DOCUMENTARY
Control Room
Inside Al Jazeera on the eve of the Iraq war
| Control Room: |
The backdrop is the United States’s fraught plunge into war with Iraq. But it is the characters — in both senses of the word — who dominate the documentary film Control Room. Among them is Hassan Ibrahim, a veteran Sudanese journalist for the Al Jazeera Satellite Network, who makes no secret of his disdain for U.S. adventurism. The United States is basically a big bully that wants desperately to be liked, “to have [its] cake and eat it,” too, Ibrahim says. The U.S. can certainly decimate the Arab world with its military might, he adds sardonically, but “don’t ask us to love it as well.”
Samir Khader, a senior producer for the controversial Arab network, is an equally complex figure, motivated by an apparent mix of cynicism and idealism. “You can’t wage a war without news, without media, without propaganda,” he declares. Khader presses for war coverage that emphasizes its human toll, including casualties inflicted on Iraqi women and children. Nevertheless, the Iraqi-born journalist later confesses that he dreams of moving to America. “Between us,” he says, “if I am offered a job with Fox, I will take it.”
These vignettes lend Control Room an endearing quirkiness that has no doubt contributed to its popularity on the film-festival circuit. But they also underline director Jehane Noujaim’s humanistic message — about the elusiveness of objectivity, the validity of clashing points of view, and the urgent need for the Arab world and the United States to find common ground. A film essay by a journalistic outsider, Control Room focuses on both control of the news and, ironically, lack of control — most evident in the tragic bombing death of an Al Jazeera Baghdad correspondent who may or may not have been targeted by U.S. forces.
Noujaim, a young Egyptian-American filmmaker best known for co-directing Startup.com, majored in both visual arts and philosophy at Harvard, and Control Room is at least partly an epistemological meditation. At its heart is the Qatar-based and financed network that, in its eight brief years of existence, has managed to enrage both Arab dictators (who have frequently censored and suppressed it) and top U.S. officials. In Control Room, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is a recurrent hectoring presence, scoring Al Jazeera for “playing propaganda” and neglecting the truth about U.S. involvement in Iraq.
Al Jazeera’s version of the truth has unquestionably won it a big following — 35 million or more viewers — on the so-called Arab street, symbolized in the film by the coffee houses of Doha, Qatar. Launched by former BBC employees, the network, as seen through Noujaim’s lens, defies easy categorization. It features decidedly untraditional female anchors and producers in Western dress, simultaneously translated interviews with non-Arab sources, and a panoply of grisly and unsettling images generally eschewed by the U.S. media: of injured Iraqis, dead U.S. soldiers, and dazed U.S. POWs. Noujaim offers no narration, but her view seems clear enough: If Al Jazeera is biased, its biases are certainly no worse, and no less understandable, than the nationalistic biases of Fox News and other U.S. outlets.
Control Room benefits enormously from timing and access, even as events continue to outrun it. With the help of executive producer Abdallah Schleifer, a Cairo-based journalist, the Arabic-speaking Noujaim talked her way into both Al Jazeera headquarters and U.S. Central Command (CentCom) on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. At CentCom, she shows U.S. journalists obediently scribbling down the latest pronouncements by the spinmeisters of the military. But she also captures the restiveness and skepticism of correspondents such as Tom Mintier of CNN and David Shuster of NBC News, as military officials puff up the Jessica Lynch rescue story, obfuscate details of the invasion, and insist that the Iraqis see U.S. forces as liberators.
One of the film’s central characters is Lieutenant Josh Rushing, an earnest and likable U.S. press officer charged with dealing with the Arab media. As Rushing argues with Al Jazeera’s Ibrahim, he struggles to hold his own against a more sophisticated adversary. At times, he is candid enough to admit his own pro-American biases, even if he can’t fully surmount them. (If he did, he’d probably have to start looking for another job.)
I first saw Control Room in April at the Philadelphia Film Festival, with an enthusiastic, partisan, university audience that groaned each time Rumsfeld made his pronouncements. I watched it again on video in May, as the nightmarish images from the cells of Abu Ghraib played incessantly on U.S. broadcasts and President Bush tried to exercise damage control by addressing Arab audiences. One can imagine the cynicism among Al Jazeera journalists deepening into disgust, as they strive to report on torture, scandal, and continuing violence in Iraq with the “objectivity, integrity and balance” their Web site promises.
It’s not surprising that Noujaim, who told the Philadelphia festival audience that she began the film with curiosity and ended with more questions than answers, has herself been accused of bias. But the eighty-four-minute film’s more crucial faults are really its elisions and omissions, among them its failure to flesh out its distinctive characters. Why is it only in interviews and press handouts that we discover that Rushing once worked for the military in Hollywood, negotiating script content with studios? Or that the Saudi-educated Ibrahim was once a classmate of Osama bin Laden? These are details fit for a Hollywood movie.
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