** MY PRIVATE WAR
The filmmakers, Harriet Eder and Thomas Kufus, found six soldiers in the German Wehrmacht who fought on the eastern front and took home movies to record “where one had been,” as one of them blithely puts it. The amateur footage is intercut with present-day interviews with each of the six discussing his “war movies.” The soldiers narrate their own footage, and we are encouraged to see the war through their eyes, which is troubling because most of them seem to be unreconstructed Nazis. Only one refers to “German crimes” committed during the war, and that occurs near the film’s conclusion. Another calls the Russians “animals.” One soldier even declares that his conscience is “clear as crystal.”
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Most home movies present images as objects belonging to the filmmaker. Junior looks into daddy’s camera, and daddy has in some sense “captured” him. A central function of image making has been to serve as a substitute for owning the object depicted, going back perhaps as far as cave drawings of animals to be hunted. Home movies typically present their subjects head-on; people often look straight into the camera, sometimes gesturing to offer their personas to the image-making process. Early in My Private War, members of the Hitler Youth loll in front of a camera held by one of their own. “Here we are going into Warsaw,” narrates another soldier, identifying the bombed-out buildings as having been “destroyed in ’39,” without mentioning who destroyed them. The soldier who wanted a record of “where one had been” was filmed bathing nude in the Black Sea, a banal image that could have come from anyone’s home movie. His motivation was the same as the average amateur moviemaker: since one can’t bring the beach home, one “captures” it on film. But the fact that the Wehrmacht literally captured the Black Sea, with much loss of Russian life, remains unacknowledged.
While many individual images are left similarly unexplained, the filmmakers provide some commentary in their arrangement of scenes. Early on one soldier praises his camera, which worked “even in the extreme cold of Moscow . . . right to the end of the war. . . . The spring mechanism was excellent.” Later another soldier compares the Wehrmacht to a kind of machine from which there was “no escape,” while we watch a series of soldiers walking by an officer, each saluting smartly. The film reveals with understated irony that near the war’s end the camera was still working while the Wehrmacht beat a hasty retreat, making “one of the worst withdrawals I ever saw,” according to one soldier. “Technically speaking, a mess.” Another praises the quality of colors captured in his old Kodachrome footage–“the colors have kept very well; it came out great”–and then we see the first home-movie image in color, a shot of a Nazi flag.
