The Corporation (Two Discs) DVD, 2003

2004 was the year of the documentary, and The Corporation was the cream of the crop: a meticulously researched, shrewdly balanced and yet starkly slanted history of corporate activity over the last century. Its conceit is to define corporations as human beings – as, indeed, does American law. Subsequently submitting these “individuals” to a full psychiatric evaluation, the conclusion reached is that the corporation is fundamentally insane, posing as much threat to society as might an unstoppable psychopath on the loose.

Certainly, the anti-globalisation lobby will find much here to support their arguments. Yet The Corporation grants equal time to Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, the softly-spoken former chairman of the Royal Dutch Shell group, as it does Michael Moore. The film’s strength is that it understands both points of view, recognising that a bank account and a conscience are not mutually exclusive. Still, the film repeatedly reminds us, corporate reach is now such that few areas of life remain untouched. The multinationals’ influence extends from the milk you put on your cornflakes and the news stories you’re allowed to hear to the quality of water you drink and that of the air you breathe. Where, one might ask, does it all end?

There are no easy answers, and yet the lasting impression is of a film not apocalyptic but optimistic: it plants a thousand seeds in your mind. Naomi Klein is one interviewee, and the film adopts much of the pro-active tone of her No Logo, which shocked the reader with the gravity of the situation and then worked towards a renewal of hope. The Corporation is similarly studded with signs of independent life, tiny glimmers of light amid the darkness. Klein refers to these rare cracks of illumination in the everyday surface of things as “fissures”. Beats Gaps, I guess.

Mike McCahill on 20th January 2005
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