of others. Looking to the enormous appreciation of the Berlin audience that applauded him back to Utah, there are many yet who will bear with him in such crucial times.

As for Cruise, the Berlin stage is now set for his coming Valkyrie, and as produced by a Wagner.

Coda

There is, however, room for reconsideration on Redford/Lacey’s extended scene with his intractable student. It’s a perspective that side bars the political discussions that attempt to frame the reception of the film, and which takes us back to the 1950s when Robert Redford, himself an 18 year-old, suddenly lost his mother. He quickly distracted into a binge of wasted years, a student of uncertain direction, a young man on the abyss. Crossing East Berlin following the screening of Lions for Lambs (2007) I wondered - and hoped - that the 71-year-old director had finally managed to connect with that young man who - like many today - so nearly lost his way”.

Original Publication here & YouTube Trailer

• http://www.weltexpress.info/index.php?artikel_id=64441&lan=en&rubrik=4

And the YouTube marketing push:

The “We, the media…”</