My opening bit on this one is to marvel at Wiseman’s talent to find interesting things in so many places. It takes real smarts to identify good subjects, and even more to be ready to include things that don’t seem to necessarily “fit”, just to follow your instincts that there is good stuff here. This is another of my obvious-sounding points, but these abilities can’t be taken for granted. A reaction I’m so frequently having is surprise at each of the films for their unexpectedness, that I thought I could guess at what’s to come and I’ve been so consistently wrong. After the movie is done, I may see some consistencies and links to stuff in other films, but while I’m watching, so often my reaction is “how did he ever get these things on film”.
Manouevre (and you try spelling that right) starts out like we’ve been here before - marching troops. Like the start of Basic Training (and a few others), a kind of processing is going on. We see quickly that the troops and lots of equipment are about to leave. The surprise bit of observation here is how much searching happens first. Why do troops need to be searched? We get three quick bits - drug sniffing guard dogs going down a row of backpacks, then a customs inspector (says so on his armband) goes through bags by handling them manually, even riffing through the pages of a paperback book just in case, and then there’s a body inspection. (“When you get on the airplane, please take the magazine out of the weapon” - they’re all carrying rifles - not the usual plane trip.) When they’re boarded (this has taken about four minutes of film time), the title of the film finally comes on. This has been a “pre-title” sequence, like in a fiction movie, but something documentaries never do. Somehow the routine and the strange have already begun together.
For a time, Manouevre appears to be unusually chronological for a Wiseman film. We’re following this bunch to Germany to watch them test readiness to participate in a NATO defense should it ever be needed. What we see in the movie is a set of simulated war games - a pretend bunch of skirmishes with point keepers and referees. What’s strange about this opening that continues through the rest of the film is that somewhat like the simulation of war the soldiers are engaged in, on one level we’re watching a movie that simulates a war film. On another, it looks eerily reminiscent of the real thing - as we travel through Germany on tanks we could be back in World War II. That’s the strange “manoeuvre” (double meaning again, at least) required as we watch: what’s “real”, what’s a planned simulation, what’s resembling war movies we’re used to. These kinds of levels we might expect in a Resnais film. Even Wiseman isn’t usually this tricky.
A now amusing appearance early in the film is by Alexander Haig, then NATO Supreme Commander and later to be Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State and the guy who proclaimed himself “in charge” after Reagan was shot. He’s one of the generals giving pep talks, and boy do these soldiers get pep talks throughout the film, some sounding like school lectures and others like they’re listening to coaches in a locker room. Wiseman’s general appreciation for institutional jargon gets a real workout here. Crazy naming is the order of the day. I think this year’s event is called something like the Central Region Autumn Forge Series exercise, and is also known as Certain Shield. We’re told previous ones were Reforger and Crested Cap. Why those names, who can say. There are all kinds of nicknames or abbreviations for different battalions of solders and I think for certain weaponry too. Something keeps getting referred to as a Papa Charley, and I have no idea what they’re talking about. I only know that as a brand of Italian beef that started in the Eighties. Disorientation is the general order of the day throughout the movie. When you see tanks firing, you wait to see what they hit, only to realize then that they are fake-firing, since it’s a simulation. They sure look genuine when they fire.
It’s very odd that in a movie about war games, it’s about an hour and ten minutes in before the action begins. Until then, besides all the pep talks, it’s lots of preparation and planning as if we’re going into real battles, or what’s needed to make it look like real battles. Also, the rules of the game, and it’s definitely a game, require much explanation. In all seriousness we’re told by one of the generals that “I hope and pray there is no human life cost here”, (wow!) and that even if there are lives lost, there are "national and alliance benefits" that would still make it worth it (wow again). I think he’s just playing at this being that serious, but you never know. This same guy, he’s described as both the Exercise Director and the Corp Commander, says their goal is that “we are going to seek to reproduce the fog of battle that is such a real factor on any battlefield.” In other words, make the fake or the simulation look like the real thing, as a movie would do.
One level of creepy realism is provided by the real soldiers pretending to go into battle. As they drive their tanks through small German villages on the way to their play sites, it feels eerily close to scenes that would have occurred in towns such as these just thirty-five or so years earlier. One comes right out and says it: “In a way I wish I was one of the soldiers who won World War II”, as he leers at pretty girls by the roadside, even saying how attractive he finds a thirteen-year-old. “I betcha they had it made here in Germany, probably got anything they wanted, probably didn’t have to ask for it either.” Nothing fake during this part, except it maybe makes you feel not so good about what might have gone on here back in the day. There are other encounters with the locals this time that are more on the colorful side - like farmers with cows not wanting their roads wrecked by the tanks as happened the previous year, and reminiscences by a former German POW who was actually glad to have been captured because it meant he got food, something in seriously short supply in Germany at the end of the war. At various points, locals notice what’s going on with degrees of disbelief on their faces, as we well might be doing too.
Because they’ve become such staples in recent decades, it’s surprising how much of Manoeuvre feels like an expensive videogame. That the military has said since Iraq days that videogames are now used in training, the loops between movies, games, simulations, and military exercises all start squishing together. The film is full of intricate arguments about possible differences between what they’re doing and what would happen in a “real” war, and reassurances to the soldiers by their leaders about how close to the real thing they actually are performing. In one great argument with a referee, he gets to spell it out quite well: "This is not a real war, man. Why you think you in a real war? If this was a real war half of this shit that's going on wouldn't even happen. When you was on the road coming here, you'd be dead now. . . . You're telling me if you were in a real war you'd be living?" The soldier he’s arguing with tries to come back with “I’m talking about what we're doing for this exercise. I'm not talking about real life." The unresolvable dispute goes on, which is actually an argument about how they are counting points in order to decide the winner.
