The documentary “The Dissident” tries to prepare the murder of the Saudi Arabian regime critic Jamal Khashoggi like a thriller.
For almost a hundred years the film world has been arguing about the legitimate weighting of authenticity and staging within what was later called “documentary”. In 1922 Robert Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North”, a docu-drama according to today’s parlance, celebrated worldwide success. One saw indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic depict the reality of their lives – and perhaps even keep the full-bodied promise of the film poster: “A film with more drama, greater thrill and more action than anyone you have already seen”.
Today’s documentary film market is pushing filmmakers more than ever to make full-bodied promises that are difficult to fulfill with fragments of reality alone. The exposés decided on by TV editors and film subsidies are full of them. Anyone who wants to be successful in documentary films seems to be the unwritten law that they should still deliver “great cinema” on television. The debate about the partly staged documentary “Lovemobil” by Elke Lehrenkrauss does not only affect the ethics of a single filmmaker. One has to discuss the market in which these images are traded.
While “Lovemobil” was made for a small five-figure budget, the lavish documentary “The Dissident” about the murder of the Saudi journalist and regime critic Jamal Khashoggi is a blockbuster. The trailer for this large-scale production by an Oscar winner lists no less than 19 producers. Bryan Fogel’s film has already been shown in cinemas in the USA, and is now available as a digital download in Germany. It is the kind of film that encyclopedically revises a media topic about which almost all information is known, underpins it with eyewitness testimony and archive images and arranges it into a full-length narrative.
Ideally, such films will outlast their time and remain a source for future generations. The film also creates a memorial to the victims of the Saudi Arabian regime, the relatives and supporters of Khashoggi, many of whom are still imprisoned without charge. But he also wants to be something else, namely really big cinema – and that poses more than a taste problem.
No tweet without a flash
The fireworks of effects already begin with the first pictures, which tell of the rise of journalist Khashoggi to online celebrity in the social networks of Saudi Arabia: no tweet that did not pop up with a digital flash on the wide screen, no public scene that did not come from would be approached by a drone camera.
Fogel tells of a murder case, the inhuman perfection of which has already been communicated in countless media reports. Anyone who commented at the time that “it all went like in a bad spy thriller”, the cutting of the corpse under the ears of the Turkish secret service microphones, now sees it processed like in a bad thriller. The Turkish government supported Fogel with its almost complete documentation. Surveillance cameras filmed razor-sharp the henchman who left the consulate in Khashoggi’s suit. Only a transcript of the audio recording is read, but a UN investigator testifies that the worst thing about it is the sound of the bone saw.
The Turkish government published all these details, of course, because it had a political interest in making the crime apparently ordered by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman public. But there were also reasons for the dictator to at least make the disappearance of his critic public – just as Russia poisons its opposition members in public: What connects these media-savvy dictators in the implementation of their murders is the narrative of the “bad spy thriller”. Shouldn’t a filmmaker think of more than to turn all these plot pieces into exactly that: a bad blockbuster?
If “The Dissident” were a feature film, one would be overwhelmed by the excess of bad music and emotionalizing sound effects. It does not come from a stranger: Adam Peters already set Fogel’s Oscar-winning “Icarus” to music, also a documentary “thriller”, only from the world of sports doping. And the studio that did the sound mixing is considered the first choice in Hollywood – George Lucas’ sound factory “Skywalker Sound”. But what is this fogging ballast doing in a film about the search for truth? Are you doing the dictatorships who stage their crimes another favor if you do not at least orientate yourself towards the “good” cinema when uncovering them? There is no real awareness that crimes and the intelligence publications they expose are stagings.
In doing so, Fogel has found admirable protagonists. His most important witnesses are Khashoggi’s companion, blogger and journalist Omar Abdulaziz, and the victim’s fiancée, Turkish intellectual Hatice Cengiz. Your courageous criticism of the dictatorship in Saudi Arabia calls for a broader public, but not for a blockbuster. Propaganda cannot be used to find out about propaganda.
The Dissident. USA 2020. Regie: Bryan Fogel. 119 Min.
