Microcredit Attack Documentary in English

As an interviewee in Tom Heinemann's documentary, I received a copy of the English version in the mail last Thursday. Compared to the Norwegian one (blogged here), the English version devotes less time to the old spat between Norway and the Grameen Bank, cuts other stuff I haven't tried to determine, and travels beyond Bangladesh, to India, Nigeria, and Mexico.A trailer is on Tom's website. The DVD can be ordered. Madeleine Bunting reports in today's Guardian that it just aired on Danish television (I guess in the English version) and will soon be shown at an event in London, the originally planned premiere at the Overseas Development Institute having been cancelled over concerns about balance.I have watched and reflected on the English documentary. Three thoughts:First, I like most of the changes that I noticed from the Norwegian version. There are now hints of positivity. Early in the Bangladesh footage a woman smiles as she tells how she and a few others in "Hillary Village" (the one visited by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton) have attained good housing through microcredit:And, I naturally noticed, the positive quote from me is now in. ("I do think that we need to give Mohammad Yunus credit for spreading the idea that you can do business with the poor. They're not just objects of charity.")That said, the character of the film has not changed. The positive bits come early. Tom has used the rhetorical device of climax, putting last what he wants to emphasize, just as I will in this paragraph. In fact, I have to say, I do the same in chapter 7 with textual analogs to Tom's story clips; I have calculated that in general stories of people being hurt by microcredit do deserve more weight than stories of being helped. Going from $2 to $1/day is more bad than going from $2 to $3/day is good. But in Tom's case---leaving aside mine, which I cannot judge objectively---inclusion of the positive bits can be fairly described as gestures---not necessarily cynical, but not heartfelt either. Tom's heart clearly lies in iconoclasm, not in realistic portrayal of the distribution of impacts of microcredit, positive and negative, ambiguous and uncertain.Second reflection: caveats about balance aside, the sad stories have real power, which because of the English subtitles I can now feel. I am more sure now that Tom has done a service in bringing us video of borrowers telling us in their own words the bad things that happened to them. Not even the France 24 story a few years ago quite achieves this authenticity and immediacy. (Though, distinctively, it shows loan officers hectoring borrowers to repay.)From Bangladesh:From Andhra Pradesh, India:I do think that anyone wanting to understand or support microcredit needs to come to terms with Tom's evidence.Now, that does not mean taking the stories purely at face value. Happy and sad stories should be received with the same critical thinking. In all the cases shown above, we do not know for certain whether life would have been better or worse in the absence of microcredit (though in the India case, we can make a good guess). We don't know who else the people borrowed from, nor even whether microcredit was the majority of their debt burdens. And we don't know how representative these stories are. We do know that there will always be people will who get in trouble with credit because of bad judgment or bad luck and who will prefer to blame the creditor.The movie does not help me think about these things. And that brings me to my last reflection: The movie is a collage, not an analysis. There is no narrative line. Yet the movie is designed. Thus viewers should think critically not only about the individual stories but also the overall "storyline." That actually is why I think media studies should be mandatory in college, if not high school, in order to forge educated media consumers.In fact, the movie brought to mind the writing of one of the greats of media studies, Neil Postman. In Amusing Ourselves to Death he uses his potent pen to attack that insidious staple of TV news, "Now this." To be fair to Tom, Postman was writing in 1985, when a small clutch of broadcast networks educated most Americans about what was happening in the world; and those networks interspersed news of the utmost gravity with ads for Burger King and Diet Coke. In contrast, Tom sticks with all seriousness to his subject for a full hour. But properly tempered, Postman's point about transitions is pertinent:

'Now...this' is commonly used on radio and television newscasts to indicate that what one has just heard or seen has no relevance to what one is about to hear or see, or possibly to anything one is ever likely to hear or see. The phrase is a means of acknowledging the fact that the world as mapped by the speeded-up electronic media has no order or meaning and is not to be taken seriously. There is no murder so brutal, no earthquake so devastating, no political blunder so costly---for that matter, no ball score so tantalizing or weather report so threatening---that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, 'Now...this.' The newscaster means that you have thought long enough on the previous matter (approximately forty-five seconds), that you must not be morbidly preoccupied with it (let us say, for ninety seconds), and that you must now give your attention to another fragment of news or a commercial....The viewers also know that no matter how grave any fragment of news may appear (for example, on the day I write a Marine Corps general has declared that nuclear war between the United States and Russia is inevitable), it will shortly be followed by a series of commercials that will, in an instant, defuse the import of the news, in fact render it largely banal. This is a key element in the structure of a news program and all by itself refutes any claim that television news is designed as a serious form of public discourse.

Apparently when watching video (or listening to audio) the human mind is pliable. We let ourselves be led on by transitions without logic, the new impressions chasing out the old ones. In the documentary, to take a random example, there are three "now this"--type transitions between about 05:55 and 06:55:

In Paris, we meet a development researcher with decades of experience....In New York, we meet an economist who has investigated what access to money can mean for poor people...In Jobra, where it all started, we meet the daughter of Sufiya Begum...

More than halfway through, we are told by way of transition that "For decades, microcredit has been seen as an effective tool to lift poor people out of poverty." The circling back to this already well-hammered point is another sign of lack of narrative line. Also telling for its disconnection is the bracketing of my positive clip, which implicitly plays down the poverty reduction myth, by two that play it up, from the Nobel committee chair and President Obama.So this film is very different from what I am trying to make with my blog and book. As befits these textual media, as Postman noted, I care more about exhaustive search for evidence and systematic, multi-faceted analysis of the proper generalizations from that evidence.In being different is the film worse? I'm not sure. Maybe Tom is just playing to the strengths of his medium too. But arguably, it is irresponsible to hurl unrepresentative yet explosive evidence into the public space. Certainly it has gone off like a grenade in Dhaka.My advice is to watch it if you can and take what is most valuable, which is the voices of the poor.