Orwell: 2+2=5
I Am Not Your Negro director Raoul Peck returns with a searing new documentary on the life and works of George Orwell — told in the author’s own words.
Are you troubled by the far right taking to the barricades? Are you tired of economic inequality? Do you feel like the world is now worshipping strong political leaders and multimillionaires without questioning authority? These are just some of the phenomena that author George Orwell wrote of over 70 years ago in his novels Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949). Orwell’s writings still, and perhaps especially, resonate in our time.
Raoul Peck, director of the hit documentary I Am Not Your Negro (Season FF 2016), returns to the boxing ring of political film with his newest, angry and inspiring documentary Orwell: 2+2=5. Quotations gathered from dozens of Orwell’s essays, diary entries, and novels accompany the documentary’s broad archive and news material. The footage shows colonised India from a hundred years back as well as the present day in Putin’s and Trump’s offices. The documentary is named after Orwell’s argument that strongly unanimous political culture demands abandoning individual intellect, for example accepting the calculation 2+2=5 as true or denying climate change.
Art and politics intertwine compellingly in this visual essay, which satirises contemporary phenomena by contrasting image with narration. Thoughtfully composed music adds both levity and gravity to the experience. Actor Damian Lewis’ narration hypnotically guides the viewer from one thought and picture to another. The documentary flows, associating freely through histories of freedom and captivity, minority and majority, equality and oppression. In our problematic time, even the possibilities of resistance are related to history. As Orwell said, ”History is something to be created rather than learned.”
Joonas Kallonen (translated by Vilja Hynynen)