You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Gonna be some sweet sounds coming down

So, my first day back at work - I felt a bit bad, since I was a half-hour later than I meant to be. (I went over to borrow the parents' van, only to find that the battery was dead. What is it with me and vehicles at the moment anyway?) As it turns out, I needn't have worried - they needed me to change the FileMaker passwords, which means tediously trawling though about seventy files and fiddling with them using a clunky GUI after everyone has gone. I popped out to get the car from the garage and have some dinner about six, got back at eight, and then was at work until half-past midnight. And then I had to make sure that I got in around eight this morning, since I was the only one who knew what the passwords had been changed to.

Bah. FileMaker administration is the bane of my existence.

On the plus side, I got to have dinner with my flatmates, something that I hadn't managed for several days. It's nice to occasionally bump into them. :)

***

Okay, I missed out Control Room last time - which is a pity, since it was an excellent documentary. It's hard to tell if it was balanced, but it certainly felt balanced, and you'd expect that if the station had an axe to grind it would spill over in the documentary. The very fact that they had woman presenters and journalists suggests to me that they can hardly be the fundamentalist hard-liners that some reports have implied them being. It was interesting how the US Army liason officer moved from being somewhat hostile to viewing them as "like Fox, but from the other perspective" during the course of the documentary; from what was presented, they seemed a lot closer to CNN than Fox. :)

Also in the international relations basket, The Battle For Algiers was an interesting one. Made in 1966, only four years after Algeria got independence, it sends a weird mixture of signals. For example, we start with the French army having tortured the location of the last of the rebels out of a Algerian; but we see the Algerian rebels murdering policemen numerous times, and policemen saving Algerians from mobs of angry Frenchmen. We also see how differently the Algerians and French are treated at checkpoints, but also how the rebels use the fact that the French won't touch their women to smuggle things through the checkpoints. The head of the army who is brought in to crush the rebellion admits that he'll use toture to root out the rebels, but he was a member of the Resistance, and is shown allowing his most influencial prisoner to talk to the press. (However, it's implied that the prisoner may have been murdered later.) The only "evil" thing that we actually see on-screen is a group of French citizens secretly planting a bomb next to a bulding; but in contrast, we see the faces of the people that the Algerians later bomb.

It made me think of the Citizen King documentary - King's struggle to find a non-violent solution, especially. And Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion, and the Dhalai Lama's struggle with the Chinese authorities. I'd like to believe that the Algerians were wrong, and they could have eventually rid themselves of the French by politely and consistently asking them to leave; but I'm afraid that it might not be true, just as it's not really been true in these two examples.

To talk about these two films quickly - the Tibetian film was engaging, and seemed to cover the material pretty well; I feel that I have a better idea of why the Chinese are so intent on keeping it, and how the whole "Tibetans in India" thing works. I wonder whether there are interesting parallels to be drawn with the Cubans in the US?

Citizen King I really enjoyed. The director was there, and he was intelligent and articulate; I got a much better idea of how King and the movement he headed fit in with the general civil rights movement, as well as the kind of man he was. I would say it was one of the better documentaries I saw.

***

I'll post my flight plan tonight.

Posted by svend at August 3, 2004 12:04 PM