On DVD: The Panama Deception

Directed By: Barbara Trent

Written and Edited By: David Kaspar

 

An Academy award winning documentary critical of the reasons and conduct of the U.S. invasion of Panama to oust Manuel Noriega the dictator of Panama who was originally supported by the C.I.A. 

 

The Movie

 

There are as many reasons to make a documentary as there are documentaries. I want to share this cool person I've met, place I've been, historical fact I've found.  I'm bored lets make a documentary. I want to win an award at a film festival. One reason is just as good as another. No matter how vain and shallow, or noble the intentions, the documentary will stand on it's own. The success of a documentary is tied up in why it was made. If you make a documentary because you want to share with the whole world this weird little town you got stuck in for a night when your car broke down, you could measure the success of that documentary by how many people saw it and ended up also wanting to visit that weird little town. If you make a documentary because your bored and want to get out and do something, the success of the documentary would simply be, did you get out and do something and was it less boring than doing nothing?

 

The reason I'm going into all of this is because I'm trying to figure out whether or not The Panama Deception is a good documentary or not. And what I'm figuring out is that it all comes down to the intentions of Barbara Trent who directed it and David Kaspar who wrote and edited it. It won an Academy Award for Best Documentary of 1992 so that's a pretty good argument that it is successful, but I think it all hinges on the intentions of Barbara Trent and David Kaspar. Were they just preaching to the choir or were they actually trying to change peoples minds about the U.S. Invasion of Panama to get rid of Noriega. If they were just preaching to the choir the documentary is undoubtedly a success. The Academy Award proves that their peers thought it was great. And when it comes to execution they are correct. It is well put together. It weaves news footage and interviews to create a narrative that tells the story of the involvement of the United States in the Panama region going back to when it was still a part of Columbia and through the aftermath of the invasion and the installment of what the filmmakers consider a puppet government in Panama. On the other hand if their goal was to bring around people like me who think that the invasion of Panama was justified, they have failed miserably.

 

War sucks. Innocent people including children and the elderly get killed in war. Buildings which are peoples homes and sources of income get destroyed in war. Young men with weapons in their hands sometimes do terrible things under levels of stress that most people couldn't comprehend. I knew this before I watched this documentary. Seeing more footage of dead bodies in the street, burned out buildings, crushed cars and crying babies and children huddled in refugee camps doesn't change the fact that war is sometimes necessary.  What really galls me though is the implication that every bad thing that happened in the invasion was attributable to the U.S. Forces. I'm not naive enough to believe that every bullet fired by an American soldier hits a bad guy but  never once is the possibility raised, which seems much more likely to me, that the atrocities discussed were perpetrated by Panamanian forces loyal to Noriega. Actually just from watching the documentary you don't get the impression that there was any real fighting at all, we just came in and indiscriminately started bombing and shooting up the place.

 

The only counter point in the whole film comes from bits and pieces from a couple of interviews with pentagon spokespersons who get less than ten minutes of the entire hour and a half running time. The whole thing comes across as the typical, “America sucks”, “I hate (this time “Herbert Walker” as opposed to “W”) Bush , we should listen more to the U.N. claptrap. It's easy to preach to the choir, it's a couple of orders of magnitude more difficult to get someone to even reconsider his or her position let alone change their mind. I've come to the conclusion that the filmmakers were just preaching to the choir, the documentary is just not put together in a way to change a persons mind.  To change a person's mind you have to get inside his or her head a little bit. You have to understand where he or she is coming from if you want to change his or her destination. You can't change someone's mind by just showing one side of an argument. You have to persuade not cudgel. Barbara Trent and David Kaspar didn't do this, everything was presented from one point of view with minimal counter point and they tried to use shocking images of death, destruction and grief to emotionally browbeat you into their way of thinking. In short they're preaching to the choir, but what's the point of that, it changes nothing.  You might as well sit around the kitchen table and shovel bravo sierra with friends or family all night long, but the Academy doesn't hand out Oscars for that.

 

So I guess I would have to say the by the intentions of the filmmakers this is a successful documentary, but I'm still going to give it a three.

 

3/10

 

The Video

 

The video is quite good considering the source materials. This documentary was produced in 1992 and consists of video taken at the time of the invasion and immediately after. There are numerous examples of blooming and other artifacts and the graphics date the documentary, but it's kind of silly to fault the documentary for that. It's a documentary after all. The extras produced for the DVD release are much higher quality.

 

7/10

 

The Audio

 

The audio is presented in Dolby Digital Stereo and besides the fact that it's not surround sound, which would be kind of silly to except considering what this is, is quite good. The dialog is all clearly audible and the sound mix is good. I never touched the volume control once which is impressive considering the different sources of video that must have been used to put this together.

 

8/10

 

The Packaging and Bonus Features

 

While I have problems with the actual documentary the DVD is excellent. The artwork on the cover is a great visual synopsis of the content. There are 57 minutes of interviews in the bonus features along with the original trailers for the documentary along with short text biographies of Barbara Trent and David Kaspar who made the documentary. There are also trailers for other Docurama DVD's along with a nice print catalog of Docurama DVD's. This is par for the course of any Docurama DVD's I have seen.

 

8/10

 

The following is an excerpt from the copy on the DVD case.

 

“Made all the more timely by recent U.S. Invasions and the current “war on terror” ...  uncovers the real reasons for this internationally condemned attack ... exposes a cover-up hauntingly relevant today ... contribute to the staggering analysis of media control and self-censorship used to deceive the American public.”

 

If you just though “hmm, interesting” your probably part of the choir Barbara Trent and David Kaspar are preaching to. If I were you I'd pick this up next time your in the mood for a documentary. If you thought, “sheesh”, your not in the choir, or at least not in this choir, stay away.

 

  

Overall (Not an Average) 7/10

The Movie 3/10

The Video 7/10

The Audio 8/10

The Packaging and Bonus Features 8/10

Overall (Not an Average) 7/10

 

-Mike Young