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The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

By John Anderson | STAFF WRITER

November 5, 2003

(U). The abortive 2002 coup against Venezuela's populist president Hugo Chavez - abetted by the already successful takeover of its media - are twin edges of this sharp, very immediate, Irish-made documentary. Directed by Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain. 1:14 . In Spanish with English subtitles. At Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St., Manhattan.

Being in the right place at the right time is the key to great documentary footage. Nobody planned the Zapruder film; none of those scores of people shooting video on 9/11 expected to see airliners ramming the World Trade Center.

What makes significant footage into significant film is an ability to frame the material, a sense of when and when not to stop ("Hoop Dreams" was supposed to be short, but its directors knew enough to make a three- hour movie), and, perhaps most importantly, an instinct for the real story: As with Zapruder, what was shot in "Revolution" was a crime. But what resonates in the end are the forces behind it, what it says about its time, and how, in fact, it ever happened at all.

The Irish filmmakers behind "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" had been in Venezuela seven months in 2002 when a right-wing, CIA-funded coup removed from office President Hugo Chavez, whose oil policies, plans to redistribute wealth and alliance with Cuba had made him a burr under the Bush saddle. Kim Bartley and Donnacha O'Briain were the only filmmakers in the palace when the coup took place; they were there 48 hours later, when Chavez, aided by the army, was restored to power.

It's an adventure story, in and of itself, and the two directors make a fascinating marriage of the footage they'd shot for their Chavez profile and the chaos that erupted when the oil interests played their violent hand. But in its title rests the more resonant part of "The Revolution": Private interests owned all but one of Venezuela's TV stations and aired nothing, pre- or post-coup, save hard-line, right-wing cant. (The one state-owned station, meanwhile, mysteriously lost its power.) Bartley and O'Briain show, convincingly and credibly, how footage taken of besieged pro-Chavez forces was doctored to cast them as instigators rather than victims, and how the Chavez policy overall was portrayed as malignant.

Fair and balanced reporting it was not. Granted, the makers of "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" (which comes from the old Gil Scott-Heron song) were there to make what would likely have been a pro-Chavez film and were predisposed to admire him. But their case is convincing, nonetheless. They break down the manipulative TV coverage in Caracas, expose the clearly defamatory statements made by such people as Colin Powell and Jesse Helms (isn't that an alliance for the ages?) and establish the Washington link with people such as Pedro Carmona, the oil puppet who seized the presidency. That Chavez was opposed by the smallest percentage of Venezuelans - which reflects the number who actually benefit from its huge oil revenue - makes the Bartley-O'Briain film a pretty credible piece of journalism.

What it also reflects is a near-reversal of the old Cold War anti-communist critique of state-owned media - Pravda and Tass, for instance, the old Soviet Union conduits of pure propaganda. In Venezuela, it was private media, spewing corporate misinformation, that almost toppled a hugely popular and democratically elected government. Now, it seems, a recall campaign is under way. If nothing else, Bartley and O'Briain make you wonder about the concept of banana republics, and where they actually exist.