Reviews: "Into Great Silence"; "Shadow Company"
By Max Goldberg
Meditating in the moviehouse with “Into Great Silence”
“Into Great Silence” is some kind of pure cinema, though, perhaps paradoxically, its aims seem antithetical to the nature of the medium. Film, after all, has always been concerned with the appearances of things. Action, gesture, externalization: these are the things most films are built on. Timelessness, devotion, the ineffable: this is the stuff of “Into Great Silence,” German director Phillip Gröning’s documentary communion the Grand Chartreuse, a Carthusian hermitage located in the French Alps with a history stretching the centuries. Twenty years in the making, Gröning first sought access to the monastery in 1984 and persisted until, in 2000, he was allowed six months there, to live and film. The resulting film — the rare movie which feels deserving of a three-hour running time — eschews traditional documentary reportage in favor of a meditative observing based more on rhythm and composition than narration and point-of-view.
A good part of the film’s wonder is simply that Gröning was able to put himself in a sympathetic enough position to be a fly-on-the-wall in a place where people go to leave the secular world behind. And although “Into Great Silence” is largely ego-less — a refreshing mark of distinction in the increasingly crowded, noisy documentary field — there is everywhere admiration for the monks’ way of life: in the appropriately ascetic aesthetic (no artificial-light, voice-overs, etc.) and in the way Gröning conveys the place’s spirituality with patterned lyricism, cutting between the minute and monumental, closely attending the circularity of the days and seasons. Despite a powerful series of close-up portraits of each of the monks dotting the film and the rough framing device of two new admissions to the monastery, “Into Great Silence” is not about psychology so much as practice, taking up a world unto itself with a movie camera not because of what motion pictures can show so much as how they show them: in time, now and forever.
Mercenaries, more than technically human, and dubiously so, in “Shadow Company”
Their exact numbers are not known; they don’t figure into most news tallies of US and coalition forces in Iraq; and their bodies don’t show up in the official death count. But their presence as armed and logistical muscle in Iraq is crucial to the US-led occupation there, being greater than the regular forces contributed by all US coalition partners combined. In fact, as Nick Bicanic and Jason Bourque’s slick 90-minute documentary “Shadow Company” makes clear, the use in Iraq of mercenaries (or “private security contractors” in the current euphemism) exceeds anything seen before, while pointing ominously to a future of increasingly privatized armies, beyond the reach of military and civilian law. This is not just a problem for foreign policy either — the US has already begun using private security forces within its own borders (as in post-Katrina New Orleans) with barely a peep said about it.
The mercenary is, of course, as the film’s token historian will tell you, as old as history itself, more or less. And yet (as another expert testifies), the corporate-government nexus of the modern-day mercenary is largely a phenomenon of the last century — one propelled dramatically forward by the post-9/11 security jones, and the wild-west-style contracting free-for-all known as the Iraq War. (“9/11 has been sort of the Internet boom for these companies,” notes Peter Singer, leading expert on the private military industry.) Today’s business is a highly lucrative three-tiered system of government contracting: supply-line support (Halliburton and KBR are examples), advisors and training (DynCorp, for one, handles this kind of thing), and fighting forces (Executive Outcomes and Blackwater — whose four employees killed and desecrated in Fallujah spurred the siege and near-leveling of that city by the US military — are examples here).
While following the money, the doc also interviews an ethicist on the right-and-wrongs negotiated by a gun for hire and their government employers. Most intriguingly, the filmmakers interview several military contractors from various parts of the First World, as well as major players like Alan Bell (president of Global Risk Holdings, Inc.) and John Mullins (an ex-Special Forces guy and sought-after freelance consultant to governments, corporations, and at least one videogame). Journalists, academics, and a Washington lobbyist also weigh in on the role of the modern “merc” as well as the rules (or lack there of) governing their participation in modern warfare.
Most of these experts take a moderate to gung-ho position on the issue, which is only surprising in the case of some of the supposedly “impartial” ones in media, academia, or policy think tanks. (The most unequivocal naysayer is a retired Canadian military man now working for UNICEF.) In fact, while “Shadow Company” looks to expose this rapidly developing trend in modern warfare, and does provide a good deal of information, it does so with a not unsympathetic, at times even vaguely cavalier lock-and-load spirit that puts a human face on the modern mercenary (even while poking genial fun at the comic-book image some, Americans especially it seems, like to project). On the other hand, there are no voices of Iraqi citizens or others who live in the crossfire. The film also refrains from going very deeply into the political affiliations of some of these companies (nothing on the rightwing Christian head of Blackwater, for example, whose influence in Washington has been exposed by Jeremy Scahill and others). That said, “Shadow Company” calls vital attention to a radically developing trend with major consequences for war and peace.
03.13.2007