“Hidden in Plain Sight”:

Director’s Statement

 

by

 

John H. Smihula

Director

 

Artists of the past could at least keep silent in the face of tyranny.

The tyrannies of today are improved; they no longer admit of

silence or neutrality. One has to take a stand, be either for or

against. Well, in that case, I am against.

                                   ---Albert Camus, “The Artist and His Time” (1955)

 

 

I

 

After two years of hard work--and much doubt, despair, and debt--I write this in a very good and very grateful mood. I have been surprised and delighted by the events of the last couple of weeks. First, there was the premiere of “Hidden in Plain Sight” the weekend of November 15-17 in Columbus, Georgia, during the big annual demonstration against the School of the Americas and against the bellicosity of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Over 1000 people watched the film, and those who couldn't squeeze into the hotel ballroom to actually watch it stayed anyway and sat in the hallway just to listen to it. When I heard the applause and saw how moved people were by the film, I no longer remembered how difficult it was to make it.

Then, on the morning of Monday the 18th, Amy Goodman played most of the audio from the film on her excellent Pacifica Radio show, “Democracy NOW.” The subsequent response has been overwhelming. People from all regions of the U.S., and from other nations as well, are contacting us to ask for copies of the film.

And finally, two days ago, my co-producer Andrés, while in front of a large boisterous crowd in Cuba, handed Fidel Castro a VHS copy of “Hidden in Plain Sight.” We don't know if he'll watch it, or if he'll write us with a response (I might have to write him, asking for one), but my team is elated that our documentary--even before it is entirely finished and translated into Spanish--has gotten as far as Cuba and Fidel Castro.

It seems that the high level of interest in our film can be attributed to not only its quality but to the timing of its release. We live in history's darkest age, a time of endless war, ever-intensifying corporate hegemony, and flourishing, unchecked militarism, a time when the oligarchs of the world's only superpower do anything they want, no matter how outrageous or criminal, because they believe no one can stop them. But at this moment, when the rulers of the U.S. are spoiling for full-fledged war with Iraq, and looking for other defenseless nations to bomb, a steadily increasing number of citizens are starting to ask questions, express doubts about the wisdom and motives of their leaders, and speak out against war and our runaway military budget. And to these citizens, a probing, revelatory documentary like "Hidden in Plain Sight" would have a strong appeal.

The fundamental questions I had in mind as I worked on the project are these: What has the U.S. been up to in Latin America? What is the primary goal of U.S. foreign policy? Why has the U.S. been training Latin American soldiers at Fort Benning, Georgia with U.S. taxpayer money? What has this training consisted of? Is there a connection between this training and the human rights violations committed by hundreds of SOA graduates? Who have been the targets of violence and repression? It is not for me to say whether my film definitively or satisfactorily answers these questions, for that is something I will let viewers decide.

 

 

II

 

What the film is now is much different from what it originally was. What started as a small, simple project quickly evolved into an enormous documentary consisting of eighty hours of footage and requiring twenty script revisions before Viví, Andrea, Andrés, and I were all content with it.

         I began the project in the autumn of 2000. While on a year-long leave of absence from my teaching duties at the University of Nevada, Reno, and recovering from a minor operation that kept me unusually sedentary, I felt a strong, insistent desire to make a documentary. This desire I had had for many years, at least since 1993 when I helped shoot a documentary in Melanesia on masks and ceremonies, but now I had both the desire and the time. That I had no money didn't matter: I would devote the next year to making a film, somehow. Determined to realize my goal, I began to plan an elaborate documentary on American working-class life: eight portraits of workers, four men and four women, from different regions of the country and different ethnic backgrounds. They would discuss their work and dreams and frustrations. I was drawn to the subject in part because the two mainstream-party candidates running for president were ignoring the working class, but, in my more lucid moments, I suspected that the project was too ambitious, that my reach greatly exceeded my grasp.

Then Viví came to my rescue. One day in October, she told me about her friend Ted, a Vietnam veteran who had become a peace activist as well as a poet and Buddhist. She said that Ted and a few other veterans, all members of the organization Veterans for Peace, would soon be taking a bus ride across the country, from Berkeley, California to Fort Benning, Georgia, to protest against the School of the Americas. When she asked, “Have you ever heard of the School of the Americas?” I replied, “Yes, it has been disturbing my sleep for fifteen years.” So Viví suggested I join the veterans to videotape the trip and hear their stories, and that this would be my documentary.

