Within the current documentary explosion, an experience like Winter Soldier illustrates a critical dilemma. Mere photographic images graven on flexible emulsion strip do not make for “film,” in the sense of “movie,” nor does a series of people talking about individual participation in, and reaction to, shared experience in itself constitute non-fiction. Persistence of vision, retinal retention, hence the illusion of smooth progression between still frames, excludes stasis, or, put another way, presupposes development. No one, for example, would classify ninety-five minutes’ worth of C-SPAN as “motion picture.”

Yet what to make of the amazing 1972 political statement that is Winter Soldier? Showing at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s August 12-18 (2005) “Dedication and Discovery,” like its three companion offerings it celebrates fifteen years of Dennis Doros and Amy Heller’s Milestone Films & Video, whose “clientele,” according to Martin Scorsese, “care about . . . and love movies.”  The accompanying eighteen-minute 2005 Winter Soldier: The Conversation covers the group effort’s acceptance (and rejection, by all major domestic networks plus PBS) over three decades, but the heart of the matter remains the original Winterfilm Collective-Vietnam Veterans Against the War record.

The 16 mm piece (re-released in Beta SP, DigiBeta and DVD-R) is better seen as document rather than documentary, for the transition that occurs -- and it is major -- takes place offscreen and before, and the shock of recognition is in the memories of those who lived through that painful era and, importantly, in a generation now living the formation of a frighteningly similar quagmire.

Minimal time allotted to the thirty ex-combatant participants’ small talk and greetings, and too few minutes to an Afro-American’s very cogent connecting of that conflict with racism at home, this is the audiovisual report done by a cadre of eighteen independent filmmakers relying on donated equipment. The three days of public testimony by a hundred-twenty-five honorably discharged veterans (including twenty-eight-year-old John Kerry) at a Detroit Howard Johnson motel were almost totally ignored by media outlets. Unlike, say, non-fiction Gunner Palace Baghdad, where interviewees are still in the line of fire and have not fully reflected, or reality-based but Stone-scripted Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, this reflects the actual face, and faces, of young men who had “run through the jungle” and lived, not to fight another day, but to bear witness to covert tragedy.

Often long-haired when that was still dangerous and not yet redneck chic, they have the courage to confess their own unthinkable acts, reveal the facts behind inflated body counts, and describe the scorched earth, torture, rape, murder and obliteration of a people and a culture by self-righteously moral America’s forces. Operations extended to civilians in an effort to cripple morale and resources, the modern military seeks to subhumanize its Godless enemy, but the conscience-stricken speakers came to realize, instead, their own dehumanization, begun in boot camp and motivation platoon and cemented under fire. Not the aberrant acts of individuals like token sacrifice Lt. Calley, but a policy that is historic -- as an American Indian laments -- pervasive, calculated and deriving from highest levels, is laid bare.

Beyond the filmed testimonies, which follow one upon another abruptly and in which no attempt is made to identify or differentiate, there are a very few informal moments among the men, a couple transparencies, and one fleeting color sequence. As film, Winter Soldier would have benefited from more of what it does only with Miami’s Scott Camil, who is filled out as a person who originally chose the service both from patriotism and as an alternative to jail but afterwards came to formal study and thence to a reassessment of self and country.

For the most part reigning in the release of emotion through tears -- of himself, offers one, he has not yet thoroughly cleansed his system of military and social machismo -- the veterans nod to themselves in recognition, to each other in affirmation, and sometimes applaud. Their agonizingly reached acknowledgement of individual and national guilt partly served its purpose then and, still effective, may move today to the outraged indignation of Never Again! 

(Released by Millarium Zero; not rated by MPAA.)