Documentary evidence

Cath Clarke talks to campaigning filmmaker John Pilger as a retrospective of his work comes to the Barbican.

Sep 18 2006

It's 1970 and a grunt, one of America's teenage Vietnam conscripts, is talking to John Pilger for a documentary. He tells Pilger what happens to unpopular officers. 'Mostly, from what I heard, if they mess with the grunt too much, they get shot.' Today, the film's images of hippie soldiers with their love beads and peace signs is as iconic of the late '60s as the Snoopy cartoon drawn on the side of a tank. But the frankness of these soldiers talking openly about murdering their superiors still shocks to the core.

The half-hour programme, 'The Quiet Mutiny' exposed the subordination of the first generation who would not be told. It was Pilger's first documentary and it provoked a furious response from the head of the Independent Television Authority when it aired on ITV. 'He called me a "bloody dangerous subversive",' says Pilger. 'I must say I didn't realise at the time what an honour he was bestowing.' But he adds: 'Within a few months, the story was standard throughout the mainstream media.'

Over the last 30 years, Pilger has made over 50 documentaries for television, from East Timor, Vietnam, Iraq, Israeli occupied Palestine, and the Chagos Islands. Back in 1970, in khakis and with a sheet of sun-bleached hair, Pilger could have passed for one of the long-haired grunts he was interviewing. Today, in his cream suits, hair still long, he looks like an affable cricket commentator. The films have a common theme, he says. 'The struggle of ordinary people against power and for genuine freedom.' He calls these people 'unworthy' victims, ignored by the mainstream media.

Most forgotten of all, and disgracefully so, are the people of the Chagos Islands. In his 2004 film, 'Stealing a Nation', we hear from the islands' inhabitants, who in the '60s and '70s were tricked into leaving and later expelled from their homes by the British government. The chief island in the archipelago, Diego Garcia, was given to America as a military base, while its people languished, and still do, in the slums of Mauritius. Diego Garcia has since been used as a staging post in attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan and the case declared 'a crime against humanity' by the International Criminal Court. In Pilger's film, a Chagos woman tells the camera how her baby died of 'sadness', common among the exiles, along with suicide. And yet when did Diego Garcia last feature in a news report?

It's a sign of Pilger's pulling-power that the Barbican has programmed a week-long John Pilger Film Festival, where the director will introduce screenings and take part in an on-stage discussion with Ken Loach. There are still those who argue that he's a dangerous subversive. For his part, Pilger says the criticism doesn't even touch the sides anymore. 'If my work is attacked by apologists for New Labour or by Bushists, I consider it a badge of honour. I would be concerned if they didn't attack it.'

Watching a selection of his films, 12 of which have just been released as a DVD box-set, it's clear his is the antithesis of soundbite television. Pilger gives his subjects time to speak, with moving results. In his 2003 film 'Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on Terror', an Afghan woman, Orifa, explains how she picked bits of her daughter's flesh from the floor after her home was bombed by an American plane. Pilger has an acute skill for crystallising overwhelming scales of tragedy into memorable images or moments. Standing in a field of makeshift graves for 'Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy' (1994) he calls East Timor, where 200,000 of the population were wiped out by neighbouring Indonesians, 'a country of crosses'. In the same film he visits 'a village of widows'. 'There were 5,000 calls a minute from the public at the end of the programme. This went on until after midnight,' Pilger says of the response to the film, which he argues put the lie to the assumption of viewers' compassion fatigue. In an article on his website (well worth a visit) he writes of the response to his 1979 film 'Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia'. The film was a cry for international aid in the wake of the devastation wrought by Pot Pot. What followed was an overwhelming response from the public. A bus driver from Bristol sent a week's wages with a note: 'This is for Cambodia'.

Pilger's latest film, 'The War on Democracy', is his first for cinema, a symbol, perhaps, of our growing appetite for documentaries at the movies. Times have changed, and you can bet there won't be a New Labour minister as candid as Alan Clark talking about East Timor in Pilger's 1994 film, 'Death of a Nation Conspiracy'. 'What is it that's so dreadfully special about East Timor to the people here?' asks the former defence minister in the same government that armed Indonesia to suppress tiny East Timor. Later in the same interview Clark sniggers like a schoolboy when Pilger asks him if animals are more important than foreigners (Clark was a campaigning vegetarian). 'Alan Clark was a manipulative character, but, compared with the Blair gang, he was honest,' says Pilger. 'He was proud to say what he said.'

The John Pilger Film Festival is at the Barbican from Sept 14-21. The DVD collection, 'John Pilger: Documentaries that Changed the World' is available now. See also www.johnpilger.com.

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