E-TEAM C
USA (88 mi) 2014
d: Katy Chevigny and Ross Kauffman Official
site
The film is a fairly
choppily edited sequence of events following reporters working for the Human Rights Watch, an international
organization that investigates and documents human rights abuses. While very little information is provided
about the organization itself, what footage is provided is accompanied by views
seen through the eyes of the journalists, both as they’re on their jobs, but
also while safely at home having meals with family and friends. What’s quickly apparent is the
differentiation in social and economic class, as the journalists are well-educated,
living comfortably in the lavishness of a wealthy lifestyle, where a husband
and wife team is seen leading a quiet life outside of Geneva, Switzerland, but
drop everything after receiving phone calls sending in the E-Teams, emergency
teams into battle zones where people are in the midst of heated violence, with
mobs of people on the streets filled with abandoned buildings raked by
shrapnel, where people are literally under attack, often with nearby explosions
and bullets flying, where people are fighting for their lives. In the intensity of the moment, a mob
mentality prevails, where like-minded people are all too willing to blame the
other side when talking to reporters, where it’s often hard to distinguish
between fact and fiction. A building was
bombed, children were killed or injured, where an on-the-scene interview with
the mother may not be the most accurate or objective piece of reporting, but
it’s dramatic as hell. This film feels forced
and manipulative, always looking for a worse case scenario, seeking to incite
the most outrageous sense of drama, where it’s edited like an adrenaline-laced emergency
room television program, following one disaster after the next, elevating the
level of trauma and outrage, where anyone willing to fit that profile will be
interviewed, failing to provide a more detached explanation of what’s happening
on the ground. More importantly, most of
what’s being documented is old news, where more current reportage and analysis
has already provided a more recent understanding of the conflicts shown.
Taking us into well known crisis regions, like Libya in the
aftermath of Muammar Gaddafi, or attacks on civilians near Syrian
rebel outposts by Bashar
al-Assad, but even backtracking to the Kosovo War that took place more than a decade ago,
where one of the reporters actually testifies in the Hague, documenting what he
witnessed, subject to hostile, face-to-face questions from Slobodan Milošević, the Serbian President
accused of war crimes. While the team
conducts interviews on the street and attempts to collect evidence of atrocities,
it’s clear they’re in a harrowing business, often smuggled into the most
dangerous regions of the world, where what they do is indisputably valuable,
yet the tone of the entire film is also filled with in-your-face moral
self-righteousness, suggesting we were there, we risked our lives to obtain
this footage, pounding the viewers on the head about the immediate
significance, attempting to provide a sense of urgency, yet what we see
onscreen is nothing new. The airwaves
are filled with this stuff, as are plenty of online sites, where the raw
footage of a ravished war zone looks pretty much the same whether you’re in
Syria or the West Bank, Iraq
or Afghanistan. War is hell.
What’s missing in their pieces, as opposed to the distinguished
photojournalism of Tim Hetherington (who was killed in Misurata,
Libya recently while
filming the conflict there) and Sebastian Junger in RESTREPO (2010), who spent
a year with one platoon in the deadliest valley in Afghanistan,
is the extent of time spent in each location.
What they’re reporting are specific flash points, a dramatic moment in
time, but they fail to provide an overall, in-depth sense of what’s going on in
the region, which would include a more balanced sense of the region’s place in
history. We never get at the root of the
turmoil, the origins of any of these conflicts, but instead focus upon the
incidental casualties of innocents.
While the film makes claims that it investigates atrocities
on both sides, this is clearly not the case, as there is simply no footage
anywhere to be seen of Israel’s assault on the West Bank, or America’s
occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan, including extensive accounts of hundreds of
innocents dying from errant bombs. The reason
for this is obvious, as western reporters are simply not allowed into the most
dangerous regions on earth. With the
recent revelations of videotaped beheadings of western journalists by the
extremist rebel jihadists of ISIL in Syria and Iraq, it’s impossible to minimize just how
dangerous it is to enter these regions.
Even the downed passenger plane, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, shot down over the war zone in territory
controlled by pro-Russian separatists in
Eastern Ukraine was impossible to investigate as western
investigators were simply not allowed near the crash site. Nonetheless, that doesn’t stop frantic
requests from E-team journalists on the ground urgently asking their superiors
to demand a no-fly zone to try to prevent Syrian air strikes against
civilian villages. When the leaders of
their own organization hesitates, believing such an action would be premature,
the journalists feel betrayed, as if they’re risking their lives for
nothing. This incident attempts to expose
an existing rift that inevitably occurs between bureaucracies safely tucked
into the background and the extreme realities that happen every day in a war
zone, which by the way, was Kubrick’s subject in PATHS OF GLORY (1957). This is a rather simplistic way of expressing
similar themes that those waging wars are nowhere to be seen near the front
lines, oblivious to the often gruesome consequences of their own acts, hiding
behind the belligerent rhetoric of war.
While the journalists themselves steadfastly believe in the power of
images, especially when they are the first on the scene, but their
self-congratulatory tone of how essential they really are sends the wrong
message, making themselves the subject of their own photos, falling in love
with seeing themselves in front of the cameras, which only comes across as
western arrogance, much like the soldiers sending selfies of themselves with
prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison.
