War, as shot by soldiers

BY JAN STUART | Newsday Staff Writer

June 2, 2006

Deborah Scranton's upsetting Iraqi diary "The War Tapes" is the apex of two converging movements in documentary filmmaking: the chronicles of a war that shows no signs of going away and movies that saddle participants with the responsibility of recording the event at hand themselves.

The thinking behind this latter concept, presumably, is that everyone has a Michael Moore inside them just waiting to get out, and that no one is better qualified to document a barrel ride off Niagara Falls than the person screaming his way through it. This experiment in artistic buck-passing has resulted in the negligible (the blinding rock show footage shot by concertgoers in "The Beastie Boys: I Shot That!") and the substantial (the eloquent photographs taken by the children of Calcutta prostitutes in "Born into Brothels").

The concept delivers tenfold for sheer authenticity and immediacy in "The War Tapes," which telescopes a year of Operation Iraqi Freedom through the lenses of three National Guardsmen who agreed to film their experiences from Fort Dix to battle and back home again.

How does one shoot a war and shoot a rifle at the same time? Hard to say, but Scranton's uniformed cameramen give us an insider's perspective that transcends the mediated realism of "Saving Private Ryan" or the evening news. A soldier's camera bounces and ducks from the agitated insides of a Hummer as it plows through a hail of bullets or races toward the surprise clouds of car bombs detonating a few yards away. An incinerated body slumps from a shredded vehicle. A voice shouts "Sgt. Smith is down! Sgt. Smith is down!"

Scranton's three volunteers represent a range of personalities, backgrounds and political beliefs. Sgt. Steve Pink is a glib jock poet who writes indelibly vivid war diaries when he is not filming. Lebanese-American Sgt. Zack Bazzi reads The Nation and rails against Halliburton's cost-gouging monopoly of military services. Spc. Mike Moriarity rationalizes the decision to go to war and cops a put-up-or-shut-up attitude.

What binds them is an eagerness to be in the thick. "Every soldier wants to go into combat," explains one. "It's like training a football player and not letting him go into battle." When a bomb goes off miles away, Bazzi is disappointed. "We're in the wrong area," he says to a comrade. "All the action is somewhere else."

While Scranton lets the soldiers speak for themselves, she hopes we'll catch the contradictions and complexities that make it impossible to reduce them to types. Moriarity gives his son a G.I. Joe doll, but would only return to Iraq over his dead body. Bazzi, by contrast, is quick to re-up for another year, even though he can barely conceal his disdain for the Bush administration. "Bush is getting elected for the next four years," he notes with palpable resignation, "so I guess Operation Iranian Freedom should be next."