Word: soldier
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...their styles, the movies are poles apart: Redacted is constructed entirely of seemingly real snippets of media: YouTube-like blogs, video posts, picture-phone emails and a daily video record of the war kept by one soldier, Angel Salazar (Izzy Diaz); it's a multimedia mockumentary. Elah is more traditional, a crime procedural that involves a police detective (Theron) and the murdered GI's father (Jones). But both films have a startling impact and a lingering chill. Just as important, both demand that their viewers consider the cost of the government's decision to invade a land no American...
...wondering about journalistic impartiality, I should say that not all the violence in Redacted is the soldiers'. After the rape-murder, one of the squad is kidnapped by an insurgent group; in a video on the group's website, we see the soldier condemned to death, his throat slit, his severed head held up. But, you could say, those are the tactics of jihadists; they're supposed to behave abominably. We're not. And if we did, we're obliged...
...Helmand: The Soldier's Story," an exhibition running at Britain's National Army Museum in London for the next 18 months, troops from the 16 Air Assault Brigade recount their experiences on the frontlines. The exhibit, which may be the first mounted during an ongoing conflict, was curated almost exclusively by the soldiers themselves. "Everything has that real flavor, which you wouldn't get if a production company put it together," says Major Alex Parks, a soldier-cum-curator who ran operations in Helmand...
...Video and audio testimonials drive the exhibition, offering raw and disturbing accounts of combat. In one video clip, a soldier describes the emotional aftermath of a soldier's death in a roadside accident: "The worst part was the coffin." In another, soldiers launch a rocket and laugh as a building collapses. "No one is coming out of that alive, are they?" one of them asks...
...While periods of combat were both intense and harrowing, the soldier's downtime could be incredibly mundane. In one photomontage, accompanied by narration, soldiers describe how they passed their time. Besides listening to their iPods and playing video games and Sudoku, they scheduled four-day bow and arrow competitions using tin cans and wooden posts as targets, with the winner receiving a bag of potato chips. Tired of eating their 4,000-calorie ration boxes that contained dried foodstuffs and chocolate, the soldiers express joy when friendly locals provide Afghan bread, onion and chilies...