youtor.org
A Face of War 1
>> YOUR LINK HERE: ___ http://youtube.com/watch?v=8yaSg0I7t4Q
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/art... • • Combat photography has become almost a commonplace, an adjunct to the 6 o'clock news and weather. A Face of War, though, has a rightful claim to be judged as art: it is a documentary in the great tradition begun by Civil War Photographer Matthew B. Brady when he took his cumbersome cameras to Virginia in 1861. The film's producer-director is Eugene S. Jones, a veteran television cameraman who fought with the Marines during World War II. He spent 97 days with a company of Marines in the heartland of Viet Nam. In the course of that time, more than half of Mike Company's 135 men were killed or wounded; Jones was wounded twice, and an assistant once. • • What Jones and his crew caught in their cameras and microphones is a superbly balanced sampling of this war of snipers and booby traps, night patrols and burning villages, in which the enemy is almost always at hand and almost never seen. No commentator's rhetoric comes between the audience and the action. All that is on the sound track is the noise of what is happening —the tense silence of a patrol exploding into a racketing firefight, the terrible pleadings of wounded men, the ominous urgency of a chaplain's sermon about death. The men of Mike Company are not identified by name until the epilogue; by that time many of them have already established their personalities by what they say and do. • • The excellence of A Face of War is not only in its fine camerawork but also in its sense of completeness. Its 77 minutes encompass the totality of Viet Nam combat: the fear and pain and boredom, heat and rain, rare relaxation, and uneasy meetings of East and West. The Marines are genial giants running a village clinic or delivering a baby; they are stunned young men around the whimpering body of a mortally wounded child; they are stone-faced juggernauts of mechanical war evacuating bewildered civilians in helicopters, methodically incinerating their houses with flamethrowers to deprive the enemy of a hiding place. • • A Face of War grinds no axes, pleads no cause. The war it shows is the specific war of small and large necessities, braveries and sacrifices, and its record of this battleground should endure long after the agony is ended.
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