Commanding Heights - Movie Review Example

Commanding Heights Commanding heights (the battle of the world economy) is a documentary that goes for six hours from PBS; it helps educate the viewers about economics. It attempts to answer questions about: the varying ideologies concerning managing of the market, nature of the contemporary economy and strategies employed so as to reach the present economic state. The major drawback of this documentary is that there is a conflict of interest. Just to expound on that, if you watch a documentary sponsored by manufacturers of cigarette, do you think ideologies on preventive care and alternative medicine will be promoted? To add on that, consider this scenario, a documentary of cancer that is funded by manufacturers of cigarette, will you believe it fully? Then what you think about an economics documentary that is sponsored by large world corporations? From that, it can be concluded that although Commanding Heights is a PBS production, it is not objective and neutral. This can be demonstrated clearly as the first thing seen are the advertisements from the program corporate sponsors including British petroleum and the federal express. On further audit, it is crystal clear that one of the original funder of the documentary was Enron even after the company scandalous fall. This illustrates Commanding Heights is substantially a piece of propaganda for the world mega corporation as the financiers of the program have a major interest in advocating for pro-deregulation economic issues and Pro- big business. This series encompasses frustrating duality: it is informative on issues of the contemporary politics and history but apparently the bias not only on the choice of facts to present and not to present but also in the interpretation. Episode one, (the battle of ideas), examines two substantial competing ideologies about the economy of the world. Firstly it looks at the analogy of the free market as propagated by an economics theorist called Hayek. On the other hand, it looks at the concept of `planned economy’ as advocated by Keynes. It tracks how the ideological climate transitioned from one to the other over a century with corresponding impact on the policies of the government. The synopsis of the specific opinion of these two critical thinkers is the most crucial part of this episode while the evaluation of the advantages of these positions is the least important. The documentary repeatedly blurs the difference between economic and political systems. It implies that capitalism, communism and socialism are economic systems while fascism, democracy and totalitarianism are political systems. It is absolutely true that a layman would not differentiate the two but, on the other hand, a documentary investigating the world economy should provide more information concerning that. The bias is demonstrated clearly in this case because the flavor of capitalism is viewed as the sole genuine economic system of a free society and the flavor of capitalism is seen to be free market. Anything to do with socialism is consistent down played without a further research to find out its merits versus the free market capitalism. In the second episode of `Commanding heights’ called `The agony of reforms’, the documentary observes the countries of the world as they transition from planned centralized economies to less regulated free markets. `Battle of ideas’ majorly focuses on the United States and Britain, it also goes ahead to feature countries like India, Chile, Poland, the former Soviet Union and Bolivia, analyzing specific economic problems and adopted solution. The program achieves a true global picture although it consistently implies that market economies do better while being mute what exactly they are doing it better, limitations, assumptions and effects of the free market on the environment and society. The third episode is called `The new rules of the game’ attempts to address the nature of globalization and the economy of the world. However it does not elucidate whether globalization benefits the world in anything other than a form of cultural and economic imperialism from countries such as the United States. To add on that, the third episode does not take into consideration the fact that success the of a free market program such as NAFTA can be ascertained not only in the increase in trade but also its effect on welfare of workers, labor rights and the environment. Although this documentary in its third episode does its best to avoid clear bias, it significantly lacks a critical face in the material it is featuring and seriously annuls anything that will serve as solid evidence against its strong free market ideology. `Commanding heights’ is lively but leaves back questions begging for answers. It purports to expound on the secret of our new global economy but never provides substantial explanation as to how or why the various components of the economy work or how various approaches to managing the market influence the economy. Since the sponsors of this program portray conflict of interest, it gives their subjective thoughts hence providing the breadth instead of a true picture. Just like any other video that consists of previously existing footage, `commanding Heights’ faces the problem of unevenness in the quality of the video albeit it handles it well. The parts of the series that were filmed specifically for it are: clean, of quality of strong colors and noise free. The first episode contains a lot of older scenes which are in poor condition some of it dating as far back as 1910.The second and the third episodes are consistent because the scenes in it are much newer. Conclusively, the quality of the material is good with several distinct sources incorporated in the whole. The audio is quite nice since it strongly relates with the events in the various episodes so as to ensure viewer’s maximum concentration. The voices are clear and unique. The incidental sounds of the track gives an accurate feel of the various scenes that the series visits although the interview clips sounded a bit confusing at times especially the older material. The new interview material was more audible. The packaging of the disks is very attractive as they are nicely put in individual cases inside a light cardboard. The PBS website has detailed its special features in its website; this is irrelevant as it does not add quality to the program contents. The supplementary materials present in the discs are weak comprising only of short text sections. For text, the most excellent mode to use is a book (in this scenario, the obvious place is the original book that conceived the series). To add on that; a DVD is best appropriate for audio-visual supplements like filmed interviews, this lacks here. Commanding heights is a documentary that is attractive and excellently produced but it has a lot of misrepresentations, omissions, propaganda advocating for the interest of big businesses sponsoring the series rather than balanced and independent view of the topic. Work cited Holly. E. Orday. commanding heights:battle of the world economy. www.dvdtalk.com.1997. Web. 24 Apr. 2014. Read More