“Voices in Wartime” is a sincere effort to capture a few different ideas and knit them together in a coherent whole. The ideas don’t quite mesh, but it has its moments.
| Unfocused: A sincere effort to capture the history and meaning of poetry associated with war, with specific emphasis on a 2003 White House event that was canceled because of an anti-war movement within the poetry community.
Rated: Not rated; probably R for violence, language. Now showing: Guild 45th. |
The two main ideas are war and poetry. The film examines the effect of war on soldiers, and the way poetry has been a method for grappling with the harsh realities of combat. Talking heads provide the words, and some horrific newsreel footage gives visual testimony.
The importance of poetry comes not exclusively from poets, but notably from West Point superintendent William Lennox, a lieutenant general who speaks forcefully and insightfully about the value of poetry that deals with trauma.
We also hear from one Vietnam vet, a Boston-accented guy whose combat duty comes bleeding out of his unsparing writing. He insists it doesn’t matter which war one talks about – the sights and sounds are just as hard to shake.
As we hear poems by soldiers (and sometimes relatives of soldiers, who have their own adjustments to make), the film also gives the histories of selected wars and the poems inspired by them.
This isn’t a complete survey – “The Iliad” leads things off, as expected, and there is a long section on the remarkable group of poets who served in World War I, notably Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Their stunned, lucid poems are still bracing. (The movie doesn’t mention Rupert Brooke, whose World War I poems were not of the anti-war variety.)
Alongside this material, there is an account of the 2003 incident that brought poetic voices together to protest the war against Iraq. A White House event to honor American poets (specifically celebrating Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes), to be hosted by Laura Bush, was abruptly derailed when the American poetry community vowed to turn the event into an anti-war happening.
Poets from around the world responded, and some of them are heard in the movie. Iraqi poets are also included, including one who serves as a voice of pre-wartime, with a reminder of the brutalities of the Saddam Hussein regime.
The backlash was largely organized by Sam Hamill, a Northwest poet and publisher. It seems like this is the real story of “Voices in Wartime,” but it shares time with the other material (including testimony from a New York Times war correspondent and a network war photographer). Even at a brief 74 minutes, the film feels like it has too many directions.
War-inspired art is also included in “Voices in Wartime,” including this digital collage by Peter Ciccariello entitled “The immovable basis of equal rights and reason,” a quote from Thomas Jefferson taken from the Declaration of Independence.
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