Saddam Hussein
Hussein appears on this page as a subject rather than a performer. Every credit listed here is archive footage, and the films using it are documentaries and essays about the period he defined.
He was an Iraqi politician and revolutionary, a leading member of the Ba'ath Party and a proponent of Ba'athism, the mix of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism whose particular variant under him is sometimes called Saddamism. He served as vice president from 1968 to 1979, as prime minister from 1979 to 1991 and again from 1994 to 2003, and as the fifth president of Iraq from 1979 until the United States-led invasion removed him in 2003.
The credit list is interesting for a different reason: the same images get put to opposite ends. Fahrenheit 9/11, HyperNormalisation and The Shock Doctrine all reach for familiar news footage and build three separate arguments from it, about American politics, about narrative and power, and about economics. How to Become a Tyrant and Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror use him as a case study. Equilibrium, a science fiction film, cuts real footage into fiction. The archive stays fixed; the meaning is entirely a function of who is editing.
Movies (4)
TV (2)
Where to start with Saddam Hussein
None of this is performance, so treat the list as a reading of a period rather than a filmography. How to Become a Tyrant is the most direct route in, a series built to explain the mechanics of one-man rule with him as one of its cases, and the clearest option if you want history rather than argument.
HyperNormalisation is the most provocative and the least reliable, Adam Curtis doing what Adam Curtis does with an archive. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a polemic from inside its own moment and should be watched as one.
The Shock Doctrine takes the economic angle, Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror the long-form American one, and Equilibrium is fiction that borrows the footage for texture.