The Corporation (2003 film)
The Corporation | |
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Directed by | |
Written by | |
Produced by |
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Narrated by | Mikela J. Mikael |
Cinematography |
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Edited by | Jennifer Abbott |
Music by | Leonard J. Paul |
Production company | Big Picture Media Corporation |
Distributed by | Zeitgeist Films |
Release dates |
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Running time | 145 minutes |
Country | Canada |
Language | English |
Box office | $4.84 million[1] |
The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan and filmmaker Harold Crooks, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary examines the modern corporation. Bakan wrote the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power during the filming of the documentary.
A sequel film, The New Corporation: The Unfortunately Necessary Sequel, was released in 2020.[2]
Synopsis
The documentary shows the development of the contemporary business corporation, from a legal entity that originated as a government-chartered institution meant to affect specific public functions, to the rise of the modern commercial institution entitled to most of the legal rights of a person. The documentary concentrates mostly upon corporations in North America, especially in the United States. One theme is its assessment of corporate personhood, as a result of an 1886 case in the Supreme Court of the United States in which a statement by Chief Justice Morrison Waite[nb 1] led to corporations as "persons" having the same rights as human beings, based on the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Topics addressed include the
Through vignettes and interviews, The Corporation examines and criticizes corporate business practices. The film's assessment is affected via the diagnostic criteria in the DSM-IV; Robert D. Hare, a University of British Columbia psychology professor and FBI consultant, compares the profile of the contemporary profitable business corporation to that of a clinically diagnosed psychopath (Hare has since objected to the manner in which his views are portrayed in the film; see below.). The Corporation attempts to compare the way corporations are systematically compelled to behave with what it claims are the DSM-IV's symptoms of psychopathy, e.g., the callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, the reckless disregard for the safety of others, the deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect the law.
Interviews
The film features interviews with prominent corporate critics such as
Joel Bakan, the author of the award-winning book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, writes:
The law forbids any motivation for their actions, whether to assist workers, improve the environment, or help consumers save money. They can do these things with their own money, as private citizens. As corporate officials, however, stewards of other people’s money, they have no legal authority to pursue such goals as ends in themselves – only as means to serve the corporations own interests, which generally means to maximize the wealth of its shareholders. Corporate social responsibility is thus illegal – at least when its genuine.
— Joel Bakan, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power [4]
Release
Box office
The Corporation grossed around $3.5 million in North American box office receipts and had a worldwide gross of over $4.8 million,[1] making it the second top-grossing film for its U.S. distributor, Zeitgeist Films.[5] It took the place of Manufacturing Consent as the top-grossing feature documentary ever to come out of Canada.
Versions
TVO version
The extended edition made for
- "Pathology of Commerce": About the pathological self-interest of the modern corporation.
- "Planet Inc.": About the scope of commerce and the sophisticated, even covert, techniques marketers use to get their brands into our homes.
- "Reckoning": About how corporations cut deals with any style of government - from Nazi Germany to despotic states today - that allow or even encourage sweatshops, as long as sales go up.
DVD version
In April 2005, the film was released on DVD as a two-disc set that includes following:[6]
- Disc 1: the film, two tracks of directors' and writer's commentary, 27 minutes of Q&As with the filmmakers, 17 minutes of deleted scenes (not including a hidden clip of the "The Majority Report, 7 minutes of Katherine Dodds on grassrootsmarketing, theatrical trailer, subtitles in three languages (English, French, Spanish), and descriptive audio.
- Disc 2: 165 unused interview clips and updates sorted by both interviewee ("Hear More From...") and topic ("Topical Paradise"). "Related Film Resources", which is one of the topics in "Topical Paradise", includes trailers for 14 other documentary films and a three-minute UK animated film.
In 2012, a new Canadian educational version was released for high school students. This "Occupy Your Future" version is exclusively distributed by Hello Cool World, who were behind the branding and grassroots outreach of the original film in four countries. This version is shorter and breaks the film into three parts. The extras include interviews with Joel Bakan on the Occupy movement, Katherine Dodds on social branding, and two short films from Annie Leonard's The Story of Stuff project.[citation needed]
Streaming
From 2017 until 2022, the film was fornerly available for streaming online on Canada Media Fund's Encore+ YouTube channel.[7][8]
The film is also available for digital purchase on Amazon Prime Video and iTunes.[9][10]
Reception
Critical reception
Film critics gave the film generally favorable reviews. The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 90% of critics gave the film positive reviews, based on 111 reviews with an average rating of 7.4/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "The Corporation is a satisfyingly dense, thought-provoking rebuttal to some of capitalism's central arguments."[11] Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 73 out of 100, based on 28 reviews.[12]
In Variety, Dennis Harvey praised the film's "surprisingly cogent, entertaining, even rabble-rousing indictment of perhaps the most influential institutional model for our era" and its avoidance of "a sense of excessively partisan rhetoric" by deploying a wide range of interviewees and "a bold organizational scheme that lets focus jump around in interconnective, humorous, hit-and-run fashion."[13]
In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert described the film as "an impassioned polemic, filled with information sure to break up any dinner-table conversation," but felt that "at 145 minutes, it overstays its welcome. The wise documentarian should treat film stock as a non-renewable commodity."[14]
Remarks by interview subject
Psychiatrist
One of the questions that comes up periodically is to what extent could a corporation be considered to be psychopathic. And if we look at a corporation as a legal person, that it may not be that difficult to actually draw the transition between psychopathy in the individual, to psychopathy in a corporation. We could go through the characteristics that define this particular disorder, one by one, and see how they might apply to corporations...They would have all the characteristics, and in fact, in many respects, the corporation of that sort is the proto-typical psychopath.
