Manoeuvre (Frederick Wiseman, 1979).
Like religion, the military is a consistent presence in the documentaries of Frederick Wiseman, which have charted a staggering range of institutions and communities in a distinct observational mode. His continual interest in this subject across six decades of films is also an acknowledgement of the military’s constant influence on American life, either overtly or as the elephant in the room.
Wiseman had been drafted into the Army himself and served for 21 months in the immediate wake of the Korean War. One of his earliest films, Basic Training (1971), documents the first nine weeks in the service for a company of men at Fort Knox. Even before Basic Training, High School (1968) concludes with the reading of a letter from a former student about to be deployed to Vietnam, addressing the graduating class.In the late 1970s, after the conclusion of the Vietnam War, Wiseman took a concentrated look at the American military in three films, Canal Zone (1977), Sinai Field Mission (1978), and Manoeuvre (1979), all of which are concerned with presenting not just the martial way but the American way, finding behind the pageantry and false promises a violent vision of Americanness as an ideology and an export product.
Canal Zone is Wiseman’s first film to set its sights on a subject larger than a single institution, though this company town is as enclosed and regimented as any of the asylums, schools, departments, courts, and abbeys he had depicted to that point. The film’s field of view is the Panama Canal Zone, which was an American-run settlement spanning the 51 miles of the canal, and extending around five miles from either bank, excluding Panama City and Colón. It was ceded to the United States at the turn of the 20th century, when the nation was emerging as a global empire following the closing of the Western frontier and victory in the Spanish-American War, the spoils of which included the old empire’s colonies of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, as well as dominance within the Caribbean.
The idea of building a waterway through Panama, thus opening a lucrative new trade route between the Atlantic and the Pacific, was mooted by the Spanish as early as 1513 but never undertaken. A disastrous initial attempt led by the French claimed 22,000 lives, the majority of which were itinerant Afro-Caribbean workers. The United States took up the project in 1903, and the canal was completed and opened in 1914, marking an economic, political, and propagandistic victory for the nascent empire. To quote President William Howard Taft, “The day is not far distant when three stars and stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.”
Canal Zone (Frederick Wiseman, 1977).
Although this is Wiseman’s first film to take place outside of the continental United States, it’s still largely concerned with what it means to be American. Sixty years after Taft’s pronouncement, when Wiseman arrived on the scene, the United States was indeed the world’s most dominant power, but the canal’s own star had dimmed. Since the end of the Second World War, American imperial interests have increasingly drifted toward the oil fields of the Middle East. With less traffic plying the canal, the Zone is operating at a deficit.
Wiseman makes us privy to a meeting between some wealthy visiting dignitaries and the governor of the Canal Zone, Harold Parfitt, who had previously served as vice president of the Panama Canal Company and a major general in the US Army. By tradition, all Canal Zone governors were drawn from the military. At various times, he had represented each part of the state, corporate, and military triumvirate that governs the United States, which in its colonial periphery takes a condensed form, dispensing with the illusion that there are checks and balances built into the power structure. Parfitt admits that the Canal Zone is in financial straits—as it would remain until the Zone was dissolved in 1979, placing the canal under joint jurisdiction of the United States and Panama—while also maintaining the façade of a highly functional, all-American oasis.
The remainder of the film meticulously unspools and expands upon this scene and its official messaging. After nearly an hour spent establishing the canal itself in precisely arranged scenes of heavy machinery and verbal exposition from both Parfitt and a tour guide, the scope and interests of the film expand in productive and less expected ways. Wiseman finds illustrative material in smaller bits of business, such as a television broadcast of a Spanish-dubbed Abbott and Costello film, a hazy cultural marker in this distant outpost. A talk delivered by an employee of the Canal Zone Police Youth Unit to an audience of mostly women links the high prevalence of child abuse within the Canal Zone to the sense of dislocation and boredom within military families. That sequence finds its rhyme in a “marriage enrichment” retreat led by a hip-looking couple mixing psychological, New Age, religious, and bureaucratic rhetoric. After opening informally with an off-color anecdote, they insist that marriage is “an educational institution” and structure the retreat accordingly, with rules and regulations.
Sinai Field Mission (1978).
Wiseman is one of the great chroniclers of bureaucracy: the pettiness and bitterness that accretes around it but also, more profoundly, how a combination of paperwork, small print, and wasted time can raise a barrier between an individual and their community. A person’s ability to make meaningful decisions is obstructed and overcomplicated, if not impossible. Sinai Field Mission is a study of bureaucracy in the especially charged context of unstable geopolitics, war, and colonial pursuit.
The Sinai Field Mission was a UN-mandated, US-run monitoring operation in a demilitarized stretch of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt from 1976 to 1982. It was staffed by US State Department personnel (mostly from the now beleaguered USAID) and by the American corporation E-Systems (since acquired by Raytheon, now RTX), along with an attachment of UN peacekeeping forces. Its mission was to surveil the Giddi and Milta Passes, key strategic locations much contested during each of the Arab-Israeli Wars, including the recently concluded Yom Kippur War.
Like Canal Zone, Sinai Field Mission was made in a moment of transition. Production began in 1977, following one of the rockier passages in the US-Israel special relationship, including a six-month suspension on new arms deals. In 1978, the Camp David Accords resulted in Israel withdrawing from Sinai and a reinforcement of their military alliance with the US, including a 200 percent increase in arm sales over the next five years.1 For Egypt, the Accords marked a transition from the anti-imperialist, pan-Arabist ethos of Nasserism to the appeasement policies of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat. The agreement returned Sinai to Egypt but brought an end to Egypt’s status as a major counterweight to US-Israeli hegemony in the region.
