American Bisque - found footage no narration 3 hr political documentary

[joseph]

I haven't watched the whole thing but the chunks I've seen are the most bizarre audio/video combinations I've ever heard in my entire life!

 

The footage is horrifying, of course.

[Guest zaphod]

i will say that "some velvet morning" worked surprisingly well with the opening footage. i kind of skipped around after that, but i still think the techno tracks i heard were bizarre and seemed out of place. i dunno, it seems like including melancholy ambient music on the soundtrack is a very generic choice though, so maybe you're on to something? maybe it's just the wrong tracks. i'd have to watch the whole thing. did you include any muslimgauze? i feel like his music would be suitable for this kind of thing.

[awepittance]

no muslimgauze :( but zoviet france during another 'death reel' the sister segment to the Iraq one you watched for Afghanistan. Maybe an unnecessary rule but I didn't want to have any songs that were taken out of context in terms of the times being shown. I could have played some before the 9/11 part (pre 45 mins in) but I'd already chosen the songs before i started working on the movie. LFO became highly associated with the Clinton era for example.
part of the reason I chose the specific songs I did is because I wanted to bring myself back to those time periods as much as i could in my own headspace, and these are songs I was heavily listening to during each time period (of course I wasn't alive during nixon, lbj, ford or carter, nor was i listening to Skinny puppy or TG when i was 8 years old, but everything else fits with this

music in order of appearance

LBJ, Nixon Ford:
Lee Hazelwood/Nancy Sinatra
Wendy Carlos (3 songs in a row)

Carter &; Reagan
Throbbing Gristle

Bush1
Skinny Puppy

Clinton:
LFO
Plastikman

Bush 1
9/11:
Squarepusher
Download
Opiate/Alvo Noto
Afghanistan:
Nommo Ogo
Zoviet France
Iraq:
Autechre
Mika Vaino (2 songs in a row)
Scorn (2 songs in a row)
AFX (3 songs in a row
2008 elections:
Dopplereffekt
Bass Clef

Obama:
Autechre
2562 (2 songs in a row
fluorescent grey
VHS Head (2 songs in a row
The Tuss
Oneohtrix Point Never
Machinedrum

the movie as a whole serves several functions. One it could be seen as just a way to re-live the trauma and abuse the US government and the mainstream media leveled upon us as a society. It also illustrates how incremental shifts happened that lead us to where we are today, and also what caused those incremental shifts. For example how Richard Reed aka the Shoe Bomber started a series of seemingly small increased security measures in reaction, followed by the liquid bomb terror plot and the underwear bomber.A few other subjects are covered that I think get very little attention, and I spent a lot of time digging for new and mostly un-seen clips to emphasize these. During the middle section of the movie especially I focus on how the event (9/11) that caused such a drastic change in direction by the US and the world in general was never even given a proper investigation and that the Bush administration tried at every opportunity to stop one from happening. One it did happen the hearings were occurring at the same time as the initial stages of Iraq (taking the media focus completely away from them in the process). After that I try to show how the Anthrax attacks took terrorism fears to totally new level, and how it was directly used to drum up support for invading Iraq in 2003.

[4d0]

music at 13' is too loud

[4d0]

tuss tracks are too loud
boston bombing track is too loud

seems like you are jumping from from one point to another without a lot of consistency...

...also ~10sec of your sister? wtf? half of this should be clips of her.

[awepittance]

seems like you are jumping from from one point to another without a lot of consistency...

that's because the format is very strictly sticking to a chronological timeline maybe sometimes at it's detriment to create a specific narrative, it's meant to jar your memory of events more than anything else. The 'points' are your own to interpret

[4d0]

Maybe there are no video clips of things I've read somewhere so it seems to me that there are some gaps. ...for example you showed opium farms but not included weed farms. ...also you haven't included domestic drone use. ...G20 should also be included because most of the mercenaries were probably from the US.

...or maybe I don't remember correctly.

[awepittance]

true, i did miss a lot of stuff. but if i tried to cram more stuff in there the narrative i think would be even less coherent. The one thing I really didn't intend to miss but couldn't find enough media coverage on was the creation of Gitmo.
Surprisingly the TSA, homeland security and GItmo as being post 9/11 creations happened with such little resistance that it wasn't heavily news worthy or controversial. Weed farms in Afghanistan aren't really a big deal to me, the black market for marijuana is not nearly as profitable and tied into corporations and banks for money laundering like opium and heroin.
I think the whole opium angle is a more interesting one because since Vietnam, there have been plenty of stories of the military and cia being involved in the black market drug trade especially heroin even if it's just to create money off the books to fund militias and stuff like that. Pharmaceutical companies can also legally purchase opium from places where it isn't overtly illegal like Nepal. IT's easier to manufacture drugs like Hydrocodone when you have a naturally available very pure precursor like Opium. There are so many other things I could have included. Maybe I will for the sequel.

I've just made a much shorter film about 30 minutes long focusing on the 2001 Anthrax attacks, set to mostly ambient music if anyone is interested i'll send a private link. The anthrax story is a fascinating one because A) it was an inside job, and the US government tried to paint it as being a 2nd wave of al qaeda attacks for years even though they knew the anthrax came from their own bioweapons lab B) Some anonymous people in the US government used several well placed reporters in the media to spread lies about the Anthrax being from Saddam Hussein C) the first man they targeted who was a suspect won a 6 million dollar lawsuit against the federal government for harassment, the 2nd man committed suicide while under 24/7 surveillance by the FBI who was trying to 'break him' psychologically into confessing. The FBI later passed on their 'case' to the national institute of science who basically said the FBI's investigation has zero physical or forensic evidence to tie the anthrax letters to Bruce Ivins (the man who is now dead and cant defend himself).

[4d0]

Send me a link, please.
I was going to suggest that, it would be better to make more shorter videos, with more info and less dispersion. ... with topics like alCIAda and other groups created by usgov/cia, drones, war on drugs/herbs, war on guns, ect.
You should also put screenshots of press articles with bolded key phrases or something like that, because (as you know, so I don't know why I'm writhing this, maybe because I haven't slept for more than 24 hours and I'm heading to work in 15min) not everything ends up on tv.
I would gladly help, but I lost thousands of articles, because of firefox update some time ago, when they figured out that it would be good to delete peoples browsing history with the new update, or maybe it was my fault for using browsing history as bookmarks.