In Restrepo, the new documentary film on the war in Afghanistan, the camera assumes a variety of stylistic performances. Rocking with young soldiers on a train to the battle front, the camera feels as intimate and autobiographic as a webcam or a cell-phone camera engaged in home video-making. Positioned behind machine guns, mounted on fighter planes, flying over valleys and zooming onto targets, the camera resembles a weapon's accurate and long-range view finder. Imparting gleams of abstract beauty to bullet chains and machine guns, the camera follows the aesthetic vision of veteran war photographers. Finally, framing veterans' faces in extreme close-up in interview settings, the camera assumes the attentive eyes of the "folks" back home as it closely surveys for traces of both trauma and heroism on these young faces--in their watery eyes,between slight stirs of their lips.
These four viewing positions make up this film of a daring undertaking, and I must first applaud the filmmakers' bravery for making repeated visits to the deadly Korengal Valley, staying with the soldiers even on their most dangerous missions (Rock Avalanche), carrying their cameras in lieu of weapons. This insistence of being present at the battle scenes must have come from a stubborn belief in the power of the visual: this is a film that aims to let us see what the soldiers see. The implication is: first, if we see what the soldiers see, then we would know how they have felt and would understand their experiences more; second, seeing what the soldiers see would make us understand the war better. But do these two implications work?
First, seeing what the soldiers see does not necessarily bring us closer to their mentalities. Despite the multiple viewing positions, and the filmmakers' determination to make an "emotional portrayal" of everyday lives at war, the film is disappointingly homogeneous. With only a few exceptions, for the majority part of the film, individual voices and gestures are overwhelmed by a comformist collective ethos. Almost all soldiers are portrayed as sympathetic and agreeable home-boys, experiencing homesickness, enjoying male-bounding, and overcoming sadness of losing their team members. The reactions to the realities of war are incredibly uniform among them, and the veterans' reminiscences, filmed from hindsight, are hardly more reflective. What we see, then, is a ready-made script of mundane heroism, a performance of military ethics and discipline, an on-going everyday ritual of war that confirms the collective and erases the individual. This is, of course, interesting, but it is an insight into the nature of military life, rather than insights into the distinctly individual emotional experiences of the soldiers.
Second, does it help us understand the war if we see what the soldiers see? I am afraid not. In the film, one soldier commented, "I wish it were closer so I could see the enemy as he was killed." In this case, the soldier himself does not see the war; his weapon sees the target but he is spared from seeing the consequences of his attack. This applies to any attack carried out in distance. Therefore, the devastation of war cannot be revealed to us in these cases, unless we try to see beyond what the soldiers see.
On a few occasions, Restrepo brings new understanding regarding guerrilla fighting in a foreign terrain. I have in mind several sequences where the soldiers interacted with the villagers in the valley, searching in houses filled with incomprehensible objects (a divorce paper, for example, hidden in a woman's sewing jar). However, such disorienting interactions are not prioritized by the filmmaker, whose viewing positions tend to return repeatedly to what is familiar and endearing: guitar-playing, dancing, drawing, wresting--to what orients rather than disturbs the audience.
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