"Winter Soldier" anti-VN war doc. being re-released this Friday

[Catchawave]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/movies/09wint.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

Film Echoes the Present in Atrocities of the Past


LOS ANGELES, Aug. 8 - Like a live hand grenade brought home from a distant battlefield, the 34-year-old antiwar documentary "Winter Soldier" has been handled for decades as if it could explode at any moment.

Now, the 95-minute film - which has circulated like 16-millimeter samizdat on college campuses for decades but has never been accessible to a wide audience - is about to get its first significant theatrical release in the United States, beginning on Friday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. (Other bookings, including Chicago, Detroit, Hartford and Minneapolis, can be found at www.wintersoldierfilm.com.)

Its distributors say that the war in Iraq has made the Vietnam-era film as powerful as when it was new, and its filmmakers are calling it eerily prescient of national embarrassments like the torture at Abu Ghraib.

Seldom has a film seen by so few caused so much consternation for so many years.

When it was made at a three-day gathering in 1971 of Vietnam veterans telling of the atrocities they had seen and committed, major news organizations sent reporters but published and broadcast next to nothing of what they filed - prompting the veterans to organize what would be a pivotal antiwar demonstration in Washington a few months later.

<snip>

When one of the veterans - John Kerry, who was seen on screen for less than a minute - ran for president last year, the old film turned up as propaganda on both sides of the partisan divide: Mr. Kerry's friend, the filmmaker George Butler, used footage from "Winter Soldier" to lionize him in a biographical film underwritten by Democrats called "Going Upriver." His political enemies on the right, meanwhile, created a Web site called Wintersoldier.com and made a film of their own, "Stolen Honor," to assail him as a traitor and a fraud.

more....

[Catchawave]

1. A kick for Winter Soldier ....

:patriot:

[CarolNYC]

2. I had started another thread on this....

Hadn't seen yours when I did...so let me post what I wrote here....even though, apparently, no one cares....

The film Winter Soldier will get it's first, I believe, theatrical release in the US over the next couple of months. It will play, on a very limited schedule, in NYC, Stamford CT, Chicago, Minneapolis, Hartford CT and Detroit between August 12th and November 7th.

Info and the schedule can be found here:
http://www.wintersoldierfilm.com /

Here's the info about the film posted on the Walter Reade Theater site. I'd love to make the showing with the panel discussion following...

WINTER SOLDIER
Winterfilm Collective, U.S., 1972; 96m
On the first two days of February 1971, one month after the revelations of the My Lai massacre, a public inquiry into war crimes committed by American forces in Vietnam was held in the second floor ballrooom of a Howard Johnson motel in Detroit. The event was organized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War with support from Jane Fonda and Mark Lane. Over 125 veterans spoke of atrocities they had witnessed and, in some cases, committed. "The major that I worked for had a fantastic capability of staking prisoners,” goes one piece of testimony, “"utilizing a knife that was extremely sharp, and sort of fileting them like a fish. . . . Prisoners treated this way were executed at the end because there was no way that we could take them into any medical aide and say, 'This dude fell down some steps.'" Predictably, the event was picketed and ignored by news outlets, but it marked a major turning point in the anti-war movement. It was also a turning point in the life of a young vet who attended, and who can be glimpsed briefly in the film asking a fellow vet to comment on the crimes he had witnessed. "I'd almost need a book to answer that, man," was his answer. "I didn't like being an animal, and I didn't like seeing everybody else turn into animals, either." That young vet who had asked the question was John Kerry, and the Winter Soldier Investigation changed him and his comrades forever. Their courage in testifying, their desire to prevent further atrocities and to regain their own humanity, provide a dramatic intensity that makes Winter Soldier an unforgettable experience.

A collective of filmmakers —— Fred Aronow, Nancy Baker, Rhetta Barron, Robert Fiore, David Gillis, David Grubin, Barbara Jarvis, Barbara Kopple, Michael Lesser, Lee Osborne, Lucy Massie Phenix, Roger Phenix, Benay Rubenstein, and Michael Weil —— recorded the event, and produced an extraordinary documentary called Winter Soldier. Acclaimed at film festivals around the world, the film was rejected as too incendiary by U.S. television and played only on New York's local public television station, WNET. Since then, only few screenings by the filmmakers have kept the legacy alive. This is a rare chance to have another look at this searing document. A Milliarium Zero release. Followed by an 18-minute short film "A Conversation with the Filmmakers."

There will be a panel discussion following the 8pm screening on Fri August 12.
Fri Aug 12: 8; Sat Aug 13: 2 & 6; Sun Aug 14: 8; Mon Aug 15: 4:15; Wed Aug 17: 7:30; Thurs Aug 18: 2

http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/programs/8-2005/milestone.htm

I heard them talking about it on Air America this AM. Apparently, there is no narration or voice over except for the opening quotation from Thomas Paine from whence the title of the film comes:
"These are the times that try men's souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it Now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman."
After that, it's all the soldiers speaking...Sounds like a powerful and haunting film to me....

It must have taken an awful lot of guts for John Kerry to do what he did to try to stop the Vietnam Warar. For that, I will always admire him.