New Orwell film a warning from history

A crucial moment in the Haitian director Raoul Peck's new film Orwell: 2+2=5 has a clip of St Joan perishing in the flames from Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 classic The Passion of Joan of Arc. She was burned for heresy - because she 'refused to outrage her conscience'. The words are Orwell's own). And then comes the exhortation, 'Dare to be a Daniel', that is: speak truth to power, hold fast to truth and to ethics, dare to stand alone.

Joan was a victim of an unholy patriarchal alliance of Church and State - and the phrase 'Big Brother is watching you' is central to Peck's narrative. Plus ça change indeed. Writing this on Good Friday gives further tragic resonance to his film. The despised and rejected Man of Sorrows was crucified by a similar unholy alliance for daring to challenge the abuse of power and pierce the veil of deceit with his all-too human Gospel of Love.

For Orwell, totalitarian states are theocracies, in that within the nefarious sphere of their far-reaching and all-pervading influence 'we live and move and have our being.'

2+2=5 seizes upon GO's dystopian 1984 and many of his other works and diaries to provide warnings from history.

A couple of days ago, the so-called 'leader of the free world' delivered a rambling 18-minute televised address (denounced by one pundit as a 'litany of lies') in which he threatened to bomb Iran 'back to the stone ages'.

Such grim and deceitful war-mongering for Macchiavellian reasons (not least by those in the West) is focused upon by Peck as part of his examination of the central, paradoxical slogan displayed on the Ministry of Truth in 1984: 'War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.' This slogan encapsulates the concept of 'doublethink', where hegemonizing power strives to have a supine populace consent to contradiction through propaganda and menace.

This consent under duress points to the second part of the film's title: '2+2=5.' 1984's protagonist Winston Smith is tortured into mouthing this lie. As Orwell writes, the imagination will not breed in captivity.

Peck focuses too on the latest forms of propagandizing 'bread and circuses' which bring obedience. We have a clip of Filipina nobel laureate Maria Ressa condemning the 'enshitification of the internet' where degrading, trivializing and addictive online platforms and social media distract, project lies and sow confusion, playing into the hands of oligarchies and global capitalism. The internet and its algorithms also epitomize 'surveillance capitalism': Big Brother looms everywhere.

Fittingly for this time of information overload, Peck's film is a flurry of excerpts and graphics. Sometimes this grates but nevertheless the effect is powerful. Contemporary and near contemporary examples come in plenty of war crimes, bombings, massacres, ethnic cleansing, book burning, book bans, and newspeak ('fake news').

Peck's splicing and transhistorical techniques and simultaneous use of graphics and text made me think of Bertolt Brecht's defamiliarization effect with both striving to stop us the viewers short and make us think. Peck certainly provokes and there is much to ponder. He relies on Orwell's cogent and elegant prose to provide the substantive food for thought.

He also traces out Orwell's own journey towards informed consciousness most effectively. An image of the baby Orwell with his Indian nanny opens an extremely fruitful exploration of the writer's dawning understanding of how terribly abusive colonialism (not least when he was in the Burmese police as a young man) was, all bound up with dehumanization, power, class and privilege. This led him to embrace socialism, to fight in the Spanish Civil War in the Trotskyist POUM, to become alive to the evils of Stalinism and to fight fascism. Pathos and beauty come in shots of lush Jura where Orwell went while dying from tuberculosis. The completion of 1984 as the disease sapped his strength was a blessing indeed.

Complementary excerpts from various films of 1984, Animal Farm, and several other films by great directors like Ken Loach and Bill Douglas are used judiciously and movingly.

While Netanyahu and the genocide in Gaza are both addressed, I feel they are skirted over and this is regrettable, not least as we hear the chilling Orwellian prediction of the future: 'A boot stamping on a human face for ever.'

Fellow Etonian Damian Lewis provides Orwell's voice which grates somewhat as he played in the series Homeland which was condemned for its stereotypical othering of Muslims and Arabs.

I took some solace from Orwell's faith in the common decency of humanity. Certainly, despite the massive bias in the legacy media and the swirling untruths in cyberspace, a majority of people of goodwill are not hoodwinked and are appalled by the horrors of Gaza, the ongoing outrages there and in the West Bank. As we learn from Orwell, conflicted and flawed like all of us, we must continue the struggle and continue to take a stand. As a fascinating footnote, Raoul Peck himself took a stand when he stood down as minister of culture, resigning in protest against what he saw as an anti-democratic takeover by former president (and former Salesian priest) Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He has witnessed tragic political failure from within.

Watch the official trailer: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCTSYWjoKWA