Controlled Bleeding – A Nation’s NightmareA film by Barton Santello
Psychotropic Films presents Controlled Bleeding, a film about addiction and dreams turned to nightmares. Underground filmmaker Barton Santello applies his signature psycho-active filmmaking style to perceptions of recent history. In this film, symbolic media images, imbued with a sense of tragic irony, portray repeating cycles of dysfunctional human behavior in the pursuit of a finite resource - Oil.
View Film on YouTube.com CONTROLLED BLEEDING
Historical Background That Inspired This Film: Oil - the biggest industry on earth - drives the world’s economic model, provides vast oil wealth and power for business and political entities. However, this fading resource, now mostly concentrated in poor, remote and politically unstable countries halfway around the world, leaves highly mechanized nations vulnerable to events in these remote countries. As third-world nations industrialize and populations explode, competition over the remaining oil intensifies.
Around the world, corrupt power brokers influence and infiltrate governments and manipulate jingoistic ideologies of powerful nations into projecting military power. To ensure the control of oil requires a physical presence which disrupts cultures of the people living in the regions where oil is found. After decades of economic exploitation and cultural degradation, David now fights-back against Goliath, in a modern day ‘war-of-the-worlds.’
In the United States at the dawn of the 21st century, political proxies of oil conglomerates have hijacked incredible technological, economic and military resources of a nation to wage war against Islamic peoples that stand between the access to ‘black gold’ and the West’s thirst for modern comfort and convenience. The cost of needless human suffering, financial abandon and environmental resource depletion, is seen as incidental to protect the flow of the world’s economic lubricant.
Rather than seek clean, sustainable alternatives to oil that would diffuse Jihad related terror; the defense of oil in America has moved the country toward a Fascist state. Capitalizing on fear following the events of September 11th, 2001, a dictatorial Executive Branch, conducts wars that fill the pockets of the military Industrial complex. At the same time proclaim to protect the public from the consequences of its own compulsive and consumptive behaviors: Wasteful practices which the government itself enables and perpetuates. One can now witness in real-time, a nation bring terrible misfortune down upon itself through addiction, fear, propaganda, and extreme nationalism; while expending great resources and policies that ironically help create enemies faster than they can be killed.
This perilous gamble with economic catastrophe and the sacrifice of moral behavior is conducted in full view of the world. And one can now witness a once highly respected nation, regress into mis-adventures such as secret prisons, torture and hunting-down its enemies as they dash from cave-to-cave in remote regions of the world.
Ironically, all this comes at a time when alternate renewable energy technologies could replace oil, transform economies, preserve the environment and empower people to take responsibility for their energy use. Will we open our eyes and awake from the nightmare of oil before it’s too late?
