Winter Soldier re-released three decades later
Winter Soldier, a documentary film by Winterfilm. First released in 1972, re-released by Milestone Films, 2005.
Thirty-four years after it was made, the controversial antiwar documentary Winter Soldier has achieved a limited theatrical release in cities across the United States this fall. When it was first completed in 1972, it was shown at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals, in movie theaters in England and France, and on German television, but film distributors in the United States wouldn’t screen it.
It played for a week in a single New York theater and was given a one-time showing on New York City’s local public television station. Thereafter, it was consigned to obscurity, its revelations of extensive American war crimes in Vietnam effectively suppressed.
However, in light of the United States’ current occupation of Iraq, and the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib, the film has gained renewed attention.
Its relevance enhanced by current parallels, the questions the film raises continue to cause consternation both for supporters of American imperialism, and ironically for those promoting the film who advocate protest politics as the means to counter it. Still possessing the power of an unexploded grenade, it is likely that even this re-release will remain limited to the smaller art theaters.
The film was made in February 1971, when more than 125 veterans gathered in a motel in downtown Detroit for the Winter Soldier Investigation, a three-day informal hearing to testify to atrocities they committed and witnessed in their service tours in Vietnam.
The investigation was named in reference to lines written by colonial American pamphleteer Thomas Paine: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summertime 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” (Thomas Paine, The Crisis, 1776-77). Considering themselves patriots in the sense that Paine described, these “winter” soldiers sought to end to the Vietnam War by exposing the atrocities it had engendered....read more
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/wint-s26.shtml
By Clare Hurley
26 September 2005
Winter Soldier, a documentary film by Winterfilm. First released in 1972, re-released by Milestone Films, 2005.Thirty-four years after it was made, the controversial antiwar documentary Winter Soldier has achieved a limited theatrical release in cities across the United States this fall. When it was first completed in 1972, it was shown at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals, in movie theaters in England and France, and on German television, but film distributors in the United States wouldn’t screen it.
It played for a week in a single New York theater and was given a one-time showing on New York City’s local public television station. Thereafter, it was consigned to obscurity, its revelations of extensive American war crimes in Vietnam effectively suppressed.
However, in light of the United States’ current occupation of Iraq, and the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib, the film has gained renewed attention.
Its relevance enhanced by current parallels, the questions the film raises continue to cause consternation both for supporters of American imperialism, and ironically for those promoting the film who advocate protest politics as the means to counter it. Still possessing the power of an unexploded grenade, it is likely that even this re-release will remain limited to the smaller art theaters.
The film was made in February 1971, when more than 125 veterans gathered in a motel in downtown Detroit for the Winter Soldier Investigation, a three-day informal hearing to testify to atrocities they committed and witnessed in their service tours in Vietnam.
The investigation was named in reference to lines written by colonial American pamphleteer Thomas Paine: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summertime 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” (Thomas Paine, The Crisis, 1776-77). Considering themselves patriots in the sense that Paine described, these “winter” soldiers sought to end to the Vietnam War by exposing the atrocities it had engendered....read more
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/wint-s26.shtml
