Past Programs
Globalisation - 2008
Global Haywire
10/04/2008
I don't think I'm giving too much away if I start with the last words of Bruce Petty's Global Haywire. They are spoken by the narrator, actor Tom Baker, and they are uttered with a kind of weary resignation. 'This story,' he says, 'is told with cartoons, because when it is told factually, no one believes it.'
These are poignant words, and they go to the heart of what Global Haywire is about, and what it seems to be trying to do. How do you account for the world as it has become? How do you represent its history and imagine how it might be otherwise? How do you show the mess we're in, and how we got into it?
Petty is a cartoonist, animator and filmmaker, and he's been wrestling with this conundrum for decades, on the page and on the screen. His first feature, Global Haywire, which is also called, in the opening titles, 'An Animated Discussion' and 'A Short History of Planet Malfunction' is, not surprisingly, a dense and hard-to-categorise work.
It's an essay, an exploration, a narrative, an inquiry, a parable, and it's made out of almost every conceivable cinematic material: of animation, archival footage, talking heads, actors, artworks, photographs, voiceover narration, music, sound, archival audio -- sometimes, it seems, all of them at once, jostling for space in the frame and on the soundtrack.
The organising principle is the notion of an international committee with a Mission Impossible task. It is set up to look at the phenomenon of what the film calls 'global haywire'. Its assignment is to examine the world and 'work out what keeps going wrong'. Although its brief is serious and vast, there's a generally comic tone to its deliberations. The committee is a motley crew: its chair is portrayed by Robyn Nevin, and its members include actors, cartoon characters and historical figures. It soon uncovers the image at the centre of the film.
This is the idea of the world as a machine, designed by a cartoon version of Leonardo da Vinci. He's building a craft that's described as a freedom machine, a vision created by technology and ingenuity, but teeming with inequalities, compromises, absurdities and disasters. It's a kind of aircraft, but sometimes this machine seems more like a boat, a Ship of Fools, or a Titanic divided into first class and steerage. And it's not actually flying, yet it is functioning and it's being used and abused.
Around this idea of the freedom machine of history and possibility, Petty assembles a range of faces, voices and images. There are talking heads, writers, journalists and commentators such as Gore Vidal, Robert Fisk, Tariq Ali and Noam Chomsky. There are students, drawn mostly from Britain, America and Lebanon, speaking about their understanding of past, present and future. Specifically, they talk about about political divides, about religion, about colonisation. About how the West understands itself. About Islam. About inequity. These are pithy and eloquent speakers, and the students often have as much to stay as the pundits. The voices of the young people, in fact, bring a generous and positive sense to the film.
The film is portrayed an animated discussion, but it's not really a discussion or a debate. It's not about airing opposing points of view or arguments.
But sometimes Global Haywire feels burdened by its structure: individual moments and utterances can be sharp or illuminating, but there's something a little awkward about the way it's been conceived. The committee is a bit clunky, and the image of the Leonardo da Vinci freedom machine is surprisingly constraining. Back as far as 1976, in his Oscar-winning animation Leisure, he has been crowding the frame, mixing images and drawings, reflecting on history and human folly. He draws and is drawn to absurdity, and he has created memorable and illuminating images of the world at work -- of systems and institutions in action, of the creaking, chaotic, illogical, improbably functioning machines that people create and are defined by. And those elements are still there; not in the overall structure of the film, but in individual moments of imagination or passionate, energetic exposition.
