Sunday, October 23, 2011
Working on the final scene
Sept 11, 2011, where the speeches are the same as on Lexington Green in 2002, and the dead are mourned by a flyover of 4 fighter jets, screaming perilously close to the skyscrapers of downtown San Diego. What to make of this?
Friday, October 14, 2011
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Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Synopsis
About Face! My Years as a Redcoat is an autobiographical documentary about the meaning of commemorating military history in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
Every year in mid-April, groups of New Englanders dress up as American colonists and 18th century British soldiers, Redcoats, to reenact the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first of the American Revolutionary War. The filmmaker first attends the reenactment as an observer in 2002, when record-breaking crowds of spectators converge on the Lexington town green at 5:30 in the morning. Media stories about ideological connections between the September 11 attacks and the massacre of colonial militiamen in 1775 drive the filmmaker to seek out a deeper understanding of this history. Seduced by the Redcoats’ colorful uniforms, oath to King George, portrayal of marauding brutes in the reenactment, and recruiting initiative after the battle, the filmmaker decides to join the Redcoats and make a video diary about the experience. Over the next three years, as the United States military conducts wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the filmmaker immerses himself in reenacting and reenactors to address questions about how Americans understand stories of their national origins.
Searching for answers leads the filmmaker on a series of somewhat banal adventures with His Majesty’s Tenth Regiment of Foot, a group of Redcoat reenactors based in Lexington, Massachusetts. He participates in a “powder party,” where the Redcoats roll black powder cartridges for their muskets, the 225th Anniversary of the Battle of Saratoga, where he engages in mock war with over 2000 reenactors and dies at the hand of a swashbuckling man on a horse, a film shoot for the Smithsonian Museum of American History, a reenactment for the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, a trip to the gun range to fire muskets at spray painted images of Minutemen, and a dinner party to eat an authentic 18th century meal called “the Green Death.” He even meets the man who founded the Redcoat Regiment in 1969, a Godfather-like figure who turns out to be a significant innovator in the Hollywood film industry. As time passes and the filmmaker becomes more involved in reenacting, he loses his critical distance in ways that surprise him.
At the same time, the filmmaker becomes friends with Lee Werling, a Redcoat reenactor and former soldier who’d served in Vietnam and Desert Storm as a sniper. As a Special Forces operative, Lee had lived for months with native guerrilla fighters to train them how to revolt against their governments from within. In Northern Vietnam, he had seen and committed acts of violence that continued to haunt him. During Desert Storm, he had lived with the Kurds, a people with whom he identified because of the similarities he saw to his own upbringing on a Native American reservation in Oklahoma. He’d even been made a member of the Peshmerga, an elite group of Kurdish holy warriors, for rescuing the niece of a tribal leader from a minefield, and offered a bride from within the tribe. His commanding officer pulled Lee out of this line of duty for fear that he had “gone native.” To this day, Lee occasionally regrets not having stayed and lived with the Kurds. As the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath unfold, the filmmaker engages in a series of dialogues with Lee about the past, about his personal struggle to make sense of what it had meant to kill in a war, to leave a people he loved, and to return to life as a prison warden in the United States with these memories in tow. His raw and conflicting accounts stand in contrast to run of the mill stories spun by dominant media about the war in Iraq and our activities as reenactors.
The film concludes with two scenes that suggest the merger of an everyday military ethic in American culture and the performance of war. The first is set at the Fort Irwin Army training center in the Mojave Desert, where Hollywood script writers craft training scenarios for troops that uncannily resemble reenactments, complete with Arabic speaking Iraqi American actors playing Iraqi villagers, replica towns modeled after Iraqi and Afghani counterparts, and bombed out cars and Humvees used as props in simulations for dealing with the explosion of roadside bombs. The second, set on the Midway Aircraft Carrier in San Diego Bay on September 11, 2011, depicts the return of nationalistic rhetoric in speeches meant to commemorate the American dead on the tenth anniversary of the attacks. In spite of so many years of war and the countless deaths of innocent civilians in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the speeches emphasize the virtue of sacrifice for nation, of violence in response to tragedy, and of national identity forged through shared sentiments of outwardly directed anger. These values are nearly identical to those attached to the reenactment of the Battle on the Lexington Green that the filmmaker first attended in April of 2002. About Face! aims to present them in a different light.
As a military command, “About face!” directs soldiers to perform a 180 degree turn. The soldier may not then walk, talk, or move without further commands, but he or she sees a completely different landscape. "About Face!" the documentary considers this term as a metaphor for looking back at history from an alternative point of view, and face as it relates to notions of shame and dignity. But most broadly, the film is guided by a question that becomes more urgent with each passing year of war: how does crisis in the present affect the ways we think about our histories, and how in turn do our understandings of history affect the way we think about the present?
Every year in mid-April, groups of New Englanders dress up as American colonists and 18th century British soldiers, Redcoats, to reenact the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first of the American Revolutionary War. The filmmaker first attends the reenactment as an observer in 2002, when record-breaking crowds of spectators converge on the Lexington town green at 5:30 in the morning. Media stories about ideological connections between the September 11 attacks and the massacre of colonial militiamen in 1775 drive the filmmaker to seek out a deeper understanding of this history. Seduced by the Redcoats’ colorful uniforms, oath to King George, portrayal of marauding brutes in the reenactment, and recruiting initiative after the battle, the filmmaker decides to join the Redcoats and make a video diary about the experience. Over the next three years, as the United States military conducts wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the filmmaker immerses himself in reenacting and reenactors to address questions about how Americans understand stories of their national origins.
