By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
UK docmaker John Pilger on why millions of Americans display such a chronic ignorance of other human beings
In the midst of a retro at London’s Barbican, UK journo and doc maker John Pilger rues the televisual corporate lack of interest in politidocs the public would want to see in the Guardian: “The political documentary, that most powerful and subversive medium, is said to be enjoying a renaissance… This may be true in the cinema but what of television, the source of most of our information? Like the work of many other documentary film-makers, my films have been shown all over the world, but never on network television in the US. That suppression of alternative viewpoints may help us understand why millions of Americans display such a chronic ignorance of other human beings,” he writes. 
“I learned my own lessons about the power of documentaries and their censorship in 1980, when I took two of my films, Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia and Cambodia Year One, to the US in the naive belief that the networks would want to air these disclosures of Pol Pot’s rule and its aftermath. All those I met were eager to buy clips that showed how monstrous the Khmer Rouge were, but none wanted the equally shocking evidence of how three US administrations had colluded in Cambodia’s tragedy; Ronald Reagan was then secretly backing Pol Pot in exile. Having bombed to death hundreds of thousands of Cambodians between 1969 and 1973 – the catalyst for the rise of the Khmer Rouge, according to the CIA – Washington was imposing an economic blockade on the most stricken country on earth, as revenge for its liberation by the hated Vietnam. This siege lasted almost a decade and Cambodia never fully recovered. Almost none of this was broadcast as news or documentary.” A PBS senior exec “proposed that PBS hire an “adjudicator” who would “assess the real public worth of your films”. Richard Dudman, a journalist with the rare distinction of having been welcomed to Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge, was assigned the task. In his previous Cambodia dispatches, Dudman had found people “reasonably relaxed” and urged his readers to look “on the bright side”. Not surprisingly, he gave the thumbs down to my films. Later, the PBS executive phoned me “off the record”. “Your films would have given us problems with the Reagan administration,” he said. “Sorry.” More worthy fear and loathing at the link, including recommendations of current films and filmmakers; details on the retro at Barbican website.
