CANNES
2002
MICHAEL
MOORE SUGGESTS BOWLING EFFECT ON AMERICAN CONSCIENCE
It
is a great merit of Cannes Festival this year to include
in the competition a revealing and breathtaking film - the
documentary "Bowling for Columbine", by Michael
Moore, about the frightening cult to fire arms in American
society.
Moore
is the proof that there are intelligent life and active
voices against the Bush government. In his interview at
the Festival, he asked recent history to be observed and
noticed how fascists conquered by disseminating fear and
the need to have more and better security. The motto, by
the way, of election campaigns in Brazil.
Michael
Moore is known for his method of persecuting news and transform
in revealing facts event the negatives of interviews he
tries to do with controversial characters. If, for example,
one imminent personality denies an interview to him, this
fact in itself becomes news in his films. The inventive
idea started with his documentary "Roger and Me",
from 1989, a pursuit to the great executive at General Motors,
after his positions about ascendant profit curves against
crowds of unemployed workers.
This
is the cynical ironic, corrosive, implacable, reflexive,
unsubmissive, provoking filmmaker, who makes one of the
best uses of the critical and combative press. All that
is usually missing in most of the TV 'talk shows' around
the world.
"Bowling
for Columbine" doesn't betray Moore's inventive genius.
His untiring camera tries to understand why American society
is so armed and kills itself so much. His research sums
up to 11.127 murders in 2001 in the USA. There are more
in Brazil, even though the filmmaker concentrates in the
indexes of richer countries. According to this research,
the USA would be the champions, against 'only' 165 mortally
shot in the neighbor Canada, where he also finds out, appalled,
that no one sleeps at home with locked doors.
His
film starts by showing that to have a rifle, one of the
most sophisticated and lethal weapons, one has simply to
go to the Michigan Bank and open an account. The client,
instead of leaving the bank with credit cards, does it holding
a rifle. Even Moore disbelieves the fact.
His
investigation searches for the reason why two scholars killed
12 classmates and one teacher at Columbine High School in
Littleton, Colorado in April 1999. Coincidentally, he remembers,
the day of the heaviest American bombing in Kosovo; yet
coincidentally, the same area employs five thousand people
in the production of heavy bellicose arsenal, including
nuclear material.
Moore
makes his camera violate the orderly departments in local
supermarkets where teenagers take care of the armors counters.
He also goes to the eye of the tragedy in Flint, Michigan,
where a six year-old (black) boy shot to death a (blond)
classmate. He also goes together with two teenagers, survivors
of the Littleton tragedy to the K-Mart department store
after the owner, who, of course, won't receive him. But
so much he insists, and registers it with the cameras, to
speak to someone in charge of the store, that he manages
to get from them the commitment to stop selling ammunition
within 90 days.
Michael
Moore's tour as a guerrilla reporter around America, which
makes a great fetish of guns, includes the covering of former
actor Charton Heston's campaigns as the president of NRA
- National Rifle Association, acting for the gun manufacturers
and traders lobby. Again by coincidence, Moore reveals that
Heston made ostensive campaign for the right of being armed
in the USA, distorting even the second correction to the
country's constitution, in Flint and Littleton right after
the school tragedies. By mere chance the film ends with
an interview with the villain, Charlton Heston, who innocently
receives the reporter's staff in his mansion in Hollywood.
Where he plays outraged, denying to answer the questions.
Moore
gets to scary conclusions with his documentary. He brings
up that American history has always been built on the idea
of fearing one another. The TV news is daily distorted in
the suggestion of black suspects of crimes in the agenda.
That the USA, playing the world's sheriff, promotes absurd
slaughtering by intervening in the intern policy of countries
all over the world: Iran, Nicaragua, Chile, (Brazil), Panama,
Afghanistan, Iraq etc. That the USA have a secular tradition
of solving its differences with the voce of the weapons.
All
that said by a thinking American citizen is a blessing to
our confused days, so full of war speeches in behalf of
the borderless combat to terrorism. One must also remember
that this brilliant reporter, more of a journalism teacher
than any academic theory, has at the moment the number 1
best seller on the American book shelves ('Jornal da Mostra'
n° 65) - the equally brilliant "Stupid White Men",
where the stupid in the title is president Bush. In his
interview in Cannes Michael Moore revealed that the first
50 thousand edited books would be incinerated by its publisher
decision after the paranoid of the September 11 attacks.
And that it came to the readers thanks to a massive campaign
by the librarians net through Internet. Bravo to reasoning.
Grande
mérito do Festival de Cannes este ano por incluir na competição
o filme revelador e estonteante - o documentário "Bowling
for Columbine", de Michael Moore, sobre o assustador culto
às armas de fogo na sociedade americana.