         Intrigued by the idea, I contacted the veterans--Ted, Fredy, and George--and they invited me to join them on the bus ride. There was, however, one stipulation: that I, like Ted and George, learn how to drive Fredy's big old 1969 school bus--the kind that used to take me to grade school. On Election Day, the three of us drove up to the northern reaches of California to meet Fredy and learn how to drive his bus. That we did, amid much laughter and a couple near-accidents, and in the evening we all sat in front of the television in Fredy's warm living room and watched in stunned disbelief as George Bush stole the election from Al Gore.

         The next day there was much work to do to prepare the bus for the long trip. The three veterans worked hard at removing seats from the bus and building plywood beds. I was not expected to help, but I did, for banging a nail into a piece of wood is something I enjoy. Occasionally, I grabbed the camera I had borrowed from a friend (a simple Canon GL-1) and videotaped the activity.

         So that's how the project began. It stayed small and focused on the veterans until the following March, when Andrés, my new cameraman Chip, and I went to Fort Benning and then up to Washington, D.C. to hold interviews with Army officials, members of Congress, and Father Roy. The details of this trip are in my essay “Pursuing Truth and Villains.”

 

 

III

 

Independent documentary film is one of the richest flowerings of the Populist-Progressive sensibility. In one sense, it is muckraking journalism, assiduous and uncompromising; in another, even more important sense, it is history from the bottom up. It is not the mythologizing, self-aggrandizing official history written by the conquerors and the elites but the people's history--history from the perspective of the conquered, the dispossessed, the deracinated, the forgotten. It is the history not of President Duarte but of Ana Chavez, not of Colombia's ruling class but of Hector and Juan Aristizabal. The documentary is therefore the art of remembrance and rectification.

Every documentary filmmaker who tackles a significant social, economic, or political issue must negotiate the tension between two distinct impulses: creating a work of art and advancing a political argument or cause. If the first impulse is to express the reality of the present moment or of a still-consequential time (that is, to inscribe or reinscribe history), the second seeks the more or less radical transformation of that reality. A filmmaker is successful if he or she finds a salutary compromise that does not devitalize either impulse.

         The artistic impulse elicits no controversy, unless it results in a graphic, and perhaps gratuitous, depiction of sex or violence, or is deemed irreligious. The political impulse, however, always seems to engender controversy, generally from conservative critics who see it as their patriotic duty to fulminate against political or philosophical perspectives that challenge The Way Things Are. Just as these critics endorse “nonpolitical” writers (which is no less an oxymoron than “compassionate conservative”) who compose technically-perfect poems or metaphorically-rich stories about flowers or fallen heroes, they endorse documentaries that do not range beyond the glory of American progress or the courtship behavior of primates. Artists who are a little more ambitious, who feel some sort of moral imperative to better understand our society and how it works, are, like a Don DeLillo or a Barbara Kopple, routinely denounced as “bad citizens” and propaganda-peddlers.

         I anticipate the same criticism being leveled at me. In response, I would say that according to our democratic tradition, as articulated by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson, the bad citizen is he or she who does not exercise their democratic rights by speaking out against perceived injustice. Further, I would point out that propaganda, like censorship, is a product of the Counter-Reformation, and that for the ensuing four hundred years, it has been one of the State's primary weapons of counter-revolution and political socialization. One of the strategies of State propaganda is to present itself as the truth, the voice of reason, and as the wisdom handed down to us from “experts,” while it attacks the radical writer or artist as a propagandist and “extremist” with a subversive “agenda.” But the only definition of propaganda that really matters is this: It is the complex of lies and half-truths the State disseminates in an effort to perpetuate itself indefinitely. Such propaganda is subsumed under the term “Psychological Operations” or “Public Relations.” (Interestingly, the Psychological Operations course at the School of the Americas generated much controversy a few years ago; in response, the Army changed the title to “Information Operations.”)

