FILM

FILM

WINTERSOLDIER by Winterfilm in Association with Vietnam Veterans Against the War

The week that the Mylai massacres were first reported in the press, I was stopped in front of the Con Ed power plant on the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and West 110th Street by a man who looked drunk. His eyes were red, his hair was tousled, his speech was slurred, — I was there, he kept repeating, I was there, and it wasn’t like that.

He wasn’t drunk. He was suffering from an emotional jag caused by reading about what had happened in the Vietnamese village. He had never thought about it, he said, not like the newspapers had presented it. It was just something that had happened.

For ten minutes, he described the atrocities he had seen and had committed. He wasn’t denying the grim facts of what had happened, but he insisted that the newspapers had distorted the events. — It wasn’t like that . . .

WINTERSOLDIER, a documentary of the Wintersoldier Investigation held in Detroit, Michigan, in February, 1971, attempts to convey what it was like.

“If I make one mistake,” said Scott Camil in describing his reaction to his first experience under fire, “I don’t get another chance . . .”

He was confessing the psychology of the survivor. In order not to make any mistakes, he explained, they learned to kill anyone who they suspected might be an enemy. All the veterans who testified were survivors; and, becuse they survived, they carried a burden of guilt.

The hearings, however, were not aimed at lessening the guilt by sharing the horrors. They were meant to force on Americans who have not fought in Indochina the understanding that the atrocities are not singular incidents which happened in the war, but the very substance of the war itself.

“The idea is, you can do anything to these people,” said Nathan Hale, “just don’t do if in the presence of a non-unit member . . .”

Joe Bangert described a Vietnamese girl who, after being raped, was disemboweled and skinned.

Bill Hatton described the stoning of a Vietnamese boy.

What makes the soldiers who testified in Detroit extraordinary is not their capacity for cruelty, which being commonplace lies in us all, but their courage in admitting to their guilt. Rather than explain to the country what is happening in Southeast Asia, they could have remained silent war heroes.

It is difficult to react to the film simply as a film because the content makes a kind of demand on the viewer that is unusual. There is no sense of movement. Each of the incidents described is as important as the others. Watching the movie is like hearing a regularly beating drum. The horror never descends into either mere information, which can be reduced to abstract facts (so many killed, so many maimed), or mere drama, which would offer some sort of end-release, some closure.

By continually focusing on gestures, faces, small unconscious actions and by stressing the particularity of each experience, the film insists that the viewer remain conscious of the human element. And, because the film insists on the human element, it presses the viewer to react morally.

The Investigation’s name comes from “The American Crisis” by Tom Paine, the first of sixteen pamphlets which appeared in the Pennsylvania Journal on December 19, 1775.

These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it Now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered .. .

The veterans who testified in Detroit have been to hell, have been the agents of a fierce tyranny. They have put their lives and their souls on the line at the bqhest of their government. They were those who were unwilling or unable to avoid the armed services, and they were sent to enforce Washington’s rigid ethic abroad.

But the war they fought finally was not in Southeast Asia, but in the belly and brain of America. Every citizen shares their guilt for every atrocity committed, but every citizen can also share in their courage.

WINTERSOLDIER is “The American Crisis” of the Second Revolution. It is a call to moral arms. By showing us the worst we are capable of, it hints at the best we are capable of. It fixes in the bone of the nation the caveat — spoken by one veteran in the hearing — “Don’t let your government do this to you . . .”

David Black

THE STRAW DOGS Directed by Sam Peckinpah

In The Straw Dogs, Sam Peckinpah has played on the audience’s worst instincts in order to produce his finest film. At a time when both violence and the traditional concept of manhood are under attack from all forms of the media and conciousness-raising groups, Peckinpah has fused the two into as severe a statement of the machismo mystique as we are likely to see. The end result is as impressive as it is disquieting; almost nobody will be indifferent to the film.

All of Peckinpah’s previous films have been Westerns, and, although “Straw Dogs” is a modern-day story,its plot has all the resonance and mythic splendor of a Western legend. A young American mathematician (Dustin Hoffman) moves to the English countryside with his bride (Susan George) in an effort to escape the chaos and instability of American university life. A group of local workmen, ugly thugs every last one of them, mock him as they work on his garage and covet his wife. Their taunts grow more and more ominous until they hang his cat in his bedroom closet. (“To show you that they can get into your bedroom,” says the bride, who is half loving wife, half bitch goddess.) When the husband tries to prove he is a man by joining the men in an afternoon of quail shooting, they sneak back to his home and rape his wife. Finally, when the men demand that he turn over a simpleton whom he is sheltering,. Hoffman rebels. “This is my home,” he declares, as he bolts the door. What follows is an almost endless crescendo of violence, a cathartic bloodbath in which the meek intellectual attains manhood by slaughtering the thugs one by one. Peckinpah’s viewpoint is unmistakable: a man’s home is sacred, his wife is his faithful servant, and the rites of manhood are achieved through violence.

