The War Tapes
Studio: SenArt Films
Rated: NONE
WorkNameSort: War Tapes, The
Information sharing, citizen journalism, social networking, 24-hour globalism ‘ none of those effects of the digital revolution are as impressive as a GI in the middle of a war, armed with a palm-sized digicam. The War Tapes distills 800 hours of footage captured by camera-wielding Guardsmen in Iraq. The material the soldiers came home with is as harrowing, boring, terrifying and inspiring as one would expect it to be, but unlike so many other documentaries that turn their lenses on the men and women fighting in that desert quagmire, The War Tapes has much less sense of predetermined bias. It’s not surprising that so many of the soldiers have misgivings about the war, but the raw honesty with which they approach their unpalatable tasks is inspiring. While a certain amount of filtration and editing was necessary to distill 800 hours into 100 minutes, the producers and editors of The War Tapes do a great job of getting out of the soldiers’ way. The result is a brutal and disturbingly realistic look at this war. In its runtime, The War Tapes gives a more rounded picture of the on-the-ground conflict than the last four years of media coverage has; there are explosions and car bombs aplenty here, but it’s the moments leading up to those devastating conflagrations that The War Tapes captures magnificently and realistically.
This article appears in May 23-29, 2007.