PROFIT AND NOTHING BUT!

2001, 57 mins. Video source: First Run/Icarus Films. Directed by Raoul Peck. Produced by Jacques Bidou, Diana Elbaum, Thierry Garrel, Hugue Le Paige, Yves Swennen. Photographed by Jacques Besse, Jean-Pierre Grasset, Kirsten Johnson. Edited by Raoul Peck and Fabrice Salinié. Principal cast: Serge Latouche, Bernard Maris, Gérald Mathurin, René Passet, Immanuel Wallerstein.


From a review by J. Hoberman for The Village Voice, May 8, 2002:

The ideals of liberté, egalité, and fraternité are reprovingly embodied in Raoul Peck's Beta SP documentary-essay Profit and Nothing But!

"Capital has won . . . Capital has swept the board," a somber narrator informs us, speaking on behalf of Peck's native Haiti, a country that "theoretically doesn't exist" and whose GNP for the next 30 years might barely equal Bill Gates's current worth. "Triumphant capitalism" means nothing in Haiti, often crosscut with shots of an imperial New York as devoid of human presence as the Caribbean nation teems with it. Profit and Nothing But! makes a gloomy postscript to Peck's rousing biopic Lumumba. In a tradition begun by D.W. Griffith in A Corner in Wheat, Peck creates an elegant 52-minute montage-cum-lecture applying Marxist economic theory to the forces of globalization. His points are interspersed with mordant clips of Ronald Reagan and other American tele-celebrities. Such juxtapositions make for a sharper argument than the depressed narrator's pronouncements, which unfortunately amount to a droning expression of moral superiority.