Operation Homecoming and New Documentaries

By Adam Hyman

American non-fiction filmmaking has entered a new era, embracing the full range of filmmaking possibilities. The era of traditional American news coverage is dead. And so is the era of traditional American documentary filmmaking. But they aren't yet buried. If you're reading this online right now, you are an example of the deaths of those eras, and a poster child for the new. Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience incorporates the full range of documentary techniques, old and new, in our goal to represent honestly the emotional lives of troops as expressed in their writings about their experiences in Iraq.

It's been written and stated repeatedly that we hear/see less about the war in Iraq than we did from Vietnam or other recent conflicts. I believe that there is in fact more information and coverage from Iraq than in any previous war. You just can't find it in the normal places. We've crossed a technological divide, where anyone can theoretically access accounts and images from Iraq that reveal all sides of the conflict, from gore-ridden battle aftermath to small election successes, with disrupted Iraqi lives, and images of the dead and suffering on all sides (and demonstrating that there are more than 2 sides). Images that can be seen almost immediately around the world; blogs from troops and journalists in the field and families at home; personal accounts (such as at aliveinbagdad.org) from the ground of citizens trying to build their lives in a war-torn land. Video and footage from soldiers – soldiers! – making their daily rounds, or revealing the horrors of explosions and massacres. These voices were unheard of in previous wars.

And yet people still say they see none of it. The major networks show none of it. They are no longer news, unwilling to face the depths of human suffering and resiliency without it being neatly packaged as a digestible three-minute narrative, revealing human triumph over adversity. But in a war, people don't always triumph. And citizens in a democracy need to be reminded of that regularly.

The development of new forms of coverage in day-to-day reportage is paralleled by the evolution in methods used in documentary films – viewers can access the information in new ways.

In Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, we drew from a body of writings by troops from the field or after their return home. These writings were originally collected by the National Endowment for the Arts for deposit in the Library of Congress after the NEA organized a series of workshops at military bases around the world. The workshops encouraged troops to write about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, whether to create new works or to develop pieces (letters, blogs, poems, stories) that they might have started while in the field, with the goal of helping them transition back into civilian life. (More details can be found at arts.gov.) These were emotional pieces revealing all stages of the conflicts – external and internal – faced by fighting men and women. Our challenge was to find visual strategies to honor and serve these writings, to represent them without overwhelming the writing, which always took precedence.

Operation Homecoming includes nine pieces of writing in its PBS version, which aired on April 16, 2007 in the series "America at a Crossroads." It also has a theatrical version that includes two additional pieces (pbs.org).

We start our film with a poet reading directly to camera – the most basic form of storytelling. Brian Turner's "Here, Bullet" reflects the defiant overcompensation to the fear of death in every infantryman. Turner's emotional reading couldn't be improved with visuals or actors. It took us a while to realize that this take, from an earlier shoot, was the correct approach, but as soon as we placed it in the show, we knew it was right. A couple of pieces use archival footage in traditional ways, but one, "What Every Soldier Should Know" also by poet Brian Turner, incorporates subtly-manipulated archival footage, in which we added words from the poem into the footage, to reinforce the written origin and echo the unreality of the setting. For another piece, "Road Work" by Jack Lewis, we assembled a more normal reenactment, with actors, set, props, and so forth, but we had it shot by war photographer Antonin Kratochvil. Kratochvil photographed it as he would a scene that he might find in a war zone. Our other reenacted piece, the fiction "Aftermath" by Sangjoon Han, used a new camera called the Phantom to produce highly stylized, slowed-down shots, separating the sequence from the realm of standard reenactments, and allowing the viewer to look closely at the elements of the scene.

In all cases, we intended that the imagery reinforce the key emotions of the writing, while we could also explore the full range of filmmaking methodology possible in documentary. Perhaps our most radical strategy was that of animating Colby Buzzell's memoir "Men in Black," first written in his blog. How can animation be in a documentary? Perhaps this requires a bit more discussion, especially since this segment has found its own life online in various video sites.

The most traditional documentary has an omniscient narrator, describing events and history – still a common mode on television. In the 1960s, this changed with the advent of what is known as Direct Cinema – filming events as they happen, and ideally finding an interesting film in the characters being followed. Obviously one can't always be lucky enough to film the most dramatic events, so it is also standard practice to use interviews (talking heads), stock photos and footage, scenic footage, art work, maps, and reenactments. In more recent years, we've been seeing additional: animation, puppetry, computer generated imagery (CGI). Documentaries are just as much filmmaking as any Hollywood feature and can make use of the full arsenal of filmmaking techniques. More rigorous and complex documentaries have become standard practice around the world, and America is now catching up.

Animation has particularly become more popular, and animated documentaries are a growing sub-genre. Animation allows direct representation of mental and emotional states. One sublime example is the Oscar-winning animated short film from 2 years ago, Ryan by Chris Landreth, which used a newly-developed animation software to bring to life a series of audio interviews done between Landreth and the now-institutionalized subject, animator Ryan Larkin. In particular, we see beautiful renditions of images in constant flux between realism and surrealism, conjectures of how Larkin now sees the world.

But animation has found other uses as well, beyond that of mental states. Such new films as Lynn Hershman Leeson's Strange Culture and Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair use it to articulate basic events and values or events that lack any footage or photos, using it as a different form of reenactment, but one without the ethical and performance difficulties that mar many reenactments. In Operation Homecoming, we also used animation for one of our pieces, Colby Buzzell's "Men in Black," an action-filled take that also occurs within the mind of the writer, Buzzell, and for which we had no imagery from the actual events. We felt that animation could represent the events in question. Also, the visual language of graphic novels was appropriate, due to their popularity among the troops, and the language of graphic novels in some ways parallel the language of Buzzell's piece. Co-producer Kristin Lesko made a wide search among graphic novelists and cartoonists. She and director Richard Robbins finally found the work of artist Christopher Koelle, based in South Carolina, who readily agreed to work with us. Koelle's drawings were animated by a company called thelawoffew, with a pair of very talented guys, Hunter Lee Soik and Evan Parsons, who brought their own inspiration to the work. The end result has now been seen by hundreds of thousands of people online in addition to those who viewed it on PBS.

The majority of viewers, however, still gain their information from standard corporate-controlled networks and newspapers. And despite our heyday of new creative documentaries, most people still don't go to see them. We hope that these new methods for journalism and documentary filmmaking will find new audiences, those open to blogs or graphic novels, for example. We feel that Operation Homecoming still reaches the deeper emotional truths of our subjects – the goal of all documentaries – using new or re-energized means. The attention given to "Men in Black," despite its dark subject gives us some indication that the new audiences are excited by these approaches; the next step is expanding their minds to more documentaries, and seeing how these subjects connect with their own lives.

Adam Hyman is Co-producer of Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience and Executive Director of Los Angeles Filmforum