The Corporation
starring: Jane Akre, Ray Anderson, Maude Barlow, Chris Barrett, Carlton Brown
directed by: Jennifer Abbott, Mark Achbar
directed by: Jennifer Abbott, Mark Achbar
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Product Description:
This charts the spectacular rise of the corporation as a dramatic pervasive presence in our everyday lives. Features illuminating interviews with noam chomsky michael moore historian howard zinn .. As well as corporate honchos whistleblowers & big business spies.Studio: Zeitgeist FilmsRelease Date: 04/05/2005Run time: 145 minutesRating: Nr
Amazon.com:
An epic in length and breadth, this documentary aims at nothing less than a full-scale portrait of the most dominant institution on the planet Earth in our lifetime--a phenomenon all the more remarkable, if not downright frightening, when you consider that the corporation as we know it has been around for only about 150 years. It used to be that corporations were, by definition, short-lived and finite in agenda. If a town needed a bridge built, a corporation was set up to finance and complete the project; when the bridge was an accomplished fact, the corporation ceased to be. Then came the 19th-century robber barons, and the courts were prevailed upon to define corporations not as get-the-job-done mechanisms but as persons under the 14th Amendment with full civil rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (i.e., power and profit)--ad infinitum.
The Corporation defines this endlessly mutating life-form in exhaustive detail, measuring the many ways it has not only come to dominate but to deform our reality. The movie performs a running psychoanalysis of this entity with the characteristics of a prototypical psychopath: a callous unconcern for the feelings and safety of others, an incapacity to experience guilt, an ingrained habit of lying for profit, etc. We are swept away on a demented odyssey through an altered cosmos, in which artificial chemicals are created for profit and incidentally contribute to a cancer epidemic; in which the folks who brought us Agent Orange devise a milk-increasing drug for a world in which there is already a glut of milk; in which an American computer company leased its systems to the Nazis--and serviced them on a monthly basis--so that the Holocaust could go forward as an orderly process.
The movie goes on too long, circles too many points obsessively and redundantly, and risks preaching-to-the-choir reductiveness by calling on the usual talking-head suspects--Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Moore. And except for an endlessly receding tracking shot in an infinite patents archive, there's scarcely an image worth recalling. Still, it maps the new reality. This is our world--welcome to it. --Richard T. Jameson
This charts the spectacular rise of the corporation as a dramatic pervasive presence in our everyday lives. Features illuminating interviews with noam chomsky michael moore historian howard zinn .. As well as corporate honchos whistleblowers & big business spies.Studio: Zeitgeist FilmsRelease Date: 04/05/2005Run time: 145 minutesRating: Nr
Amazon.com:
An epic in length and breadth, this documentary aims at nothing less than a full-scale portrait of the most dominant institution on the planet Earth in our lifetime--a phenomenon all the more remarkable, if not downright frightening, when you consider that the corporation as we know it has been around for only about 150 years. It used to be that corporations were, by definition, short-lived and finite in agenda. If a town needed a bridge built, a corporation was set up to finance and complete the project; when the bridge was an accomplished fact, the corporation ceased to be. Then came the 19th-century robber barons, and the courts were prevailed upon to define corporations not as get-the-job-done mechanisms but as persons under the 14th Amendment with full civil rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (i.e., power and profit)--ad infinitum.
The Corporation defines this endlessly mutating life-form in exhaustive detail, measuring the many ways it has not only come to dominate but to deform our reality. The movie performs a running psychoanalysis of this entity with the characteristics of a prototypical psychopath: a callous unconcern for the feelings and safety of others, an incapacity to experience guilt, an ingrained habit of lying for profit, etc. We are swept away on a demented odyssey through an altered cosmos, in which artificial chemicals are created for profit and incidentally contribute to a cancer epidemic; in which the folks who brought us Agent Orange devise a milk-increasing drug for a world in which there is already a glut of milk; in which an American computer company leased its systems to the Nazis--and serviced them on a monthly basis--so that the Holocaust could go forward as an orderly process.
