>>REVIEW
IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS
DIRECTED BY James Longley
Opens Friday, February 16
Uptown Screen
Making a good documentary is difficult under any circumstances, but anyone wishing to make a film about Iraq today faces three additional hazards – the risk of voyeurism, the risk of hypocrisy and the risk of getting killed.
James Longley avoids all three and though Iraq in Fragments may lose out to the more functional Inconvenient Truth at the Academy Awards, there is no question as to which is the better film.
After an abortive attempt to start filming prior to the invasion, Longley spent two years shooting in Iraq immediately following it, the first 18 months in Baghdad and the south, the last six in Kurdistan after explicit and implicit death threats made it foolhardy to continue in the capital.
Some of the footage is quietly terrifying (e.g. that of a Sadrist militia going about its brutal business), and Longley did not avoid the trouble zones. The emphasis, however, in all three of the film’s segments (one per region) is on the personal lives of three Iraqis – two children and a young man. The story is shown almost entirely from their point of view and told in their own words. While this accounts for the film’s one great weakness – a lack of contextualization, it also escapes the dishonesty and irresponsibility that has characterized American editorializing on this topic from both left and right.
Perhaps more problematic, however, is the sheer beauty of Fragments. Because of his extensive stay and the low cost of video, Longley ended up with 300 hours of footage to choose from. This could be why every shot appears to have been carefully composed and painstakingly lit, even though it was in fact shot more or less on the run, and is practically a one-man production. Longley not only did image and sound, but composed the (fairly unobtrusive) soundtrack and co-edited as well.
There are ethical problems in making art of others’ misfortunes, and a powerful image always runs the risk of overpowering its subject and taking on a life of its own as a purely esthetic object. But again, Longley avoids the pitfall through the intimate scale of his storytelling – however dreamlike some of the scenes, they remain anchored in human reality. In short, this is a masterful film, far more complex than expected and complex in unexpected ways. |
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