At first glance, Hoffman’s victorious academic may seem a marked departure from the gallery of out-dated losers Peckinpah has chronicled in the past (Randolph Scott and Joel McRae in Ride the High Country, William Holden and his men in The Wild Bunch, Jason Robards in The Ballad of Cable Houge.) Yet, taken as a whole, all of the director’s heroes share an allegiance to some kind of tradition, one which shapes and defines their lives. Hoffman differs from Holden, Robards, and the others only in the respect that the tradition he learns to live by redeems him, instead of dooming him. Stylistically, it might even be argued that, since this is the first Peckinpah film in which the hero’s code of living is maintained and upheld, it is appropriate that Straw Dogs is also the director’s most violent film, violence being the arena in which a Peckinpah man proves himself.

Thematic consistency aside, Straw Dogs is a tremendously impressive technical achievement. It’s got some of the finest editing I’ve seen since Bonnie and Clyde. What’s even more important is the way Peckinpah uses his editing: to make us feel, to get us to empathize with the leading characters and understand the intensity of their feelings. The editing during the rape sequence — from an ominous hand, to a terrified , face, to a shot, of a hulking torso — is so brutally effective that we feel overwhelmed by it. As the wife submits to the rape, so we submit to the scene: scared, tense, but powerless to do anything in a situation which demands complete submission.

To get an audience to such a point requires enormous talent, arid Peckinpah’s got it. There are, however, larger implications involved, and it’s here that Straw Dogs is going to run into a mess of trouble. Peckinpah’s prejudices (against women, against intellectuals, against anyone he considers weak) are as strongly felt and expressed in the film as the things he advocates (the rites of manhood, the primitive, cathartic power of violence.) I’m aware that some people have latched on to Dustin Hoffman’s enigmatic last line (“I don’t know my way home either.”) and a few other scraps as proof of some kind of ambiguity beclouding the director’s views, but this strikes me as fence straddling. Perhaps, as the publicity material for the film insists, Peckinpah is sickened by the violence he depicts on screen; but that is hardly likely to affect our reaction to it. And make no mistake, the violence will affect you. It’s as potent as anything that’s been put on film in years. What’s important for those of us in the audience is to try and get past our initial reactions to the gore and the machismo, and to understand how Peckinpah is controlling his movie, and us.

A lot of people, however, aren’t going to be willing to do that. I’ve spoken with several women I know who are involved with the Women’s Liberation Movement, and evefy single one of them has been so enraged by Peckinpah’s degrading view of women that they completely turned off to the film. I don’t dispute anyone’s right to hold a political or philosophical viewpoint over an aesthetic one, but I insist on pointing out the danger which exists when this occurs: concentrating solely on content, prohibits a spectator from enjoying an artist’s greatest gift, his style. Perhaps a paragraph or. two from Susan Sontag’s justly famous essay “On Style” will clarify matters: “A work of art encountered as a work of art is an experience, not a statment or an answer to a question. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world . . . The satisfactions of Paradise Lost for us do not lie in its views on God and man, but in the superior kinds of energy, vitality, expressiveness which are incarnated in the poem.” Exactly. What must interest us in Straw Dogs is not Sam Peckinpah’s beliefs, which we are free to accept or reject, but the ways in which he puts us in touch with them. Style is the area in which the ultimate judgements on an artist must be made. I can understand someone who is heavily into Women’s Liberation wanting to ban Straw Dogs, but wouldn’t those radical, free thinking women also be among the first to protest if Mein Kampf were pulled off the shelfs of the local library?

I’m not trying to play down the mean-spiritedness of Straw Dogs, or to suggest that Peckinpah’s feelings are irrelevant. Make no mistake about it, this film turns a movie theatre into a primal pleasure palace, baiting its audience on with tension and sexuality, and climaxing in a slaughter that’s craftily engineered to rouse the slumbering beast that lurks within xus. But the feelings it rouses in us are our responsibility, and we, not Peckinpah, must work them out. I’m willing to admit that I felt uncomfortable after the film was over and I remembered that during the last scene, as Peckinpah cuts back and forth from the hoodlum who is kicking Hoffman tq Hoffman’s wife as she tries to fire a gun at the man, I became so engrossed that all I could think was “Blow his fucking head off.” I don’t normally think that way. In fact, I like to think that I almost never do. But Peckinpah got me to do it. And he got me to do it honestly, not with a lot of close-ups of bloody bodies (Dirty Harry or El Topo), but through his camerawork and editing. That’s his job, and he did it beautifully. Understanding the hostility and frustration he touched off in me is my job.

I see, in looking this over, that I’ve forgotten to mention Dustin Hoffman. He’s fantastic.

John Kane