Searching for answers leads the filmmaker on a series of somewhat banal adventures with His Majesty’s Tenth Regiment of Foot, a group of Redcoat reenactors based in Lexington, Massachusetts. He participates in a “powder party,” where the Redcoats roll black powder cartridges for their muskets, the 225th Anniversary of the Battle of Saratoga, where he engages in mock war with over 2000 reenactors and dies at the hand of a swashbuckling man on a horse, a film shoot for the Smithsonian Museum of American History, a reenactment for the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, a trip to the gun range to fire muskets at spray painted images of Minutemen, and a dinner party to eat an authentic 18th century meal called “the Green Death.” He even meets the man who founded the Redcoat Regiment in 1969, a Godfather-like figure who turns out to be a significant innovator in the Hollywood film industry. As time passes and the filmmaker becomes more involved in reenacting, he loses his critical distance in ways that surprise him.
At the same time, the filmmaker becomes friends with Lee Werling, a Redcoat reenactor and former soldier who’d served in Vietnam and Desert Storm as a sniper. As a Special Forces operative, Lee had lived for months with native guerrilla fighters to train them how to revolt against their governments from within. In Northern Vietnam, he had seen and committed acts of violence that continued to haunt him. During Desert Storm, he had lived with the Kurds, a people with whom he identified because of the similarities he saw to his own upbringing on a Native American reservation in Oklahoma. He’d even been made a member of the Peshmerga, an elite group of Kurdish holy warriors, for rescuing the niece of a tribal leader from a minefield, and offered a bride from within the tribe. His commanding officer pulled Lee out of this line of duty for fear that he had “gone native.” To this day, Lee occasionally regrets not having stayed and lived with the Kurds. As the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath unfold, the filmmaker engages in a series of dialogues with Lee about the past, about his personal struggle to make sense of what it had meant to kill in a war, to leave a people he loved, and to return to life as a prison warden in the United States with these memories in tow. His raw and conflicting accounts stand in contrast to run of the mill stories spun by dominant media about the war in Iraq and our activities as reenactors.
The film concludes with two scenes that suggest the merger of an everyday military ethic in American culture and the performance of war. The first is set at the Fort Irwin Army training center in the Mojave Desert, where Hollywood script writers craft training scenarios for troops that uncannily resemble reenactments, complete with Arabic speaking Iraqi American actors playing Iraqi villagers, replica towns modeled after Iraqi and Afghani counterparts, and bombed out cars and Humvees used as props in simulations for dealing with the explosion of roadside bombs. The second, set on the Midway Aircraft Carrier in San Diego Bay on September 11, 2011, depicts the return of nationalistic rhetoric in speeches meant to commemorate the American dead on the tenth anniversary of the attacks. In spite of so many years of war and the countless deaths of innocent civilians in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the speeches emphasize the virtue of sacrifice for nation, of violence in response to tragedy, and of national identity forged through shared sentiments of outwardly directed anger. These values are nearly identical to those attached to the reenactment of the Battle on the Lexington Green that the filmmaker first attended in April of 2002. About Face! aims to present them in a different light.
As a military command, “About face!” directs soldiers to perform a 180 degree turn. The soldier may not then walk, talk, or move without further commands, but he or she sees a completely different landscape. "About Face!" the documentary considers this term as a metaphor for looking back at history from an alternative point of view, and face as it relates to notions of shame and dignity. But most broadly, the film is guided by a question that becomes more urgent with each passing year of war: how does crisis in the present affect the ways we think about our histories, and how in turn do our understandings of history affect the way we think about the present?
Filmmaker's Statement
I was trained in an observational cinema filmmaking tradition that conceptualizes daily life as the starting point for constructing documentary films. This lineage of filmmaking traces its roots to the direct cinema and cinema verite movements of the 1960s and 1970s, with turns toward autobiographical filmmaking in the 1980s and 1990s. The usual goal of this style of filmmaking is to create for spectators the illusion of “being there,” either psychically or physically, with the cameraperson and subjects. The filmmaker stands in as a reliable representative for the viewing audience. But in an era when daily life is increasingly defined by individuals’ interactions with documents and screens, the utility of this approach seems to fall into question. What would an observational documentary about watching television or reading on the Internet reveal about “being there”? And how is it possible to represent subjects as they “actually” are when the presence of the camera seems to demand a performance from those in front of it? Partly in response to these questions, I have become most interested in subjects that are imagined rather than directly observable. In an era of globalization and ubiquitous media, imagined connections sustain threads of logic, interpretations of shared historical events, ideals about one’s identity, and notions of right and wrong across time and space. My work seeks to represent the intersections between daily life practices and these imagined connections, and to draw out their political ramifications. In my most recent project, About Face!, I explore the subculture of reenacting as a reenactor, in order to see the processes involved in “making” history in a post 9/11 context.
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