Film Echoes the Present in Atrocities of the Past

New York Times ^ | August 9, 2005 | David M. Halbfinger

[Interesting Times]

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 8 - Like a live hand grenade brought home from a distant battlefield, the 34-year-old antiwar documentary "Winter Soldier" has been handled for decades as if it could explode at any moment.

Now, the 95-minute film - which has circulated like 16-millimeter samizdat on college campuses for decades but has never been accessible to a wide audience - is about to get its first significant theatrical release in the United States, beginning on Friday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. (Other bookings, including Chicago, Detroit, Hartford and Minneapolis, can be found at www.wintersoldierfilm.com.)

Its distributors say that the war in Iraq has made the Vietnam-era film as powerful as when it was new, and its filmmakers are calling it eerily prescient of national embarrassments like the torture at Abu Ghraib.

Seldom has a film seen by so few caused so much consternation for so many years.

[snip]

When one of the veterans - John Kerry, who was seen on screen for less than a minute - ran for president last year, the old film turned up as propaganda on both sides of the partisan divide: Mr. Kerry's friend, the filmmaker George Butler, used footage from "Winter Soldier" to lionize him in a biographical film underwritten by Democrats called "Going Upriver." His political enemies on the right, meanwhile, created a Web site called Wintersoldier.com and made a film of their own, "Stolen Honor," to assail him as a traitor and a fraud.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[Just mythoughts]

I got to wonder if JFKerry's films reenacting his powerful battles will be the featured preview for this "first significant theatrical release".

[bray]

Nice to see that the Old York Times is trying to expand it's customer base to both Leninists and Stalinists!!

Pray for W and Our Freedom Fighters

[Mo1]

First Jane Fonda comes out of retirement with her bus tour and now this

Gee .. what will the 60's hippie crowd come up with next

[TexasTransplant]

Not in MY Nieghborhood

[trubluolyguy]

Vietnam protest film...that is sooo last century. Unfortunately, so are the liberals(that's why they are so nuts...they know they are going the way of the dinosaur)

[bitt]

no mention of the plot to kill the Senators.....hey, how come?

[TexasTransplant]

When you are in a home, an old folks home.

What will have more influence on the rest of your life or the quality of your life...

The whizzenned know it all bald headed (with a pony tail) little Viet Nam War Protester?

Or the little blue pill.

Whiners don't get Laid!

TT

[bitt]

and MORE at http://ice.he.net/~freepnet/kerry/index.php?topic=Documents

[bitt]

LT ping. It is depressing to think we have to go thru this shite again.

[Mo1]

Check out the date on the minutes

[zot]

The trashing of Vietnam vets continues...

And it isn't only the Vietnam vets. The leftist media was the enemy then and they are the enemy now. They are doing again what they did before. Step by step, day by day, they are turning the American people against the war in Iraq.

[bitt]

ACK!!

Sept 11!

[Mo1]

no mention of the plot to kill the Senators.....hey, how come?

Ummmm .. because they are afraid of the truth

[RightWingAtheist]

Here's a New Criterion article about a documentary which should be seen after one has seen The Winter Soldier or Hearts and Minds any other lefty doc on Vietnam, just to put things in their proper context:

http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/sum05/sandall.htm

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[bitt]

:)

[Slings and Arrows]

Sounds like a man who reclaimed his soul. More power to him.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

Thanks for the link. We would be foolish to think it couldn't happen again. Hillary and her cohorts are admirers of that bunch and desire to implement that system.