Film Artistry Overshadows Politics
By Larry Calloway, Albuquerque Journal
Last weekend, the Telluride Film Festival premiered "Gunners Palace," Michael Tucker's urgent documentary about American soldiers in Iraq. He shot most of it in the last 12 months. So it all takes place after "the end of major combat operations." This and other Armed Forces Radio and Television Service announcements in the name of Donald Rumsfeld are part of the ironic narrative, like the loudspeakers in M*A*S*H.
Tucker is an unknown, a Seattle boatman who took a community college course in digital film editing, bought a high-definition camera and set out to see what he could see. He went to Baghdad four times the hard way: without military sanction, by armored car from Jordan. For two months late last year, he lived with the Army's 2nd battalion, 3rd Field Artillery regiment— 400 soldiers stationed in the bombed pleasure palace of Uday Hussein, Saddam's psychopathic first son.
The soldiers in "Gunners Palace" party at Odai's swimming pool, practice on his putting green, work at their laptops under his high ceilings. They patrol the streets in the dangerous Aadhamiya district of Baghdad in open Humvees, do raids, make arrests. They rescue abandoned babies, talk to school children, restore a hospital. They take hits from rocks, small arms, mortars, RPGs, IEDs. They always go fully armed. And some die.
Telluride chooses 18 or 20 new films for showing each Labor Day weekend on the basis of artistry, not politics, and this is not a political movie. Of the many films on the Iraqi war that were available this year, the festival organizers chose only this one, which was an unsolicited submission, according to festival co-director Tom Luddy.
"Gunners Palace" is a digital movie from a digital war. The men and women of the "Gunner" battalion, as it is known informally, carry sophisticated equipment, but beneath the night-vision goggles and the helmets with microphones, they are still soldiers, aware of the fate of soldiers.
And Tucker captured this. But he did it in a new way. Unlike many documentaries, this one makes the camera part of the action. The soldiers were aware of it, especially when they were resting at the palace. They began performing for the camera. As Tucker discovered, some were natural rappers. And they could say things in the guise of rap music that they would never say in a serious interview. Like:
"Yeah, I notice that my face is aging so quickly
'Cuz I seen more than the average man in his 50s
I'm 24, I got two kids and a wife
Having visions of them picturing me out their life."
One soldier played the electric guitar, and in a scene with helicopters hovering in an orange sky he stands on a palace wall and does a Jimmy Hendrix-inspired version of "The Star-Spangled Banner."
Although he was not "embedded" as a journalist, Tucker says he had free access to the palace and was eventually trusted enough by the men to go along on patrols. In the opening scene, they are under fire. And Tucker, in another innovation for a documentary, narrates in the first person plural— as in "we," not "they."
Introduced to the Sheridan Opera House audience before the first screening and handed a microphone, Tucker said, "Eight of the people you will see in this movie are now dead." He seemed to choke up and handed back the microphone.
Calloway is a former Santa Fe journalist who now writes for his own Web site, larrycalloway.com.
