The Fog of War
I just finished up an interesting documentary called “The Fog of War” by Errol Morris.
It came out in 2003 but our library just now got a copy that I could check out. I’m too cheap to buy movies and renting a documentary seems ….
If you’ve not heard of this film, it basically features former Secretary of Defense (during Kennedy and Johnson’s Presidencies) Robert McNamara, recounting his involvement during the height of the Vietnam War.
Errol Morris does an interesting job of turning 90 minutes of a talking- head into something very watchable.
Whether you agree with McNamara or not, watching it will provide some insight into what we did as a country during Vietnam. And it is hard to believe that the sharp mind and voice speaking on camera is that of a man in his mid-eighties with a remarkable recall for historic details. I guess if you live the history, you remember it.
During the war, McNamara took almost as much if not more grief from everyone about Vietnam as did either President. And in his twilight years he took even more for seemingly recanting his involvement in support of the administrations actions during the war. But I think if you listen closely he says more than once, that at the time, no one knew for sure what to do, they thought they were doing the right thing, everyone agreed (except perhaps for General Curtis LeMay) that war was horrible but they made the best decisions they could.
In hindsight of course we can see they royally misunderstood everything and in the process lost more than 50,000 lives, several million North and South Vietnamese were killed and when the dust had settled, Vietnam was re-united and did become Communist. But all we have to do is look at the country now – while no economic powerhouse, American companies like Coca Cola and others are in the marketplace there.
As I watched I knew this was a movie with a message undoubtedly geared toward or about the war in Iraq too. I can only hope that we are not making the same mistakes all over again.
On a technical or stylistic side – Errol Morris has an odd technique that somehow works. He uses odd angles and framing. McNamara talks often right into the camera. I wonder if Morris had more than one camera because he cuts quickly from tight shots to close-ups to odd framings – all seamlessly on McNamara.
Inevitably during an interview, you need to edit out portions of statements, clean things up, eliminate pauses etc. The traditional way is a cutaway – cut off the speaker, show something else, hide your audio edit underneath the picture cut and then come back to the speaker. Errol Morris simply leaves lots of the jump cuts that are visible when you don’t use a cutaway. It is much more than that but this is a simple explanation of what he does.
His use of stock film must have taken researchers years to find and decide exactly what shot to put where.
And finally the score from Phillip Glass is timeless – meaning to me that it works under transitions, under modern footage but also under the archival stuff that goes back to WWI.
I’ve not seen nor do I desire to see Michael Moore’s various rants that he calls documentaries. This one for me is one of the better. About 90 minutes long – I watched it in three sittings and never got tired or bored. I still don’t understand the war I grew up during, but this helped me to understand a part of it I didn’t know much about.
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