Giving Audiences the War They Want

Can combat equal better movies (or bigger audiences)? Fighting Iraq doc fatigue, filmmakers head to Afghanistan.

Similarly, Danish filmmaker Janus Metz wanted to bring viewers up close and personal with the tension of the battlefield, even using cameras strapped to the soldiers’ helmets (“producing amazing grunt’s-eye-view footage,” according to one critic).

“So you get this first-person experience, almost like computer gaming,” Metz told the website Cineuropa in Cannes. Winner of Cannes’ Critics Week prize, “Armadillo” — with its gripping, stylishly conceived in-the-trenches sequences of ambushes and killings — strives to illustrate its tagline: “War gets under your skin.”

By emphasizing this experiential aspect of the war, the filmmakers believe their documentaries can uniquely provoke audiences and make them more involved in these far away conflicts — in contrast to the widespread apathy that seems to exist with respect to the war in Iraq.

“It’s an emotional journey you go on,” says Hetherington, a photojournalist who has also documented carnage in Liberia and Darfur in addition to the months he spent embedded in Afghanistan.

“In some ways, you can’t intellectualize war, so we try to bring you emotionally close to it. And I think that experience makes you wake up and see these guys as individuals, not as ciphers or symbols as they’re often represented in the press.”

For Hetherington and his comrades in documentary filmmaking, the ultimate hope is that this more affecting and unflinching cinematic experience — one that tries to avoid political partisanship and therefore access a wider audience — will spur a larger dialogue about the war during this crucial moment in U.S. foreign policy: America military casualties in Afghanistan broke the 1,000 mark at the end of May, while NATO is pressuring for withdrawal as soon as possible.

And yet, there’s also something disingenuous about these documentaries. Much of Afghanistan’s plight — and America’s rebuilding efforts — has nothing to do with flying bullets, attack helicopters and soldiers struck down in the heat of battle.

Playing alongside “Restrepo” at the Human Watch International Film Festival this week, Carol Dysinger’s “Camp Victory, Afghanistan,” which examines U.S. soldiers’ efforts to train an Afghan army, lacks the nail-biting suspense of its more war-like brethren, but its wider scope and awareness of cultural — not bloody — conflicts is frankly more accurate about what’s at sake.

Then again, which is more compelling to viewers? “The Hurt Locker” may have been criticized for its inaccuracies, but it won the Academy Award. As Michael Tucker observes, these films don’t necessarily represent the Afghanistan experience — “take me to the most fucked up place in the country,” he notes — but they’re giving audiences “what they want.”

[Additional photos: On previous page, "Gunner Palace," Palm Pictures, 2004; "Obama's War," PBS, 2010; on this page, "Restrepo," National Geographic Films, 2010, credit: Tim Hetherington; "Camp Victory, Afghanistan," ITVS, 2010]

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