November 16, 2005
Hollywood Goes to War
The New York Times Magazine provides a round-up of recent Iraq documentaries-- Control Room, Occupation Dreamland, Dream of Sparrows and Gunner Palace--in an article authored by Tom Bissell.
Life Imitates Art
Wilf doing his Jake Gyllenhaal impression.
Reading the piece, I took notice that Bissell tries to frame our films against the Vietnam Era "Hearts and Minds"--a film that was produced at the tail end of a conflict. He refers to our films as "journalism in a hurry", which I think is only half correct. I think the films are a response to television which simply isn't doing in-depth reports from Iraq. Given ten years to meditate on the war, I'm sure we'll see a "Hearts and Minds" emerge from this war.
Davis made his documentary with three questions in mind: Why did we go to Vietnam? What did we do there? What did the doing in turn do to us? "I didn't expect the film to answer these questions," Davis admits in the commentary on the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film. "I expected it to address those questions." Explanatory impotence is not unique to the documentary, but in some ways is abetted by the form. Inimitably vivid yet brutally compressed, documentaries often treasure image over information, proffer complications instead of conclusions and touch on rather than explore. But when a documentary film takes on the considerable subject of war, inconclusiveness can frustrate, though the viewer's frustration is not necessarily with the film. Even "Hearts and Minds" acknowledges its limitations: "You were over there, too," one man angrily says to the filmmakers at a stateside parade, "with your damn cameras."The damn cameras have now been to Iraq and back. Few of the Iraq-war documentaries offer such self-awareness, though, and most neglect to address the war as a result of choices that might have been made differently. The one that comes closest is probably Stephen Marshall's "Battleground." In showing us insurgents discussing their hatred of Americans while Humvees pass by, an Iraqi translator explaining that the invasion was due to the collapse of the American economy, a former anti-Saddam guerrilla reuniting with his mother after 13 years of exile and a U.S. officer marveling at the fact that Iraqis wear jeans ("They could be anywhere in the United States"), "Battleground" provides a movingly human and many-sided portrait of the war. It is, however, more the exception than the rule. In the grunt's-eye view offered in "Occupation: Dreamland" and "Gunner Palace," the Iraq war functions as a savage reversal of American expectation. In "Control Room," about Al Jazeera, the war is a rough beast sprinting toward Bethlehem. In "The Dreams of Sparrows," a film made by Iraqis, the war is a fiery doorway into a hitherto unknown reality. But in all of these films the war just is. Matthew Arnold famously said that journalism was "literature in a hurry." The analytic content of these Iraq documentaries sometimes feels like journalism in a hurry. These are partial maps drawn while still within the maze of war.
