Winter Soldier
Rated: NOT RATED
Release Date: 2005-09-29
Cast: John Kerry
WorkNameSort: Winter Soldier
It’s almost impossible to review a film like Winter Soldier in the traditional sense of the verb. Released to the festival circuit in 1972 and virtually unseen ever since, the movie looms so large as a cultural document that evaluating its merits as cinemacraft seems unnecessarily reductive, if not utterly beside the point.
Essentially 95 minutes of black-and-white talking-head footage, Soldier captures salient testimony from a 1971 press conference organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War. More than 100 disillusioned ex-servicemen appear on camera detailing the horrors they witnessed and abetted while in country. They appear onscreen without ID names are given only at the end, and in list form putting the entire focus on their jaw-dropping tales of sanctioned brutality and the awful wonder they feel at having participated in it.
One face is immediately familiar: It’s John Kerry, glimpsed as an interviewer only and for the briefest moment. Otherwise, the near-anonymity of the participants works to the film’s continued strength. The shadow of Abu Ghraib looms over these expert witnesses as they spin their anecdotes of murder, torture and humiliation, which decades later still have the ability to make a “good citizen” nauseous with shame.
Yet if the conference was once considered a wake-up call to radicalization, a modern-day audience can also see in it the seeds of the counterculture’s ultimate failure. One vet testifies that the most encouraging moment he experienced in Southeast Asia was when he learned that a bunch of kids back home had converged for a landmark happening called Woodstock. Whereupon everybody in the room applauds, relieved that rock & roll is going to end Uncle Sam’s imperialism once and for all.
Yeah.
This article appears in Sep 28 – Oct 4, 2005.