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The Corporation
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Mark Achbar Jennifer Abbott
Produced by	Mark Achbar Bart Simpson
Written by	Joel Bakan Harold Crooks Mark Achbar
Narrated by	Mikela J. Mikael
Music by	Leonard J. Paul
Cinematography	Mark Achbar Rolf Cutts Jeff Koffman Kirk Tougas
Editing by	Jennifer Abbott
Studio	Big Picture Media Corporation
Distributed by	Zeitgeist Films
Release date(s)	Toronto International Film Festival: September 10, 2003 Canada January 16, 2004 (limited) United States: June 4, 2004 Australia:: September 2, 2004 United Kingdom:: October 29, 2004
Running time	145 minutes
Country	Canada
Language	English

The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film written by Joel Bakan, and directed by Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott. The documentary is critical of the modern-day corporation, considering its legal status as a class of person and evaluating its behaviour towards society and the world at large as a psychiatrist might evaluate an ordinary person. This is explored through specific examples. The Corporation has been displayed worldwide, on television, and via DVD, file sharing, and free download. Bakan wrote the book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, during the filming of the documentary.

Synopsis

The documentary shows the development of the contemporary business corporation, from a legal entity that originated as a government-chartered institution meant to effect specific public functions, to the rise of the modern commercial institution entitled to most of the legal rights of a person. One theme is its assessment as a "personality", as a result of an 1886 case in the United States Supreme Court in which a statement by Chief Justice Morrison R. 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. The film's assessment is effected via the diagnostic criteria in the DSM-IV; Robert Hare, a University of British Columbia psychology professor and a consultant to the FBI, compares the profile of the contemporary profitable business corporation to that of a clinically-diagnosed psychopath. The documentary concentrates mostly upon North American corporations, especially those of the United States.

The film is in vignettes examining and criticizing corporate business practices, to establish parallels, between corporate legal misbehavior (malfeasance) and the DSM-IV's symptoms of psychopathy, i.e. callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect for the law.

Topics addressed

Topics addressed include the Business Plot, where in 1933, the popular General Smedley Butler exposed a corporate plot against then U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt; the tragedy of the commons; Dwight D. Eisenhower's warning people to beware of the rising military-industrial complex; economic externalities; suppression of an investigative news story about Bovine Growth Hormone on a Fox News Channel affiliate television station; the invention of the soft drink Fanta by the Coca-Cola Company due to the trade embargo on Nazi Germany; the alleged role of IBM in the Nazi holocaust (see IBM and the Holocaust); the Cochabamba protests of 2000 brought on by the privatization of Bolivia's municipal water supply by the Bechtel Corporation; and in general themes of corporate social responsibility, the notion of limited liability, the corporation as a psychopath, and the corporation as a person.

Interviews

The film also features interviews with prominent corporate critics such as Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, Vandana Shiva, Charles Kernaghan, and Howard Zinn as well as opinions from company CEOs such as Ray Anderson (from the Interface carpet & fabric company), the capitalist viewpoints of Peter Drucker and Milton Friedman, and think tanks advocating free markets such as the Fraser Institute. Interviews also feature Dr. Samuel Epstein with his involvement in a lawsuit against Monsanto Company for promoting the use of Posilac, (Monsanto's trade name for recombinant Bovine Somatotropin) to induce more milk production in dairy cattle.

The following individuals were interviewed for the film, each appearing on the screen at different times during the documentary:

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 104 reviews.^[2] Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 73 out of 100, based on 28 reviews.^[3]

Variety 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."^[4]

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."^[5]

The Economist review suggests that the idea for an organization as a psychopathic entity originated with Max Weber, in regards to government bureaucracy. Also, the reviewer remarks that the film weighs heavily in favor of public ownership as a solution to the evils depicted, while failing to acknowledge the magnitude of evils committed by governments in the name of public ownership, such as those of the Communist Party in the former Soviet Union.^[6]

The Maoist Internationalist Movement, in their review criticizes the film for the opposite: for depicting the communist party in an unfavourable light, while adopting an anarchist approach favoring direct democracy and worker's councils without emphasizing the need for a centralized bureaucracy. The film, in their view "offers no realistic alternative to imperialism." and "it shares some of the strengths and downfalls" of Mark Achbar's film Manufacturing Consent, which celebrates the life of anarcho-syndicalist, linguist, and activist Noam Chomsky. In their view, "corporate power for profit [is] not the same as megabureaucracy without profit."^[7]

The film was nominated for numerous awards, and won the World Cinema Audience Award: Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, 2004, along with a Special Jury Award at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in 2003 and 2004.

Versions

TVO version

It is an extended edition made for TVO that separates the documentary into 3 1-hour episodes:

• 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

The DVD version was released as a 2-disc set that includes following:^[8]

• Disc 1 includes the film, 17 minutes deleted scenes, 2 tracks of directors' and writer's commentary, filmmakers' Q's & A's and interviews, theatrical trailer, 60 minutes of Joel Bakan interviewed by Janeane Garofalo on Majority Report, Air America Radio, 10 minutes of Katherine Dodds on grassroots marketing, 3 language (English, French, Spanish) subtitles, descriptive audio.
• Disc 2 includes 165 never-before-seen clips and updates sorted by person (Hear More From...) and subject (Topical Paradise). Hear More From... includes updates and goodies like the Milton Friedman Choir singing "An Ode To Privatization". Topical Paradise includes 22 topics, with Related Film Resources include 15 film trailers and a 30 minute UK animated film.

