Analysis Of Liz Garbus Shouting Fire

Liz Garbus's, Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech\ explores the political as well as the social context of American's freedom of speech in the post 9/11 era. While watching Garbus's documentary, one can predict that how freedom of speech, as a part of The First Amendment, is violated after the 9/11 era, for “security” reasons.

The documentary begins with Ward Churchill, a political activist, author and professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado. He exposed the hidden facts of endangered freedom of speech in America. He had to face harsh circumstances for using his right of speech and ultimately in 2005, he eventually got fired from the University of Colorado because of his unethical views about the foreign

During the time when the issue of Debbie was documented her cultural background and stories from her childhood were not very relevant to the topic. When talking about her arrival in United States “...there was white everywhere and I started to scream all over the house “Wake up! Wake up! There's sugar everywhere.” These details distracted the audience from the main context of the documentary, specially because such details were not given for the other examples in this film. Furthermore the length of this documentary makes it difficult for the audience to follow and is saturated with information. Since this documentary is an hour and half long, it takes a good amount of effort to recall the events from the beginning of this documentary while reaching the end. The director could have made the documentary shorter by only including the parts from the history which were most relevant. In the beginning of the documentary Ward Churchill's story is shown, however by the end the viewer has forgotten the details presented at the beginning resulting in his story not being as impactful as the other. The director could have recapped all the major issues at the end, which would have helped the audience to completely understand the main idea of the topic. The director could have presented the story of Ward Churchill more efficiently by having a representative from the University of Colorado who actually made the decision to fire him. However, Garbus didn’t do this because she was biased to the topic which made the documentary less effective, if she includes individuals who had knowledge based on both the topics, her documentary could have been more impressive and useful. Hence this layout makes it less of an effective