In his book Snakes in Suits (2006; co-written with Paul Babiak), Hare writes that ":[17]
Although the producers of the documentary stated that they used the term psychopath merely as a metaphor for the most egregious corporate entities, it is apparent that they had in mind corporations in general...To refer to the corporation as psychopathic because of the behaviors of a carefully selected group of companies is like using the traits and behaviors of the most serious high-risk criminals to conclude that the criminal (that is, every criminal) is a psychopath. If [common diagnostic criteria] were applied to a random set of corporations, some might apply for the diagnosis of psychopathy, but most would not.
However, in his monologue in The Corporation and the transcript of the interview, Hare, in addition to pointing out differences between corporations, clearly uses generalized terms with regard to numerous of his characterizations of psychopathy applying to corporations. He states, for example:[18]
A psychopath doesn’t accept responsibility for his or her own behaviour. Usually diffusion of responsibility is the name of the game for the psychopath. Somebody else made me do it, it wasn’t my fault, it was fate. And I’m not really responsible. Corporations would do this almost routinely I would imagine.
Awards
The film won or was nominated for over 26 international awards
See also
- Corporatocracy
- Empire (Hardt and Negri book) (2000)
- Evil corporation
- Manufacturing Consent (film) (1992), co-directed by Mark Achbar
- Manufacturing Consent (1988), the book upon which the eponymous film was based
- Psychopathy in the workplace
Notes
- Chief Justice Waite's words, "we avoided meeting the question". (118 U.S. 394 (1886) – According to the official court Syllabus in the United States Reports)
References
- ^ a b "The Corporation (2004) - Financial Information". The Numbers. Retrieved 11 May 2018.
- Point of View, July 30, 2020.
- ^ "And Now a Word From Their Cool College Sponsor". www.nytimes.com. July 19, 2001. Retrieved 2017-05-11.
- ^ Bakan, The Corporation, Constable, 2004, p.37
- ^ "Zeitgeist Studios". Box Office Mojo.
- ^ "About the DVD". TheCorporation.com. Archived from the original on 2009-05-14.
- ^ "Encore+ hits 25M views and 100K subs". Playback. August 19, 2020. Retrieved January 21, 2024.
- ^ "ENCORE+ YOUTUBE CHANNEL REACHES 100,000 SUBSCRIBERS AND 25M VIEWS MILESTONES" (Press release). Canada Media Fund. August 18, 2020. Retrieved January 21, 2024.
- ^ "Watch The Corporation". Amazon. Retrieved January 22, 2024.
- ^ "The Corporation". Apple TV. Retrieved January 22, 2024.
- CBS Interactive. Retrieved March 13, 2018.
- CBS Interactive. Retrieved March 13, 2018.
- ^ Harvey, Dennis (October 1, 2003). "The Corporation, review". Variety.
- ^ Ebert, Robert (July 16, 2004). "The Corporation, review". Chicago Sun-Times.
- ISSN 0013-0613. Retrieved 2023-04-23.
- ^ The Corporation. 2003. Event occurs at 40:33. The Corporation – Feature Transcript: Part 1 (PDF).
- ISBN 978-0061147890.)
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link - ^ "Transcripts: The Nature of the Corporation" (PDF). The Corporation. Archived from the original on October 31, 2014.
- ^ About the film - The Corporation
- ^ "Awards IMdB". www.imdb.com. Retrieved 2017-05-11.
External links
- Official website
- "The Corporation site". TVO.org. TVOntario.
- The Corporation at AllMovie
- The Corporation at Metacritic
- The Corporation at Box Office Mojo
- The Corporation at IMDb
- The Corporation at Rotten Tomatoes
- "Interview with Joel Bakan". Air American Place. Archived from the original on 2005-01-11.
- "Interview with Bakan and Achbar". Work Magazine. Archived from the original on 2005-12-16.
- trailer for the documentary on YouTubewith link to the full film in Comments
Downloads
- The Corporation (and bonus interview) is available for free viewing and download at the Internet Archive
- Paul, Leonard J. Paul. "Entire soundtrack, available for free download". Internet Archive.