Journalists, soldiers, activists, authors, bloggers, lecturers and filmmakers will descend on campus this weekend with one common theme: The war in Iraq. A two-day conference sponsored by the Watson Institute for International Studies, "Front Line, First Person: Iraq War Stories," will feature first-hand, uncensored accounts of the war from soldiers and embedded journalists who have returned to the United States to tell their stories.
The conference will feature military blogger and author Matthew Burden, former U.S. Sen. Lincoln Chafee '75 and award-winning blogger Colby Buzzell, a former soldier who blogged from the front lines and then released his stories in a book titled "My War: Killing Time in Iraq."
Also speaking will be documentarian Deborah Scranton '84, whose critically acclaimed 2006 film, "The War Tapes," won the Tribeca Film Festival's "Best Documentary" award and was shortlisted for an Academy Award nomination. "The War Tapes" was shot by 21 active soldiers who were given filming equipment by Scranton and her production team to provide an account of the war unparalleled in authenticity.
Scranton, who teaches INTL 1800E: "The Good Fight: Documentary Work and Social Change" as a visiting fellow for international studies, sat down with The Herald yesterday to talk about the war, her documentary and life at Brown.
Herald: Handing cameras to soldiers without any formal training in film or journalism seems like a risky move, but it ends up providing viewers with the most real account of the war possible. How did you come up with the idea for the documentary?
Scranton: I wanted to tell the story from the inside out versus the outside in, from the point of view of those who are going out of the bases and who are actually engaged. My background used to be doing a lot of sports work, and very often I would be on the headset with lots of cameras. So when I got a phone call with the offer to embed with the New Hampshire National Guard to tell their story, I literally woke up in the middle of the night at like 4 o' clock in the morning with this idea - "What if I could virtually embed?" If I could put more cameras out there, maybe I could tell a multi-faceted story. What if I could have cameras rolling all the time and create a permeable relationship with the soldiers through IM and e-mails to really get inside of the story, to understand what their experiences were like? So instead of going in there and thinking, "This is the story I'm going to tell," I wanted to crawl inside the experience of war - what it looked like, smelled like and felt like.
The Iraq war obviously elicits strong opinions from nearly everyone, for and against. Did you try to accomplish anything political with the documentary?
Absolutely not. I gave the soldiers a promise: I said that we would tell their story - through their eyes - no matter what. The caveat for my access was that I had to get the soldiers to volunteer.
"The War Tapes" was shortlisted for an Oscar nomination. How did it feel to almost, almost win an Oscar?
I was thrilled because I really hoped that by that acknowledgement it would have a wider audience. My motivation for this was to try to bridge the disconnect between those who know a solider and those who don't. Right now, it's less than one percent of the country who knows a soldier. In World War II it was a little more than 12 percent - we had a home front, a war front, everybody was involved. Now, in this country, you can go days without knowing there's a war going on.
Has your Brown education helped you in your career as a filmmaker?
I'd say my undergraduate education helped me in two ways. One was being a semiotics major and looking at interpretive frameworks and how meaning is constructed. I also did two and a half years of RISD in photography. I had a wonderful photography professor who only let us have a 50mm lens for our photography class. His thing was, "You want a picture? Go get it."
