Word: canal
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...Wynn, who normally operates out of Cairo. His past assignments have included interviewing the late King Faisal of Saudi Arabia for TIME'S 1975 Man of the Year cover, and six months later joining Egyptian President Anwar Sadat aboard the first ship to pass through the reopened Suez Canal...
...Canal Zone. All the reviews indicate that Fred Wizeman's latest documentary may be his most disturbing -- and at a time when many Americans are failing to confront the imperialistic impulses that led us deeper and deeper into Vietnam, his most timely. Under Wizeman's cold, documentary gaze, American "Zonies" who are zealously protecting our "sovereignty" over the canal appear as a pack of super-patriotic crazies -- absurd if they didn't seem all so familiar...
Wiseman reveals that the Zonians, for all their manic patriotic ardor, are a rootless and unhappy lot; their crime and child-abuse rates are well above the mainland rates. Canal Zone thus becomes a study in how Americanism when isolated and left to feed on itself can become a desperate form of mass escapism-and, as such, it is an ingenious cautionary tale. -Frank Rich
...past decade, Frederick Wiseman has been examining American institutions in a series of documentaries (High School, Welfare) that are both provocative political statements and innovative works of film. In Canal Zone, one of his best efforts, the director travels to an American realm that is far removed from most of our lives. The results are unexpectedly harrowing. In the sunny landscape of a distant Army enclave in Panama, Wiseman finds a nightmare vision of America itself...
...Canal Zone is three hours long and somewhat repetitive, but its temperature rises steadily as it proceeds. At first it seems that Wiseman has made this film only to poke obvious fun at colonialism: he includes some all too pointed shots of the downtrodden Panamanians who perform the Americans' menial labor. By the time Canal Zone reaches its Memorial Day climax, however, it becomes as bitter as Sinclair Lewis' Main Street...