Speaking Freely – Volume Five, Hugo Chavez on The
Path To Socialism (Cinema Libre
DVD)
Picture:
C Sound: C Extras: D Main Program: D
When
discussing Hugo Chavez, one of the biggest international thorns in the side of
the ever-thorny second (and hopefully last) Bush Administration, never has the
success of one man proved that two wrongs don’t make a right. They just help the Religious Right. In the fifth volume of the ironically titled Speaking Freely DVD series, Hugo Chavez on The Path To Socialism is
simply 52 minutes of the Venezuelan dictator espousing what a nice, smart guy
he is, sometimes over footage of people told to act happy (especially
children!) in front of the camera.
It shows
that the sole owner of the Chevron Oil Company is a smart, conniving dictator
who has successfully manipulated himself into an odd position of power as the
Bush II people try to at worst build an international Christo-Fascist Empire,
which Chavez does address and with sly avoidance of other facts and truths. The rest of the time, it is to bash
Capitalism, overgeneralize about it, talk Marxism only to say he is not a
Marxist and tries to con the viewer into thinking he is not a Stalinist when al
is said and done. Of course, action
speaks louder than words and his record is much closer to Old Joseph than the
likes of a Trotsky, who he “remarkably” never names.
Some
people would say this kind of propaganda should not be on DVD and that it is
too radical and subversive, but in real life, it should be on DVD so we can see
what a rip-off and lie Chavez’s Venezuela and Socialism with a smile on its
face really is. By the time this was
over, calling Bush (and America, more or less) The Devil as he did at his U.N.
visit, I had not just seen a dictator… I had seen the anti-Carson!
The 1.33
X 1 image is soft, has aliasing issues and all this despite basically being a
single shot. The Dolby Digital 2.0 sound
is stable at best, but the combination is still often inept with us hearing the
camera operators more often than we ever should. It is called unprofessional and rude, though
they call it team work? On that level, this
is the most inept communist propaganda since Godard’s Maoist cycle. Extras include brief propaganda notes.
- Nicholas Sheffo
