by MATTHEW HAYS

To say that corporations often do things that aren't particularly good for the environment or that aren't exactly great for their employees won't come as much of a revelation. The word "corporate," after all, has morphed into an entirely pejorative adjective.

But something about The Corporation, a Canadian feature-length documentary that has now won a slew of awards on the festival circuit and is breaking box-office records, remains utterly overwhelming. In it, Vancouver-based filmmakers Mark Achbar, Joel Bakan and Jennifer Abbott, don't just point fingers at certain cases of multinational malfeasance - they dissect the heart of the problem, indicating the width and breadth of the influence of corporate influence in our daily lives, and indicate precisely why this scenario is so dire for humanity.

The film's objectives are hugely ambitious in scope. Based on Rhodes scholar Bakan's latest book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, the documentary begins by mapping out the legal birth of corporations. In the mid-1800s, American lawyers managed to successfully argue that a corporation was much like an individual person, and thus should have the same rights as people. But the corporation, as Bakan clearly points out in the film and book, operates entirely in the interest of maximizing profit, leaving little or no room for ethical or moral considerations. Bakan is backed up by a legion of pundits, from Noam Chomsky to Naomi Klein to Michael Moore, who discuss their theories on and run-ins with corporate culture. Interspersed with the expert testimonials are often heart wrenching anecdotal pieces of evidence, indicating the extent of corporate influence in our lives.

Manufacturing dissent

And if the experience of watching The Corporation was overwhelming for the audience, former Montrealer Achbar confirms he felt the same way while researching, co-directing and co-producing the feature. "It wasn't so much the individual extremes that got to us while making this," he says on the phone from a festival in the U.S. where the film is playing. "It wasn't about the most outrageous crime - more like the normalcy, the basic problems that were being created by corporations. It has become so common and so accepted. The more we dug into this, the stranger the institution became. That strangeness is what we wanted to convey."

Achbar already has an international hit documentary under his belt. In the late '80s and early '90s, Achbar lived in Montreal, where he co-produced and co-directed the NFB documentary Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media with Peter Wintonick. The film was a lively and formally innovative filtering of the philosophies of the celebrated and controversial linguist, and the film succeeded in getting theatrical distribution throughout much of the world. After moving to Vancouver in the late '90s, Achbar continued to work on various documentary projects. The Corporation was hatched when Achbar met Bakan, oddly enough, at the funeral of a mutual friend's sister. "We were both very interested in globalization and its impact," recalls Achbar. "Joel really is to this film as Chomsky was to Manufacturing Consent - he's brilliant."

And typical of any runaway success story in the film biz, The Corporation's path to its current snowball status began with the sound of numerous doors slamming shut. "Channel 4 rejected us, as did BBC," Achbar recalls. He and Bakan then ventured to the all-important TV festival in Banff, where Achbar says Bakan held an audience of industry types "enraptured" with his tales and analysis of corporate malfeasance for over 45 minutes. Broadcasters began to take note, with Vision TV being a strong supporter from the get-go. Achbar notes that the list of folks who did come on board suggest the importance of maintaining public broadcasting, something that doesn't rely on the goodwill of advertisers for its survival.

"There isn't a single commercial broadcaster in sight for this film," he points out. "It's been entirely done by state-run or educational broadcasters."

Corporate claustrophobia

Achbar acknowledges that while the filmmakers behind The Corporation wanted to investigate the ways in which corporate culture permeates our lives, they were also careful to offer signs of hope and alternatives. That was a difficult thing, given the extent to which corporations own, run and control so many aspects of our daily lives. (For the record, the paper you hold in your hands was purchased by Quebecor, itself a huge corporation, six years ago.) "We are stuck with this tremendous sense that corporations are everywhere, that they do everything. I call it corporate claustrophobia." Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore, whose Bowling for Columbine now ranks among the most commercially successful documentaries ever released, discusses how he uses corporate structure and distribution to offer critiques of corporations themselves.

Achbar says while they included testimonials like Moore's, "We didn't want the film to get too prescriptive. We also didn't want to leave people in despair. A whole other film needs to be made about resistance and constructing alternatives. Sometimes, when I look at the full scope of what's going on out there, when I look at what people are doing to counter it, I think, ‘If this is what we've got to offer, then we're in big trouble.' This film is simply a primer. It runs a lot deeper than this. The fact that we're having to make a film like this is a grim testament. I hope we've appealed to the cynicism of the intellect and the hope of the spirit.

"Social change happens incrementally. We know how to stop an individual polluter from polluting a specific river. We're trying to get at a larger systemic problem - to get at a deeper analysis that might lead to a deeper shift. The most a film can do is to help shift the culture."

The Corporation has won huge amounts of praise, including an audience award at the crucial indie film fest Sundance in January. But it's also raised hackles from the right, in particular a front-page rabid diatribe against the film in (surprise!) The National Post. "They argued that The Barbarian Invasions was essentially a right-wing film, with its jabs at a government run health-care system, and was thus a good film, while ours was leftist rhetoric. To be so viciously attacked by the National Post - I knew we'd arrived."

Don't steal my Sundance

Jabs at corporate sponsorship did create a minor scandal at Sundance, however. When Achbar accepted the audience award, he cracked a joke about the level of corporate sponsorship at Robert Redford's famous event. "The level of corporate presence there really is alarming," he says now. But he maintains that he's puzzled that anyone could find his remarks insulting or disparaging. "How could I not comment on it?" he asks, rhetorically. "That's what our film is all about."

Still, the vast majority of those who are lining up to see The Corporation are giving the film raves - and telling their friends to go too. (The film is set to break the million-dollar mark in box-office receipts - astonishing for a documentary that is still in limited release.) And opening in Montreal constitutes something of a sentimental homecoming for Achbar. It was at Concordia's Hall Building cinema, some 20 years ago, that he attended a lecture by Noam Chomsky. His date was Terre Nash, the filmmaker who made If You Love This Planet, a documentary based on the no-nukes lecture of peace activist/crusader Dr. Helen Caldicott, the NFB film that was labelled propaganda by the Reagan administration and went on to win an Oscar. "I sat there thinking to myself, ‘I want to do for Noam Chomsky what Terre has done for Helen Caldicott.'" That moment, Achbar recalls, marked the inspiration for Manufacturing Consent.

In a reunion of sorts, Achbar found himself back at the Hall Building cinema for an audience test screening of the working cut of The Corporation last fall, where a packed house ate up every second of the film. The crowd hooted, hollered and roared their approval at the film's critique.

"I felt like I'd come full circle," says Achbar. "It was very sweet for me."

The Corporation opens Friday, April 23
at the Cinéma du Parc and Ex-Centris

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