         I contend that “Hidden in Plain Sight” is not propaganda. The short videos produced by Robert Richter for SOA Watch, like “School of Assassins” and “Guns and Greed,” are propaganda, however, because they present only one side of the story. There's no issue to debate, no controversy, no pursuit of the truth. They are direct advocacy films: from the first second to the last, they have a set point of view and a cause to advance, and they are confident that they are on the side of truth and justice. These videos serve their purpose, and I welcome their advocacy and their sympathy for those who have suffered, but I am sure that I am not the only viewer who is left wondering what the other side thinks. My film, in contrast, presents both sides of the issue. It does, of course, become an advocacy film in the end, when it calls for a Truth and Justice Commission to be established in the U.S. (an idea I heard first from Father Roy), but it has by then earned the right to advocate. After the debate, which effectively ends when Major Joseph Blair exposes the "new" school, the fact remains that thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured, murdered, and disappeared by soldiers and police officers who had trained at the School of the Americas and at other U.S. military schools, and who had served repressive regimes that were supported by the U.S. government. So what can be done about this? Establish a Truth Commission and open all the records, declassified or not. Forty other nations have had Truth Commissions since World War II, and I believe it is time for the U.S.--the self-appointed moral tutor to the world--to have one. Let us have a day of reckoning. As Christopher Hitchens told me: “The only people who could possibly lose are those who have something to hide, those who poisoned and tainted American democracy and committed unpardonable crimes against their neighbors.”

         As an addendum to the topic of propaganda and my effort to present both sides of the issue, I should note that as I worked on the film, I tried to give the pro-SOA side more intellectual potency by including an interview with a right-wing intellectual. Two summers ago, I made contact with George Will, political pundit for the Disney Corporation (which owns the ABC network), but he disingenuously pleaded ignorance on the issue of the SOA and U.S. policy in Latin America. And last summer I attempted to line up an interview with someone at the Hoover Institute or Heritage Foundation, but was given the runaround. So, in the end, I had to settle for a Jeane Kirkpatrick soundbite taken from a U.S. Army video on the SOA.  

 

IV

 

As I worked on “Hidden in Plain Sight” (which was entitled “Not In Our Name” until a new anti-war group took the title in the weeks following the September 11th terrorist attacks), my intention was to craft an intellectually stimulating and visually exciting film like Peter Davis’s “Hearts and Minds” (1974) or Barbara Trent’s “The Panama Deception” (1992)--one that would have some of the drama and poetry of a first-rate narrative film. I wanted to strike a balance between the expository and the expressionistic, and make a film that would appeal equally to the head and the heart.

I find it interesting how most of my students say they have seen very few documentaries. I have even had students who never saw a documentary before taking my course. They tell me that documentaries are boring, and they're right: most documentaries are boring. They tend to be anemic and pedantic, and as I struggle to stay awake during them I start thinking of how I’d rather peruse an article or a book on the subject.

But no documentary should be boring, regardless of how mundane the topic. If the potential of the film medium is exploited, the film will be cinematic and dramatic. Toward this end, what I tried to do in “Hidden in Plain Sight” was minimize narration and let the characters carry the story, have the characters ask questions as well as make statements, use images as well as words to impart information (as when we see, following Mac Collins’ praise of the U.S. Army, a death squad on the move), make the best use of both sound (sound design is as important to a documentary as it is to a narrative film) and silence (the pauses between words--as when Hector recalls his brother's murder--can say more than the words themselves), employ music circumspectly (the bane of most films is that they have too much music, and in documentaries this music is often of poor quality), never be too predictable (by varying the editing style and including a few surprises), and not have the film conclude on a falsely positive note (yes, Americans love happy endings, but maybe we have seen too many Hollywood movies and not enough documentaries).

 

 

V

 

Go into any movie theatre in the U.S. today to watch the latest glossy product from Hollywood’s “cinema of blood and sperm” (to borrow Eric Hobsbawm's phrase), and you will notice, if you are paying attention to all of the posters and trailers, the absence of films that could in any sense be called “realistic.” This is not surprising, especially in our post-9/11 era, for in times of tyranny any depiction of the real is suppressed in favor of a cinema of diversion. You will see special-effects extravaganzas, silly and prurient comedies, patriotic war and espionage thrillers, run-of-the-mill romances starring the latest beautiful boys and girls who have struck gold in Tinseltown, family crisis movies that always manage to celebrate affluence, fidelity, and conformity--but nothing approaching a sober, steady look at social, economic, and political realities.

Confronting reality is the province of the documentary. Perhaps if the world were perfect, and life fair, and society just and equitable, there would be no need for documentary film. Inhabitants of Eden would have no reason to document their existence, but in our post-Edenic world where one must work by the sweat of his brow and where Cain kills Abel and where some people die from gluttony while many more die from starvation, there is an irrefutable need to document reality, to expose that which has been hidden, to speak truth to power. Each serious documentary attempts in some way to help a fallen world to its feet.

 

 

San Francisco

                                                                        Thanksgiving, 2002