New West Pick: Documentary Film Festival

Big Sky Film: “The War Tapes”

By Nick Davis, 2-15-07

	Shot through binoculars - MSR Tampa, north of Taji, Iraq. Photo courtesy of SenArt Films/Scranton/Lacy Films.

Of all the miracles that constitute The War Tapes—and this movie is a seemingly unending string of miracles—easily the most overriding is the very fact of its existence.

Billed as the first war flick with combat scenes filmed exclusively by combat soldiers, this might be the most improbable movie ever made.

Before they were deployed to Iraq in the spring of 2004, and handful of soldiers from an Army National Guard unit were given video cameras and a request to shoot as much real-time war footage as they could. It remains a mystery to me how an organization as controlling as the military would allow such a thing (unless the chink in the armor was a military bureaucracy vast enough to let go unnoticed the doings of a single Guard unit), but according to the filmmakers, only one of the many hundreds of tapes shot by the soldiers were withheld by Army brass—and even then, the censored video images were replaced by a series of devastating still photos.

Put together by some of the key people behind the doc greats Hoop Dreams and The Fog of War, The War Tapes marks the film directorial debut from Deborah Scranton, who had actually been extended an invitation to accompany the unit as an embedded reporter before nixing that idea and going with the DIY soldier approach.

Scranton wisely mixes the often-jiggly combat footage (though the soldiers were schooled in camera technique, they remained bullet-shooters first and film-shooters second) with interview pieces shot after the soldiers returned home. Further bolstering the narrative are a number of pieces Scranton shot with the significant women in the soldiers’ lives, both during their deployment and after they returned home. Those post-combat remarks from the women, in fact, rank among the most haunting impressions of the movie.

But it’s the war footage itself that defines the singularity of The War Tapes.

While actual human destruction is mostly limited to the aftermath of attacks, the obvious authenticity of the scenes make even the most artfully constructed fictional war footage seem tame. Though not combat footage per se, there’s a scene in The War Tapes that closely mirrors a scene from Jarhead (the fine memoir-turned-movie about the first Gulf War), and it hammers home the difference between actual and faux reality.

It involves perhaps the most unsightly of non-combat war issues, that of human waste disposal, and as stomach-turning as the scene in Jarhead was, suffice it to say the real thing is exponentially more gross, funny and sad.

The War Tapes is not, amazingly enough, a political movie. No judgments are rendered, no agendas are pushed, and any search for meaning invariably folds under the weight of war reality. It’s a movie that leaves you numb and perplexed, and if you have any interest whatsoever in the Iraq conflict it’s a movie you shouldn’t miss.

Editor’s Note: “The War Tapes” is one of NewWest.Net’s top picks for the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, which opens Feb. 15 at the Wilma Theater. “The War Tapes,” which is one of the special presentations at the festival, shows on Friday, Feb. 16 at 7:30 p.m. in the Wilma. Producer Steve James and co-producer Adam Singer will be on hand to do an extended question and answer session with the audience after the screening. Admission is $7.00 for the general public. Click here to watch the trailer for the film and check back to www.newwest.net/bsdff for more NewWest.Net picks this week and coverage of the festival.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.