Guzzetti's Risk
Alfred Guzzetti, co-director of Living at Risk, quotes a Jean-Luc Godard saying that aptly sums up his new documentary film. "One should never aim to be a political filmmaker," Godard remarked, "but instead one should make films politically."
The release of Living at Risk comes at a politic time in the continuing debate over American involvement in Central America. It is an important film because it sheds new light on the sorely stretched "facts" that each week issue from the editorial pages of our leading newspapers. It undoes the welter of complacent opinion, spearheaded by conservative journalists like Shirley Christian and George F. Will, that finds fault with every aspect of the Sandinista regime and urges further U.S. funding of contra activities in the region. And because of several clever decisions by the filmmakers, Living at Risk should have a significant impact on public opinion about Nicaragua--especially, as seems likely at this writing, if it gets picked up by the PBS network.
The idea for Living at Risk was hatched two years ago by co-directors Alfred Guzzetti, Susan Meiselas and Richard Rogers. As a photographic journalist for Time magazine and The New York Times, Meiselas had spent years in Nicaragua, and she broached the idea of a film project with Guzzetti and Rogers, two film professors at Harvard University. Their goal was to expose the besmirched truths of the nation in a way easily assimilable by American audiences. Together they hit upon the inspired decision to film a middle-class family, the Barrios, carrying out their daily tasks in the service of the Nicaraguan government.
Naturally, few Americans are used to the notion of a relatively wealthy Nicaraguan family being waited on by a maid in the comfort of their own house. But though the Barrios enjoy some of the trappings of their exalted family background (they are closely related to the influential Chamorros, who were the leading aristocrats on the side opposed to Somoza in the 1979 revolution), they play a considerable role rebuilding the country that faces constant terror from U.S.-sponsored contras. Their lifestyle and demeanor are accessible to the average Yankee viewer, yet their politics have been slandered from here to high water by the average Yankee president, Ronald Reagan. American audiences are compiled to rethink the issue.
Living at Risk is sensitively photographed, a moving series of vignettes subtly linked by voice-over narrations by various Barrios family members. At several points in the hour-long film, the English narrator informs us that the filmmakers are stalking highly dangerous territory, that guerrilla attacks have recently occurred along the stretch of road that Miguel Barrios (and presumably the American filmmakers) drive on. Physical danger, the oppression of a country being squeezed to its weakest point, make Living at Risk.
As a companion piece the ICA is showing Witness to War, Deborah Shaffer's 30-minute study of Dr. Charlie Clements, a former U.S. pilot in Vietnam who has had a conversion to Quakerism and now does medical relief work in the shell-stormed hills outside San Salvador. The quick-paced film captures the Sturm und Drang of life at the front lines, cutting throughout to interviews of Clements's friends, high school snapshots, and snippets of Clements raising funds and consciousness back home in America. In a brilliant device, Clements sits in his present-day living room and reads out of his own diary from 1982 while Shaffer cuts to actual 1982 footage of him helping natives recover from a bomb attack.
Witness to War is a politic portrait of a model humanitarian, a film designed to prick the American psyche without baring the blade.