The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

The lights go down in the courtroom, a 16-millimeter projector shoots out its beam, and into the trial blazes evidence of an unprecedented nature: not a report of criminal events but the crime itself, stored on film and now released again into the world. Strange to think that only seventy years have passed since Fritz Lang imagined this moment in Fury. Lang was arguably more sophisticated than anyone now alive about camera tricks and propaganda -- he'd led the world in deploying special effects, and had been offered the cordial support of Goebbels himself (in response to which he had fled Germany); and yet, as his first artistic act in America, Lang told a story about the reality of filmed images and their liberating potential. Who among us today would second him? We live in the era of asymptotic prophecy: The truth, which we'll never arrive at, would make us something like free.

Here, though, are two people who share Lang's faith: the Irish filmmakers Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain. In their thoroughly remarkable documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, they show how a critical public event was seen in three different segments of the moving-image media. The event was the coup in April 2002 against Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez, and its abrupt failure. The media in question are Venezuela's privately owned television stations, which fomented the seizure of power and tried to sustain it; the state-run television station, which helped break the coup, serving at a key moment as the sole link between the besieged presidential palace and the outside world; and the Bartley-O'Briain documentary itself.

Whether the filmmakers intended the truthfulness of their own work to be questioned, I can't say. I suspect, in fact, they did not. Bartley and O'Briain had come to Caracas in autumn 2001 to film a profile of Chávez -- a profile that he must have thought would be admiring, since he gave them access to the Miraflores Palace and his presidential plane. They recorded his rallies, his visits to the rural poor and his weekly call-in television program. They interviewed Chávez supporters in the ranchos, those makeshift neighborhoods that rim the basin of Caracas, where shanties are piled up by the thousands like teetering stacks of broken crockery; they went into the whitewashed apartment blocks of the central city, where Chávez's opponents warned one another to beware their domestic servants and be prepared to use firearms. It looks to me as if Bartley and O'Briain were gathering material to portray Chávez as a popular and fundamentally democratic leader, who champions the impoverished majority and stands up to the oligarchs, at home and in Washington. I'm not saying this reading of the situation is wrong, just that the filmmakers must have been inclined from the outset to believe it. They found scenes (no doubt plentiful) to confirm their opinion.

Then events gave them more urgent scenes, which transformed their project from a reasoned polemic into the documentation of a crime. In early April 2002, they recorded the inflammatory broadcasts on private television that threatened Chávez with a coup, provoking his supporters to gather outside the Miraflores Palace and helping to rally an opposition march. Soon after, Bartley and O'Briain were on the spot when the march approached the palace, and snipers suddenly opened fire on the Chávez supporters. The ensuing gunfight produced images, repeatedly broadcast on private Venezuelan television and reported in the United States, that seemed to show Chávez's irregulars shooting from a bridge at unarmed protesters below. Bartley and O'Briain have telltale footage that wasn't broadcast or reported: images that show there were no marchers under the bridge, but that the Chávez gunmen, in between taking shots, were cowering under fire.