Reviews of "Greetings From Missile Street"
"This video makes it impossible for U.S. citizens to
avoid the painful reality that the policies of our
government are killing innocents in Iraq. The ugly
human toll of the supposedly benign sanctions policy
are revealed in Greetings From Missile Street.
Anyone who sees Tom Jackson's work and takes it to
heart will have to demand that the U.S. government
change its hypocritical policy."
Robert Jensen, author,
Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream
"Missile Street", like all great documentaries, is
not a propaganda film. We are simply, or not so
simply, there. We are there to see and understand on
our own the images and sounds emanating from the
high-tech box. The medium is not the message. Jackson
narrates the voice-over, but the predominate aural
memories are the voices of the American women from
Voices in the Wilderness who, while living under
sanctions, speak to the camera and describe and
reflect on what they see and experience. It is mostly
children they see, touch, and experience.
It is the images of the children that we, too, remember. The film displays the unspoken terror of parents who are helpless in the grip of forces so distant, so powerful, and so malevolent... Greetings From Missile Street has none of the visual terror which succeeds so well in Peter Davis' documentary of Vietnam, "Hearts and Minds." Much of the success of Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" derives from the black humor Moore extracts from the deepest recesses of Freud's dark, immoral and laughing id. For the viewer of "Missile Street" there is no such relief. Jackson's work is guerrilla filmmaking. It is clear why he names "Night and Fog," Alain Resnais' 1955 eviscerating exploration of guilt and responsibility for Auschwitz, as the greatest of the documentaries. Greetings From Missile Street is a hard film to watch. In a commentary on itself, one of the film's subtexts is the media and its effect and power. Returning home, I clicked through the TV. It was a very special night. I could have watched the "Victoria's Secret Special" or the stirring climax of "The Bachelor." The media is like most everything else. You have to work for what you get. It's never free. We are all paying a price. Charles Robinson, Capital Weekly, December 5, 2002
(Excerpts from a movie review of Greetings From Missile Street)
Greetings From Missile Street is a moving video that
puts a human face on the people of Iraq. Tom Jackson
shows us in powerful detail the human consequences of
the comprehensive sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990
and the ongoing consequences of the Gulf War. As
Greetings From Missile Street shows, the war has not
ended, and ordinary Iraqis -- not the regime -- are
paying the price. Jackson also shows us the brave work
of activists who are working to expose these important
truths and change US and UN policy. Greetings From
Missile Street should be widely watched by anyone who
wants to get behind the headlines to grasp the reality
of the war on Iraq.
Anthony Arnove is the editor of
Terrorism and War, a new collection of interviews with Howard Zinn, and Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War |