Ken Kimmelman, Emmy award-winning filmmaker and Aesthetic Realism consultant, says about this upcoming class in his course “If It Moves, It Can Move You”: Opposites in the Cinema:
In recent decades, films have exposed various corporate practices which companies have tried to keep hidden and have lied about—practices resulting, for example, in contaminated water, radiation poisoning, unsafe automobiles, deaths from tobacco. Both the practices and their effects are direct results of the profit motive. And these films are part of what Eli Siegel described as “the force of ethics.” The films, and the welcome they’ve received from audiences, are a showing that people are furious at the profit system—which is the using of human beings and the earth contemptuously, for somebody’s private profit. The corporate cover-up films illustrate both the contempt at the basis of profit economics, and the fact that, as Mr. Siegel explained, people are saying, “We don’t want ill will to hurt and poison our lives anymore.”
Some of the films I’ll be discussing in this class are: The China Syndrome, The Constant Gardener, Erin Brockovich