A single-disc set was also released that contained only the main feature.

Notes

References

External links

• The Corporation official website
• TVO site
• The Corporation at the Internet Movie Database
• The Corporation at Allmovie
• The Corporation at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Corporation at Metacritic
• The Corporation at Box Office Mojo
• Interview with Joel Bakan
• Interview with Bakan and Achbar

Downloads

• The Corporation (and bonus interview) available for free download at the Internet Archive [more]
• The Filmmakers Official Download Edition - A torrent, created by the filmmaker, containing the film.
• The Corporation Direct download (.avi, 700MB)
• Soundtrack created by Leonard J. Paul - Leonard J. Paul's entire score for the film is available for free download

From Wikiquote

The Corporation is a 2003 Canadian documentary film critical of the modern-day corporation, considering it as a class of person (as in US law it is understood to be) and evaluating its behaviour towards society and the world at large as a psychologist might evaluate an ordinary person.

Narrator ("Mikela Mikael")

• 150 years ago, the business corporation was a relatively insignificant institution. Today, it is all-pervasive. Like the Church, the Monarchy and the Communist Party in other times and places, the corporation is today's dominant institution. This documentary examines the nature, evolution, impacts, and possible futures of the modern business corporation. Initially given a narrow legal mandate, what has allowed today's corporation to achieve such extraordinary power and influence over our lives? We begin our inquiry as scandals threaten to trigger a wide debate about the lack of public control over big corporations.

• Through the voices of CEOs, whistle blowers, brokers, gurus and spies, insiders and outsiders, we present the corporation as a paradox, an institution that creates great wealth, but causes enormous, and often hidden harms.

• To determine the kind of personality that drives the corporation to behave like an externalising machine, we can analyse it like a psychiatrist would a patient. We can even formulate a diagnosis, on the basis of typical case histories of harm it has inflicted on others selected from a universe of corporate activity.

• Having acquired the legal rights and protections of a person, the question arises - what kind of person is the corporation?

Noam Chomsky

• The dominant role of corporations in our lives is essentially a product of roughly the past century. Corporations were originally associations of people who were chartered by a state to perform some particular function. Like a group of people want to build a bridge over the Charles River, or something like that.

• Corporations were given the rights of immortal persons. But then special kinds of persons, persons who had no moral conscience. These are a special kind of persons, which are designed by law, to be concerned only for their stockholders. And not, say, what are sometimes called their stakeholders, like the community or the work force or whatever.

Others

• Robert Keyes: The word corporate gets attached in almost, you know, in a pejorative sense to and gets married with the word "a-gen-da." And one hears a lot about the corporate a-gen-da as though it is evil, as though it is an agenda, which is trying to take over the world. Personally, I don't use the word "corporation." I use the word "business." I will use the word... use the word "company." I will use the words "business community" because I think that is a much fairer representation than zeroing in on just this word "corporation."

• Ray Anderson: The modern corporation has grown out of the industrial age. The industrial age began in 1712 when an Englishman named Thomas Newcomen invented a steam driven pump to pump water out of the English coal mine, so the English coal miners could get more coal to mine, rather than hauling buckets of water out of the mine. It was all about productivity, more coal per man-hour. That was the dawn of the industrial age. And then it became more steel per man-hour, more textiles per man-hour, more automobiles per man-hour, and today, it's more chips per man-hour, more gizmos per man-hour. The system is basically the same, producing more sophisticated products today.

• Mary Zepernick: There were very few chartered corporations in early United States history. And the ones that existed had clear stipulations in their state issued charters, how long they could operate, the amount of capitalisation, what they made or did or maintained, a turnpike or whatever was in their charter and they didn't do anything else. They didn't own or couldn't own another corporation. Their shareholders were liable. And so on.

• Richard Grossman: In both law and the culture, the corporation was considered a subordinate entity that was a gift from the people in order to serve the public good. So you have that history, and we shouldn't be misled by it, it's not as if these were the halcyon days, when all corporations served the public trust, but there's a lot to learn from that.

• Robert Monks: The great problem of having corporate citizens is that they aren't like the rest of us. As Baron Thurlow in England is supposed to have said, "They have no soul to save, and they have no body to incarcerate." (and) The corporation is an externalizing* machine, in the same way that a shark is a killing machine. *(moving its costs to external organizations and people)

• Michael Moore: I believe the mistake that a lot of people make when they think about corporations, is they think you know, corporations are like us. They think they have feelings, they have politics, they have belief systems, they really only have one thing, the bottom line - how to make as much money as they can in any given quarter. That's it.

• Ira Jackson: The eagle, soaring, clear-eyed, competitive, prepared to strike, but not a vulture. Noble, visionary, majestic, that people can believe in and be inspired by, that creates such a lift that it soars. I can see that being a good logo for the principled company. Okay, guys, enough bullshit.

• Oscar Olivera: At the climax of the struggle, the army stayed in their barracks; the police also remained in their stations; the members of Congress became invisible; the Governor went into hiding, and afterwards, he resigned. There wasn't any authority left. The only legitimate authority was the people gathered at the city square making decisions in large assemblies.

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The Corporation

See Also

• Michael Moore
• Noam Chomsky