Sunday, May 3, 2009

Let’s Make Money (Director: Erwin Wagenhofer): In 2005, I saw Wagenhofer’s We Feed the World (review), which was about the impact of glob­al­iz­a­tion on food pro­duc­tion. Here the dir­ector turns his typ­ic­ally dis­pas­sionate eye to the world of fin­ance. As in his pre­vious film, he takes us on a global tour, shooting in vivid widescreen 35mm. Along the way, he lets his inter­view sub­jects define the tenets of neo-liberal eco­nomics: dereg­u­la­tion of fin­an­cial mar­kets, lib­er­al­iz­a­tion of trade, reduc­tion in the power of the state, and privat­iz­a­tion of state-owned resources. He’s not an active pres­ence in the film, and although he lets sub­jects from all sides of the issues speak, it’s in his editing and struc­turing of the film where his per­spective comes through. For instance, after hearing from the German owner of a fab­ric­ating plant in India, we cut to a scene of a bill­board advert­ising products for a European com­pany. Under the bill­board are the shacks of people too poor to ever afford these products. Wagenhofer lays out a very clear scen­ario where money is extracted from coun­tries in the so-called “emer­ging mar­kets” to enrich the already-wealthy “investors” from the West.

In Burkina Faso, the biggest export is cotton, a crop which leaves the soil unsuit­able for growing any­thing else, including food. As a local pro­duc­tion man­ager explains, Burkina Faso could sup­port itself on its cotton exports alone if the US gov­ern­ment didn’t sub­sidize its own cotton farmers. He com­plains that the West preaches free mar­kets but then prac­tices pro­tec­tionism at home. The only other work in Burkina Faso is breaking rocks at a quarry, making the country look like a cross between a slave plant­a­tion and a prison chain gang.

Another start­ling seg­ment is set in the southern region of Spain, the so-called Costa del Sol. Despite the desert cli­mate, thou­sands of new apart­ments are being built around new golf courses. Since there is very little rain, these golf courses need to be con­stantly irrig­ated with massive amounts of water, even though hardly anyone in Spain plays golf. Worst of all, since these apart­ments are being sold as invest­ment prop­er­ties, many are being pur­chased by large pen­sion funds. Local people simply can’t afford them. The end result is that nobody is living in them. In some sweeping heli­copter shots, we see empty apart­ments cov­ering huge swathes of pre­vi­ously unspoiled coast­line. At the end of the film, we’re informed that there are three mil­lion of these empty apart­ments in Spain.

For the most part, the “talking head” inter­views are filmed in unusual places, making them visu­ally inter­esting. Development eco­nomist John Christensen is filmed on a beach in Jersey, where he was born, explaining how Jersey and other small places like it have become home to off­shore trusts, a method for cor­por­a­tions to avoid tax and hide the origin of their profits. Former “eco­nomic hit man” John Perkins appears to be walking through a jungle as he explains his own pred­atory past.

All in all, Wagenhofer has cre­ated another com­pel­ling exam­in­a­tion of forces that can often seem imper­sonal and impen­et­rable. The level of craft in his work is remark­able and he’s not afraid to put his camera in unex­pected pos­i­tions to make his points visu­ally as well as with words. If I have one cri­ti­cism, it’s that the film, at 107 minutes, is per­haps 20 minutes too long. This sort of expos­i­tion, no matter how beau­ti­fully and clearly presented, does tend to require a bit of time to pro­cess, and I think keeping this under 90 minutes would have given it more impact. At its cur­rent length, it would be easier to digest on a smaller screen. Making one of the sequences an extra on the DVD ver­sion seems like a good idea to me.

Official site of the film (in German)

(8/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs09, economics, finance, globalization

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