Samizdat Video: Archiving the Iraq War
The L.A. Times has an amazing story, Extreme Cinema Verite, about combat videos made by soldiers in Iraq. The story’s implications are quite striking.
The contrast between what’s on the evening news, and what’s on these videos is enormous; the traditional media is again being re- or de-valued. These images are more powerful, in part, because they are created by participants, rather than observers.
By adding music, soldiers create their own cinema verite of the conflict. Although many are humorous or patriotic, others are gory, like McCollough’s favorite.
“It gets the point across,” he said. “This isn’t some jolly freakin’ peacekeeping mission.”
Amateur editing tools work, and the traditional networks aren’t needed for distribution.
Thomas Doherty, chairman of the film studies program at Brandeis University and author of “Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture and World War II,” called the videos an authentic diary of the war.
“There’s always the disconnect between the front-line soldier and the sheltered home front,” he said. “It’s a World War II ethos: You don’t bring it home.”
After watching the video, Doherty said, “Of course you’re struck by the gruesomeness of the carnage, but it’s a wide range of images.”
He went on to praise “the contra-punctual editing — the beat of the tune and the flash of the images,” calling it “a very slick piece of work.”
“The MTV generation goes to war,” he said. “They should enter it at Sundance.”
There is a market for these images.
“Militants fight in the streets of Baghdad, looting, lawlessness,” is how clips are advertised on efootage.com. A Las Vegas-based company, Gotfootage.com, offers $50 and $100 clips that include older footage of Saddam Hussein, Jessica Lynch, aerial bombardment and “sooooo many bombs.” The site also advertises video showing an Iraqi fuel truck being destroyed by U.S. bombs during the invasion in March 2003.
Another website advertises, “GrouchyMedia.com is the place to find those pump-you-up-to-kill-the-bad-guys videos everyone has been talking about.”
And there is a tragic dimension.
Daniel Nelson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati School of Medicine, said he understood the disconnect.
“I’m not surprised about this — it’s a new consciousness that we’re beginning to see,” he said, comparing the videos to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse photographs. “What happens in this situation, the culture is endorsing something that would be prohibited in another context stateside.”
What seems disrespectful or a trivialization is also a way for soldiers to distance themselves from the trauma, he said, which says: “I don’t want to see what I’ve done or experienced as real.”
The Pentagon’s control over the media in Iraq is perhaps in some sense an illustration of the universal tendency to fight the last war. Unlike Vietnam, CBS is under control, and there’s a cheering section at Fox that is the american analog of pre-glasnost Pravda. But these little samizdat videos — made by individuals, passed from hand to hand, and containing facts the official media does not — tell certain truths about the war.
There may not be much of an overt political statement here, but the images speak for themselves. This is the historical record in the making.