Extreme Cinema Verite in Iraq

Samizdat Video: Archiving the Iraq War. The L.A. Times has an amazing story, Extreme Cinema Verite, about combat videos made by soldiers in Iraq. The contrast between what's on the evening news, and what's on these videos is enormous —

By adding music, soldiers create their own cinéma vérité of the conflict. Although many are humorous or patriotic, others are gory. "It gets the point across. This isn't some jolly freakin' peacekeeping mission."


The Pentagon's control over the media in Iraq is perhaps in some sense an illustration of the tendency to fight the last war. Unlike Vietnam, CBS is under control, and there's a cheering section at Fox network that is the American analog of pre-glasnostPravda. But these little samizdat videos — made by individuals, passed from hand to hand, and containing facts the official media does not — tell certain truths about the war. This is the historical record in the making.

-- via Cinema Minima