As a quick aside here, I keep waiting for a film where I don’t have to bring this up, but there are some serious appearances of songs here, so we’ll have to notice this again. The most amazing is our second Wiseman appearance of a Paul Simon song, as it was Simon And Garfunkel’s “Dangling Conversation” that we heard as poem and song in High School. In Manoeuvre, it’s Simon’s “Slip Slidin’ Away”, so well used it feels like the soundtrack for a war film. Besides expressing a comic disorientation, its most appropriate line is probably “you know the nearer your destination, the more you’re slip slidin’ away”, well describing how often these troops are either lost or having to reroute their attack plans. It also speaks as a more general condition, as Wiseman of course very frequently does. While this one’s the best, it’s certainly not the only song. We even get one performed, just about right away when we land in Germany, at the start of one of the pep talk meetings, when a soldier-singer does a pretty decent version of “We’ve Only Just Begun”, so right with its descriptions of “working together day by day” and “watching the signs along the way”, making war sound like a romantic relationship. Once again, very obviously funny and entirely appropriate. One last crooner is also brilliantly used, a chunk on the radio of a Rod Stewart song called “I Was Only Joking”. Its lyrics on a radio right at the end of the film could not be more fortuitously matched, even beyond the title. First, as a soldier ogles a porn magazine as the military exercise winds down, Rod croons "Now you're asking if I'm guilty. That's a question that I've always dreamed”. And even better, in the very final moments, we see three German civilians watching nearby while a soldier fires his simulation machine gun, and the last words in the film come from the song in an exact match “The crowd don’t understand”. Since Manoeuvre came out the same year as a great war movie famously heavy on the music, Apocalypse Now, we can appreciate the temptation to use more than guns and marching for a movie soundtrack.
From music maybe we should give a quick consideration to some aspects of “show” and media, since that will be big in Model, our seriously-shifting-gears next film. It goes by quickly, but there’s an excellent little bit of video staging in a quick snippet of a news reporter recording a short intro to a tv spot about the military exercises. He records it once, and then tells his cameraman he’s got a better idea. They move over just a bit for a do-over, because the reporter wants to quickly stage it again with some soldiers in the background “so they won’t notice”. We see him do the repeat and then smile in satisfaction at what he’s pulled off. Restaging like this is of course something Wiseman would never do, but Wiseman can film someone else doing it and then leave it to us to sort this out. Filming a re-do on a tv report about a war exercise simulation of an actual war, media awareness is heavy in the air. The entire subject of Manoeuvre is a staged event itself, so our movie’s awareness of levels of pretending and depiction is one of the ways this is anything but a normal documentary about some activity. Our position has to feel ironic and critical, at the same time as we might get caught up in the drama and take it all pretty straight, or as straight as we might any war movie. So many times we’re either led or lulled into feeling like what we’re watching really is about troops in battle like a “normal” war movie would show us, it feels like Wiseman is regularly commenting on how battle is generally depicted. Our position is a step back from that, looking at a show that’s supposed to resemble a real thing, while the film resembles how we’re used to seeing that real thing, in movies and newsreels. Here too, the levels of representation are another part of what the movie is about.
While Manoeuvre starts out looking like it’s going to be pretty linear and chronological, as it winds down, it’s anything but. We are led to believe that a big dramatic conclusion might be in the offing, when in yet another pep talk to the soldiers, their leader says "Tomorrow's the fun day. You've gone through the hard day." He gamely adds “This is where the war stories are made” and then tells them that the next day they should "Maneuver, think, react, execute violently." After that kind of buildup, we can certainly expect a dramatic climax, a chance to see a clear victor. Instead, most of the movie has already happened. We learn from a discussion between two of the officers that real simulated battle (only in this movie could you use a phrase like that) on the last day didn’t take place for logistical reasons. In his recounting he says “All that fight was just played. Just simulated.” In other words, the soldiers didn’t actually get to simulate doing it, instead their superiors described to themselves without them what would have happened. "It's just that the book came out that way. We would have done it correctly." That’s how he puts it, but then goes on to say that the troops should still know "They didn't do anything wrong. It's just the play of the game." So the play of the game was not to play the game, I guess.
In keeping with this sort of weird logic, Wiseman does not tie a neat bow on things. Given how decisively the film begins with the start of the trip from their base in America, we might well have expected a return flight. Instead, we feel somewhat stranded, left in the midst of an inconclusive simulation with our narrative bearings unmoored. As both Canal Zone and Sinai Field Mission (and Basic Training well before it) all ended with military ceremonies, we certainly could have expected one here too, especially given how many such situations have already taken place here. We’re stranded that way too, left with soldiers ogling girlie magazines following strange radio tidbits about cloning and life expectancy after divorce - near surrealism rather than dramatic resolution. As the third of these three films of Americans in foreign lands, and like the real war which wound down a few short years before this film, we must feel anything less than triumphant. For these soldiers, that would be a difficult manoeuvre indeed.