Big Screen/Small Screen
`The Corporation'
Film takes a hard look at the abuses of corporate power.
GEORGE ROBINSON
Special to the Jewish News
A
s late as October 1941, when the Final
Solution had already been planned and put in
motion at the Wannsee Conference, IBM was
leasing and maintaining punch-card systems to the
Nazis, who were using them to track the disposition
of prisoners — mostly Jews — on their way to
Auschwitz and the other eastern camps. Once there,
the Jewish prisoners usually received what the punch
cards designated as "Code 6 — Special Treatment."
Thomas Watson, the founder and head of IBM was
not an anti-Semite. How could this have happened?
The answer, according to a new book and film,-
both titled The Corporation, is inherent in the nature
of the dominant institution of our time, the for-profit
corporation. The film opens Friday, July 23, at
Landmark's Main Art Theatre in Royal Oak. The
book, subtitled "The Pathological Pursuit of Profit
and Power" (Free Press; $25), came out earlier this
year.
"I've always thought the corporation was a strange
institution, very much the product of legislation and
judicial decisions," said Joel Bakan by phone from
British Columbia. Bakan, a professor of law at the
University of British Columbia, is the author of the
book and the screenplay.
"It intrigued me that the public didn't know about
that, that public perceptions were quite different from
the reality," he explained.
Recalling the first wave of "socially responsible" cor-
porations in the mid-1980s and the renewal of that
theme in the last several years, he said, "Here's this
image of the corporation as concerned about public
interest, but by law it has a responsibility only to its
shareholders and to the bottom line."
There's the rub. By its very definition in Anglo-
American law, the corporation's only responsibility is
to create profits, and later developments in case law
gave it a unique set of powers to do just that.
A series of 19th-century U.S. Supreme Court deci-
sions utilized the 14th Amendment to define the cor-
poration as a "person," with the same rights as the
freed slaves that amendment was supposed to protect.
Needless to say, the 14th Amendment was a better
shield for corporate interests than for freedmen and
women.
But this elaborately absurd piece of legal fiction is
the hub from which Bakan and directors Mark
Achbar and Jennifer Abbott constructed their film. If
we accept the idea of the corporation as a person,
what kind of a person is it?
Bakan, Achbar and Abbott build a brilliantly argued
and elegantly constructed argument around the idea
that the corporation's personality is that of a psy-
chopath.
Using the defining characteristics of this diagnosis as
found in the standard psychological manual, the
DSM-IV, with the help of a clinical specialist in crimi-
First-fime filmmaker takes a rare look into world
of Jewish religious married life and sexuality.
NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
I
n her controversial Israeli documen-
tary, Puri, Anat Zuria glumly
strides to the mikvah, the women's
ritual bath, on a cold Jerusalem night.
"Six months after giving birth, and I'm
still impure," the waiflike director says.
Her intimate film explores the
ambivalence some women feel about
Judaism's family purity laws, which pre-
vent husbands from touching their wives
for a time after childbirth and menstrua-
tion. Physical contact may resume only
after she immerses in the mikvah.
Ha'Aretz called the film a "pioneering
expose"; just as Sandi DuBowski's
7/23
2004
48
Trembling Bore G-d provoked dialogue
about homosexuality in Orthodox cir
cles, Purity has prompted debate about
the family laws — usually praised as
Judaism's recipe for sustaining spicy
marriages.
"It's a very
important
movie since it
opens discus-
sion on what
Age.
has been a
taboo topic,"
"Purity" ("Tehora" in
Bambi Sheleg,
Hebrew): Breaking
the Orthodox
taboos of silence.
editor of Eretz
Aheret, told the
Jerusalem Post in 2002.
"Corporation" filmmakers Mark Achbar, Joel Bakan
and Jennifer Abbott examine the mind of the profit-
making institution, concluding that it is psychopathic.
Others worry al3out its critical point
of view. Purity has the "potential to
encourage Jews who may not yet have
.
experienced the power and beauty of
Jewish observance to simply dismiss
those precious things out of hand,"
Rabbi Avi Shafran of Agudath Israel of
America wrote in an online essay,
"Impure Intentions.
Zuria, 42, describes
her intentions as per-
sonal. Although she
grew up secular, she
says she fell in love
with Judaism after
marrying an obser-
Israel-based
vant man in 1982.
- filmmaker
Yet she found the
Anat Zuria
purity laws "oppres-
sive, alienating,
humiliating," impacting her relationship
and her body image. The artist-turned-
director sometimes spent hours at the
mikvah as the attendant inspected her
for paint spots (Jewish law prohibits the
slightest barrier between the skin and
the water).
Around 1999, Zuria decided to
explore her feelings in a movie, inter-
viewing more than 100 women before
focusing on three subjects. Natalie pro-
yoked a divorce by refusing to go to the
mikvah; Katie is happily married but
strum es with the laws; and bride-to-be
Shira clashes with her mother's conserva-
tive views.
Zuria also shows herself as so conflict-
ed about the ritual that she visits the
bath "in the night, in the dark, so as not
to be seen."
She feels Purity has shed some light on
the subject since winning best documen-
tary at 2002's Jerusalem International
Film Festival. "This was a non-issue, and
now its an issue," she says.
Purity premieres 9 p.m.
Monday, July 26, on the
Sundance Channel. Check
your local cable listings.
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