If you are lucky in this life,
a window will appear on a battlefield between two
armies.
And when the soldiers look into the window,
They don't see their enemies.
They see themselves as children.
And they stop fighting
And go home and go to sleep.
When they wake up, the land is well again.
—Fourth-grader Cameron Penny, 2001.
Voices in Wartime is an ode to poetry as a
coping mechanism for soldiers and civilians in times of
war. If the medium isn't always as sturdy as the
message, that's a fault that can be readily overlooked,
at least by like-minded viewers. Friends of Bush may not
take as kindly to Voices in Wartime as will
kindred spirits of "Poets Against the War."
Director Rick King takes a scattershot approach, but
attempts to anchor his leaping timeline with a recent
event: the Laura Bush-sponsored conference "Poetry and
the American Voice,” which was such a boondoggle that it
was cancelled before it could occur in February of 2003.
Poet Sam Hamill was so gobsmacked by the wartime
invitation—which promised a presumably non-political
discussion of socio-political poets Emily Dickinson,
Walt Whitman, and Langston Hughes—that he immediately
commissioned poems protesting the invasion of Iraq.
King tells this story in bits and pieces and
responses, including a variety of talking heads and
glimpses of a benefit reading of some of the poems. The
rest of the film is comprised of sometimes grisly
archival footage, poets reading their work to the
camera, and a historical perspective on the world wars,
Vietnam, and Iraq, with nods to Homer and Sumerian
poet/priestess Enheduanna ("Lament to the Spirit of
War").
The impact of the poems and King’s technique is
variable. The potency of war veteran poets—from the
Great War's Wilfred Owen to Vietnam vet David
Connolly—is so strong that the civilian poetry smacks of
artistic hubris. Connolly's devastating "Why I Can't"
(which he recites in the film) begins with battlefield
horror and ends with the lines "and still people tell
me,/'Forget Nam.'" After a poem like this, the customary
peacenik poems pale in comparison.
A bigger problem is that making poetry cinematic
requires greater imagination than King evinces here. At
his worst, King stuns imagination by literalizing the
poems with accompanying concrete images and sound
effects; at best, he shoots someone reading the poem
into his video camera (to his credit, King also makes
found poetry of FDR and Lyndon Johnson's war
pronouncements).
Like Cinema Libre's Robert Greenwald films, Voices
in Wartime culminates in a talking-head epilogue
that explains why what you've just seen is "so
important." The topic of art's response to war is
worthy, though your 74 minutes might be spent just as
well at the film's excellent website,
www.VoicesinWartime.org. |
