Face to Face With the Enemy

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

The wide array of Iraq documentaries in the past couple years has yielded an invaluable escape from the echo chamber of mainstream news coverage, not to mention a textbook-ready comparative lesson in perspective, structure, and visual technique. But one facet of the Iraq War that has remained curiously indistinct in these accounts, even in a synthetic retrospective like the recently acclaimed “No End in Sight,” is Iraq’s insurgency, now well-established.

In most Iraq documentaries, the insurgency is visible mainly by its visceral effects — American soldiers shell-shocked and mutilated by such guerrilla tactics as roadside bombs, Iraqi citizens terrorized by murders and kidnappings — and by its theorized causes, usually religious and nationalist extremism aggravated by negligent occupation planning. Although “insurgents” headline every pocket-timeline of the war, the nittygritty specifics of who, why, and how are astonishingly absent.

The lazily unskeptical “Meeting Resistance” lacks the informed perspective to fill the gap satisfactorily, but it does present a bracing series of encounters with the many faces of “the enemy.” That’s “faces” in a figurative sense, though: Almost all of the interviewees are shot out of focus, glimpsed piecemeal, or heard via voice-over, in order to conceal their identities from the American military, not to mention their co-conspirators.

Teaming up for their first feature, the photojournalists Molly Bingham and Steve Connors largely turn the show over to their anonymous subjects, who were drawn primarily from the city of Adhamiyah in the year immediately following the invasion. The assortment of mostly ordinary-sounding Iraqis reflect, explicate, and vent in candid, personal expressions of, above all, national pride. Martyrdom and self-described Iraqi machismo also figure prominently. Each insurgent is assigned a plain but portentous moniker: “the warrior,” “the teacher,” “the fugitive,” and so on.

The warrior, who was a special-forces soldier in the 1990s, explains why he took up arms after Saddam Hussein’s defeat despite having been tortured by Baathists. The fugitive, so named because he’s sought by the U.S. Army, says he knew nothing about combat before joining one of the several insurgent groups, but learned quickly. If that zero-to-60 evolution is disconcerting, then “the wife,” who calls herself a “patriotic wife of a fedayeen,” might induce paranoia by describing an underground support system of insurgents’ wives.

“Meeting Resistance” also unnerves visually with its oblique shooting strategy and measured but relentless flow of images. Each speaker is often represented only by his or her hands, usually holding cigarettes or tea cups, like the mood-setting close-ups in a fiction film. To flesh out these monologues, the directors pluck unnervingly vivid moments drawn from daily life in Iraq in all its extremes. When one insurgent says that new sources of insurgency funding must be vouched for with the liaison’s life, the film segues to footage of a man finding a stranger’s corpse in the water.

These running illustrations and the unfiltered testimonials foster a sense of an embarrassing willingness on the part of the filmmakers to take the insurgents at face value. Hearing these all-too-popular opinions from individuals is valuable, but “Meeting Resistance” suffers for its lack of an incisive organizing intelligence to shape this sensitive material. The editing often falls back on a disorienting but stirring image and then, like an establishing shot in a fiction film, works off the fumes of its intensity: small cars packed with people raucously playing drum sets and horns (apparently a wedding celebration), or footage shot by a cameraman who appears to get shot and drop his camera. The danger in the directors’ approach becomes clear in the final stretch of the film, in which the style feels given over to the warrior’s bravado. Snappily buoying his performance with on-cue photos from Abu Ghraib, the documentary gets taken away with his bluster. This comes on the heels of the strangely aggrandizing setup used to conceal an imam’s appearance, casting him in stagy silhouette as he parses the concept of jihad.

It’s terribly uncomfortable to watch people affirm their plans to kill American troops, whatever your feelings about the war. Ms. Bingham and Mr. Connors perform a service by introducing viewers to voices that are easier to find in insurgent propaganda on file-sharing sites, and especially by highlighting the many pedestrian supporters, who are in some ways more frightening. But without a sure hand or a grounded sensibility to trust, “Meeting Resistance” is at best a valuable trove of raw data and at worst a worrisome and rudderless endeavor.


The New York Sun

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