Trauma in the frame

Laurent Bécue-Renard, Of Men and War, 2014. All rights reserved.In
the Atlantic earlier this year,
Robert H. Scales lamented
that America had ‘gun trouble’. The richest country in the world was laming its
own soldiers in the field with cheap, rudimentary rifle design, barely improved
upon since the 1960s. “It doesn’t have to be this way”, he concludes. “A few
dollars invested now will save the legions of brave infantrymen and –women for
generations to come.” This is America’s answer to the lacerations inflicted by
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: enthusiastic investment in armoury
development.

What
happens when you strip all the jingoism away?

“I
remember my vehicle stopping, the figure running towards the tree line. I
leveled my weapon, pulled the trigger”. As he turns to face the camera, the
veteran’s voice drops to register his self-disgust. “Never found the weapon. Picked
him up and a big chunk of brain fell on my boot. And he just kept looking at
me. That’s why I don’t sleep.”

Of
all the US troops returned from deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan, 20 percent
are now ravaged by Post-Traumatic Stress: it strangles their ability to think
properly, torments them in their sleep, and cuts deep into the lives of their
families. And these are just the official statistics.

Five
years in the making, Laurent Bécue-Renard’s Of
Men and War navigates the ruinous effects of PTSD on those US soldiers
returned from Iraq. As a director, he seats himself next to the veterans, and
observes silently, adopting a thoroughly non-interventionist position. The
camera is left to watch as the men at California’s Pathway Home – run by Fred
Gusman, a veteran of Vietnam and leading figure within the PTSD treatment
movement – retread deeply traumatic memories, moving across the slow, revealing
rhythms of therapy.

“We
don’t use ‘killed’”, one man tells us. “We use ‘hosed’, ‘zapped’, fucking ‘blew
up’. But we killed someone’s dad.”

There’s
shouting, sobbing. A cigarette break.

“In
one way shape or form, you feel small – not as strong as you once felt. You
feel defective.”

The
men are constantly twitching, prone to sudden explosions, fingers furiously
scratching their bodies. And although Bécue-Renard removes all traces of
himself from the frame, the camera looms ever larger, taking on even more of an
activist role within the therapeutic process. “It’s acknowledging and
validating from an outsider point of view that something has happened to them”,
he says.

“You’ve
never learned to forgive yourself”, Gusman says to one veteran. “I think it would
be selfish of me to forgive myself” he says back.

We
depart the therapy room, deeply shaken, our sense of time thrown out. This is a
painstaking approach to documentary, mirroring the trauma and therapy that
slowly unfurl in front of the lens. Poring over footage from almost 200
sessions, Bécue-Renard traversed and recut hundreds of hours of recordings into
a series of sketches which move from moments of painful silence to devastating
revelations.

“It’s
a horrible thing to watch your friend disappear within the confines of a body
bag.”

These
are stories that testify to war’s punishing toll on mental health. But
Bécue-Renard’s scrutinizing gaze always turns to what the extremities of war
have exacted from the families: wives, girlfriends and children caught in
between. After the first nine months of therapy, the director visited the men
with their families across a period of four years. He returns repeatedly to
these deeper, more intimate settings, to consider the trauma that now ripples
across America’s social life.

“I
have no clue what it’s like to be a woman, and marry a man twice your size and
that’s lethal, in the military, and takes his rage out on you,” one man says.
“Someone that’s supposed to love you.”

Of Men and War is the second in a
projected trilogy of films that Bécue-Renard calls “the genealogy of wrath”.
His last film, De Guerre Lasses was
similarly embedded in a post-war therapy group. He hopes to
reach an understanding of how all violence spawns another multitude of
violences that flow beneath: “wrath is passed on from one generation to the
other”.

Soldier
suicide is now on the edge of passing the number of those killed in the wars. But
the politics of militarism are only viewed from a distance. And the “pantomime
of support”, as Joann Wypijewski damningly
calls it, carries on calling for more soldiers to be put on the ground,
without ever drawing the line back to the now widely publicized cost at home.

“I
still have a lot of guilt that I can’t get over. I just can’t stop crying”, one
man says to his partner. “I still can’t get used to the way I am.”

Of Men and War has its UK
premiere at the Open City
Documentary Festival on 17 June 2015.