The movie goes on too long, circles too many points obsessively and redundantly, and risks preaching-to-the-choir reductiveness by calling on the usual talking-head suspects--Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Moore. And except for an endlessly receding tracking shot in an infinite patents archive, there's scarcely an image worth recalling. Still, it maps the new reality. This is our world--welcome to it. --Richard T. Jameson
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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: 
- Amazing and Important!
Every person in the United States needs to sit down, pay full attention, watch this movie and ask themselves how they can be part of a solution.
This is riveting and hard to watch.This film exposes an ugly truth that we are all struggling with daily.We are serfs in a corporate feudal world with no real control over anything.
Buy it immediately and watch it soon.
The premise is powerful and the art of presentation is amazing.They have taken a legal topic ... Read More
Rating: - Revealed !
What an interesting review of corporation ethics, or rather, the lack of ethics. The Corporation draws upon the now-ingrained belief that a company is the equivalent to a human person (which by law and business-serving conservative court judgment is now common law). Then it goes into a comparison of these "persons" behavior in the world. At every turn, corporations are found to be psychopathic persons, bent on self-serving behaviors that have no regard for their fellow "persons".
Recommend this ... Read More
Rating: - Today's dominant institution
The Corporation is today's dominant institution.This awkward entity is considered a "person" by law, but has all the characteristics of a psychopath when examined closely : it shows no emotions nor feelings, has no conscience, is incapable of experiencing guilt, and its sole purpose it is to make profits, no matter how.
Therefore corporations are very fond of fascist regimes, such as Nazi Germany, where IBM offered support with their machines counting the deaths in the concentration camps. ... Read More
Rating: 
- Really, Really Dumb
I was hoping I could show this film to my business ethics class, in order to spark some interesting discussion.I was very disappointed.It is certainly one of the worst pieces of ratiocination I have ever examined -- I would not want to waste my students' time with it.It's not worth discussing.It makes heavy use of a version of the economic notion of "externalities" which is more or less incoherent.
Rating: - Amazing but watch past the first 15 minutes.
This is the best movie I have ever seen. It allows us to think more clearly about the world's psychotic obsession with capitalism.
- Amazing and Important!Every person in the United States needs to sit down, pay full attention, watch this movie and ask themselves how they can be part of a solution.
This is riveting and hard to watch.This film exposes an ugly truth that we are all struggling with daily.We are serfs in a corporate feudal world with no real control over anything.
Buy it immediately and watch it soon.
The premise is powerful and the art of presentation is amazing.They have taken a legal topic ... Read More
- Revealed !What an interesting review of corporation ethics, or rather, the lack of ethics. The Corporation draws upon the now-ingrained belief that a company is the equivalent to a human person (which by law and business-serving conservative court judgment is now common law). Then it goes into a comparison of these "persons" behavior in the world. At every turn, corporations are found to be psychopathic persons, bent on self-serving behaviors that have no regard for their fellow "persons".
Recommend this ... Read More
- Today's dominant institutionThe Corporation is today's dominant institution.This awkward entity is considered a "person" by law, but has all the characteristics of a psychopath when examined closely : it shows no emotions nor feelings, has no conscience, is incapable of experiencing guilt, and its sole purpose it is to make profits, no matter how.
Therefore corporations are very fond of fascist regimes, such as Nazi Germany, where IBM offered support with their machines counting the deaths in the concentration camps. ... Read More
- Really, Really DumbI was hoping I could show this film to my business ethics class, in order to spark some interesting discussion.I was very disappointed.It is certainly one of the worst pieces of ratiocination I have ever examined -- I would not want to waste my students' time with it.It's not worth discussing.It makes heavy use of a version of the economic notion of "externalities" which is more or less incoherent.
- Amazing but watch past the first 15 minutes.This is the best movie I have ever seen. It allows us to think more clearly about the world's psychotic obsession with capitalism.
