The Machine That Killed Bad People appears, cursorily, to be a stylized documentary about the scuffle for control of the Philippines during Marcos's regime. This first glance is rewarded through interviews with Filipino dissidents, Marcos home movies, discussions with the New People's Army, Alex "Faith Healer" Orbito, TV footage of the Mendiola Bridge debacle, glimpses of folk customs, and sundry other mediated events. Yet permeating this hybrid work is an inventive critique of how history and people are transformed into spectacle. The locale for this examination is a news program complete with deadpan anchorwoman and disenchanted correspondent. Fagin employs the grammar of TV-the impersonal voices, the segmented formats, the graphic logos-to interrogate representation. He does this not by emptying televisual language but by overwhelming cliché with meaning. An alternative discourse, The Machine That Killed Bad People suggests that just as Philippine history is a product of neocolonialism, so, too, is the media.-Steve Seid