Sinai Field Mission (Frederick Wiseman, 1978).
None of these major developments, ploys, and machinations are seen in the film, which takes as its subject the petty frustrations and banalities of being a denuded cog in the wheel. Wiseman is interested in the workings of the station—the close monitoring of the station’s radar; the passing back and forth of messages to both sides; the encounters, often banal but sometimes tetchy, between SFM staff and the Egyptian and Israeli military—but ultimately his film is about cabin fever and workplace tensions.
The speechifying in the film is focused on the supposed unity of the SFM, despite its Frankensteinian nature: it draws together American military and civilian organs, the powers of the state and the market, public and private employees. Many people at the station also harp on its singularity as a peacekeeping mission run by unarmed civilians. And yet the atmosphere of the film is one of discordance and disillusionment. After one particularly stressful episode in which an injured Egyptian soldier must be airlifted out of the buffer zone, one State Department employee rages at his superior, indignant at the order to keep his E-Systems colleagues informed even when it is redundant. The tantrum is pictured from a distance, through blinds, as if from the point of view of an employee whiling away a dull day by spying on some office drama.
The idea of the true communal spirit taking root within the SFM is absurd, as the station’s purpose is the laser-precise demarcation and regulation of space in a land where giving an inch one way or the other could mean war. The few glimpses we see of the Sinai landscape are foreboding, an expanse of desert dotted with the scars of war, from burned-out vehicles to security checkpoints. And there are moments in which the contestation of land becomes entirely abstract. In one, an Israeli officer, furious that his mission into Sinai was delayed by a late UN attachment, bullishly tries to turn some Byzantine regulation on its head and use it as a battering ram to argue for ignoring standard operating procedures in the buffer zone.
This series of bureaucratic feints and abstracted combat eventually gives way to one of the film’s liveliest scenes. It involves neither actual warfare nor its active prevention but a wild party in which several E-Systems employees, mostly Texans, fill a cowboy boot to the brim with beer and take turns drinking from it, an assertion of off-the-cuff Americanness in the desert of imperial interests.
Manoeuvre (Frederick Wiseman, 1979).
Manoeuvre, the last of Wiseman’s late-’70s run of military films, is as much about performance and spectacle as his later films Model (1980), Ballet (1995), and Crazy Horse (2011). The weekslong training exercise it depicts—undertaken by a tank infantry company of the United States Army in conjunction with its ally, the West German Army, in 1978—is an imperial cavalcade, a grand show of force. The itinerary of imagined battle scenarios dot a route covering miles and miles of wilderness, farmland, and urban areas along the East German border. This maneuver has ostensibly been organized to keep the US army combat-ready post-Vietnam and to promote close collaboration with a key ally, but it is also a dramatic staged threat in response to, as one general puts it, “propaganda from the East.”
Most of Wiseman’s films are shot on a fixed terrain. The director and his crew may have some idea of planned events, but otherwise they are obliged to follow their noses and explore the space. The nature of the maneuver not only conferred a much more linear production, but also required Wiseman and the crew—usually the interloping outsiders—to temporarily join the unit that they were filming, following the same path, sticking to the same routine, eating the same rations, and wearing the same uniforms.
This extra degree of immersion only strengthens Wiseman’s determination to delve beyond the logline of whatever place or institution he is documenting. In one of the film’s most bracing sequences, a convoy of tanks rolls through a German town. Cameraman John Davey is perched on one tank, capturing the convoy’s progress from a soldier’s perspective, gazing out at the rolling scenery and the faces of the locals watching from the sidelines with excitement, distrust, or disinterest. Simultaneously, Wiseman is in another vehicle recording the radio chatter bouncing back and forth between the tank crews. The resulting scene is a spectacle of military might, chauvinism, and boredom, the soldiers’ backstage chatter revolving around all the good-looking women they are passing.
Manoeuvre (Frederick Wiseman, 1979).
The disjunct between duty and drudgery, vocation and job, is the film’s concern. Early on, an Army press officer is being interviewed by a TV crew. The reporter mentions that the Army is in a period of transition, from the drafted citizen soldiery that won the Second World War to a fully professionalized, volunteer workforce. Once again, Wiseman landed on a subject at a revealing moment, in the years immediately following defeat in Vietnam, when the military’s popularity at home was at an all-time low.
The dispirited attitude is evident in the pragmatism, frustrations, and boredom of the enlisted men and its stark contrast with the ham theatrics of their officers.
During a field briefing, an officer does his best rendition of a hard-nosed, clenched-jaw pep talk, à la General Patton, though it is undermined by awkward and conciliatory lines like “I know many of you have colds…” that drop the veil of might and moral righteousness covering these war games.
The heroic myth the American military tells about itself—full of fire and brimstone, rhetorical flash, and flag-waving—clashes with the testimonies of those who comprise it. They describe a strict and petty bureaucracy that is alienating its constituents as it spreads and deepens its jurisdiction and global monopoly on violence worldwide. All of Wiseman’s films take place in the gap between the ideals that an institution projects and its day-to-day operations. When it comes to the armed forces, that gap proves especially vast.
- Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World, rev. ed. (W. W. Norton, 2014), 340–44. ↩