“The War Tapes” comes by its title honestly.
Deborah Scranton’s documentary opens with jarring chaos and immediacy.
The date onscreen puts us in Fallujah in November 2004. The decimation of that city 69 klicks west of Baghdad already had happened. Still, what takes place is dire enough.
A patrol approaches buildings, weapons drawn. Shots bang out, followed by this exchange.
“Sergeant Smith is down.” “Sergeant Smith is down?” “Smith is down!” The camera jostles, stumbles, recovers, dips again.
“The War Tapes” is compelling, challenging, painful, revealing. But you might have guessed that from the filmmaker’s aim: to deliver an intimate view of the war by giving soldiers cameras.
“If I had to think of one adjective to describe the film,” says the director, “it’s ‘visceral,”‘ says Scranton.
“Like it or not, we’re a nation at war. And I think it’s important that we understand what war looks like, feels like, smells like. Because at this point in time there are 140,000 boots on the ground, not counting Special Forces, in our name.”
So this isn’t a traditional review. Because the arrival of “The War Tapes” for a one-week stint at the Starz FilmCenter calls for a slightly different tactic.
After all, the movie can be treated as the first in a fresh wave of documentaries coming to Denver in the next months that touch – hard – upon the war. Or it can be seen as the latest in a wave of thoughtful movies about the Iraq war that began appearing in art houses about a year after President Bush declared major combat operations done with.
Some of those movies looked at the war in a glancing fashion. For instance, Jehane Noujaim’s fine portrait of Arab TV network Al-Jezeera, “Control Room,” and Eugene Jarecki’s “Why We Fight,” a thought-provoking if didactic essay on what President Dwight D. Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex.”
An impressive number have been about soldiers. “Gunner Palace,” by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein, began the campaign to connect viewers with the lives of soldiers. Tucker was embedded with the 2/3 Field Artillery for two months in Baghdad.
“Occupation: Dreamland” followed a few months later. Filmmakers Garrett Scott and Ian Olds spent time in 2004 with the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division stationed near Fallujah.
Later this month, “The Ground Truth” is due out. Patricia Foulkrod’s film examines the lives of veterans returning from Iraq with the burdens of warfare heavy on their consciences. One of them is Kelly Dougherty, an Army National Guard medic and MP from Colorado Springs.
Starz FilmCenter will screen two documentaries looking at the U.S. occupation from an Iraqi perspective: Laura Poitras’ “My Country, My Country” (Sept. 22-28) and Andrew Berends’ “The Blood of My Brother” (Sept. 29-Oct. 5).
Most of these docs come with the sort of pedigree earned at film festivals. “The Ground Truth” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. So did James Longley’s well-thought, beautifully wrought “Iraq in Fragments.”
The elegant meditation on post-invasion Iraq unfolds from three perspectives: that of a young boy in Baghdad, from within Muqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite movement, and from the Kurdish countryside. It has yet to find a distributor.
Scranton’s “War Tapes” won the best-documentary prize at the Tribeba Film Festival.
The project began in February 2004 when Scranton turned down an invitation by the New Hampshire National Guard to embed with them. Instead, inspired by the “living journalism” of James Agee and Walker Evans’ “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” she pitched the idea of giving soldiers mini-DVD cameras. A public affairs officer said sure, but the soldiers would have to volunteer.
So Scranton headed to Fort Dix, N.J., to sell the Charlie Company, 3rd of the 172nd Infantry (Mountain) Regiment, on recording their year-long stint in Iraq.
“I picked Charlie Company for two reasons,” Scranton says from her home in New Hampshire. “One, they were infantry. Two, they were going to be based at Camp Anaconda, and I knew they would have Internet access, so we could talk.”
Of her listeners, 10 signed up. Five shot footage for the entire year. Over the span of a year, editor Steve James crafted more than 1,000 hours into a tight, dramatic 97 minutes.
Three soldiers are featured in “The War Tapes.” Sgt. Zack Bazzi, Spec. Mike Moriarty and Sgt. Stephen Pink, as well as their nearest and dearest on the home front, present rich, conflicting, raw portraits.
“The War Tapes” speaks of citizen soldiers and citizen journalists – in this instance one and the same. So what about the citizen moviegoer?
“I want audiences to see it, to feel for an hour and a half, what these guys did for a year,” says Scranton.
Pink is the film’s most literary soldier. He’s now splitting his time between carpentry and writing a memoir due to his publisher in March.
Traveling with the movie, he noted audience reactions.
“At the beginning, we’re kind of making these jokes, this gallows humor. And the audience is laughing right along with us,” says Pink, who has been back from Iraq for a year and a half and lives on Cape Cod.
“Then as we go on, the audience stops laughing at the same things we’re laughing at. Toward the end, we’re making a few final jokes and they can’t believe we’re joking about this kind of stuff.” One of those things? A debate about what sort of meat the wounds of the dead and dying most resemble.
“I think that’s one of the things that shows the arc of the way way we changed while we were there,” he says. “It really forces the audience to understand what we were going through.”
Scranton recounts her own favorite audience encounter. It occurred when an audience member at the Tribeca premiere asked what they could do to help soldiers.
Brandon Wilkins, who filmed the opening footage in Fallujah but doesn’t appear onscreen, took the question.
“He’s a man of few words,” says Scranton about the Maine native. “I’m a northern New Englander too. And we joke that my grandfather had 80 words a day and he used them judiciously.”
Wilkins, just as thrifty, said “Get to know one.”
“We were out later that night,” Scranton says. “I said, Brandon you summed up my film in four words. That’s what I was hoping to achieve through the power of empathy.”
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
| “The War Tapes”
NOT RATED|1 hour, 37 minutes|SOLDIERS’ STORIES|Directed by Deborah Scranton; photography by Zack Bazzi, Mike Moriarty, Stephen Pink, Duncan Domey, Brandon Wilkins, and other soldiers of Charlie Company, 3rd of the 172nd Infantry (Mountain) Regiment; featuring Bazzi, Moriarty, Pink, Sana Bazzi, Lindsay Coletti, Randi Moriarty|Opens today at the Starz FilmCenter.
