When someone spies the name “Orwell” in a movie title they’re pretty sure what to expect: George Orwell, author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, a.k.a. 1984; nightmarish dystopian visions; the ubiquitous Big Brother and more. Similarly, a well-versed follower of international cinema should recognize Raoul Peck, the director of I Am Not Your Negro, as a fiercely committed, skeptically minded leftwing filmmaker, unafraid to take the bull by the horns.
And so Peck’s new documentary, Orwell: 2+2=5, shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone. Even when it runs the author—real name: Eric Arthur Blair—and his most famous literary creations through a suitably rough-house examination that stretches from Orwell’s dubious British Empire beginnings all the way to the present-day madcap global political scene.
Born in the Bengal Presidency of India in 1903, the son of a career civil servant who held the post of Sub-Deputy Opium Agent, the young Blair—he adopted the Orwell pen name in 1932—had a first-hand view of the excesses of colonialism. At one point he served as a police officer in Burma, an experience that opened his eyes. As he wrote later, “In order to hate imperialism, you have got to be part of it.”
Filmmaker Peck’s bio-doc, drawn from the author’s diary as well as his published writings, proceeds in chronological fashion across a minefield of Orwell’s political and literary provocations, from Hitler to Stalin to Franco to MI6 to rival leftist journalists to Wigan Pier to his own ill health. The injustices Orwell saw raised hackles that stayed with him for a lifetime: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism,” he said. He was often besieged by but never bewildered by the 20th century’s turbulence.
The writer who gave us “proles,” “doublethink,” “newspeak,” “Ingsoc” and “thoughtcrime” made his living—in between laboring as a school teacher, a bookseller and a novelist—as an essayist and columnist in print publications, working on deadline for a variety of newspapers and magazines. The medium of film did not play an important part in the plot of Nineteen Eighty-Four, setting aside the incessant pro-war “commercials” on everyone’s telescreen, and no part at all in Animal Farm—and yet those two books and their screen adaptations have inspired an avalanche of movie images that continues into the 21st century.
Orwell: 2+2=5 unearths a large trove of clips from films that illustrate the Orwellian antipathy toward authoritarian societies. Nineteen Eighty-Four is clearly the most-adapted of Orwell’s writings—versions by Michael Radford, Michael Anderson, Rudolph Cartier, David Wheatley and Christopher Morahan stand out in the montage—followed by the numerous animated treatments of Animal Farm, most notably by John Stephenson and irascible ink-splatterer Ralph Steadman.
Peck also rounds up scenes from other films that describe the soul-deadening effects of cruel hierarchies and rigorous conformity, including Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report and Ukrainian director Sergey Loznitsa’s documentary Babi Yar. As well as the context and pretty much the entire filmography of Ken Loach. A 1966 broadcast edition of The Frost Report on BBC is an especially damning indictment of its target, The Class System. Meanwhile Orwell Rolls in His Grave, a 2003 TV documentary by Robert Kane Pappas, lays much of the blame on corporate mass media for the indifference toward democratic principles in the U.S.
Orwell is famous for his pull quotes. As a determined foe of both fascism and communism, especially the Stalinist kind, he disdained the admiration of “guts, or character, which in reality meant the power to impose your will on others.” Nazism revolted Orwell, who said, “The goosestep is one of the most horrible sights in the world. It is simply an affirmation of naked power.”
In its particulars, Peck’s tribute to Orwell is a celebration of one of history’s most vigorous skeptics, a champion of humanism, who once declared: “All that matters has already been written.”
‘Orwell: 2+2=5’ is currently showing at Roxie Theater, 3117 16th St., San Francisco.
