Inside Job: A film by Leni Riefenstahl

Inside job was not an epiphany. It was more of an afterthought.

I wanted to get some insight or greater understanding to the point
of enlightenment about the condition that rocked and continues to rock
and redefine our world global economies etc. What I got was an
extra grind

Now please note this film is extremely well made. Extremely
beautiful extremely high-quality, creative, inventive in its use of
interview positions, questioners voice present - this is an advanced documentary.
Really.


But the problem is:

When one construct stories that cease to be a quest - when the truth is laid out plainly and clearly and bluntly at the start and reinforced with more and more heavy handed (beautiful) imagery and interview, what are we dealing with?

We're dealing with propaganda.

I don't know where issue pieces like this really lay. where they need to go, what they need to do when a filmmaker comes to the project already knowing what he wants to say.

But it can't be this. It can't come out like this.

It's the same dilemma for fiction filmmakers, novelists, poets. In some way, maybe even explicitly, they know what their story is about, they know what they want to say to their audience. But they cannot explicitly spell it out or it becomes repugnant to the audience - like a bad pill, like bad cheese. Like bad food that that body simply rejects.

This film did not bring me in. Despite its beauty and authority. It only sent me away.

That cannot be what the filmmaker intended.

Someone smart once said, that Symbols must be used in stories and films because they elevate the story to an archetypal level. But if the symbols become explicit and recognizable as symbols, the power reverses and the audience is thrown back down to their terrestrial plane with no insight, noe elevation, and only the sense that symbols are dead.

Don't kill the symbols that you are trying to create.