Let’s start with “figuring out”, a key process in Wiseman films, as so often scenes start without our knowing what’s going on. This is a good thing, I’d say. As a cinematic strategy, it seems so much better than knowing right away the “reason” we’re watching what we’re seeing. It also seems closer to the real world, where we don’t know what will happen until it happens. Also, we may wind up in an unexpected direction, not going where we think we were. It can feel a bit disorienting or unsettling at times, because there might be a lot we just don’t know, but what’s important is that eventually it feels like there was a logic at work, with the emphasis upon eventually. We need retrospectively to feel like it was worthwhile to see what we did, that there was an overall logic to the pieces. That comes once the film is over. It doesn’t have to be there at all times while we’re watching.
We can take the beginning of Sinai Field Mission as an example. We get a fairly arty opening, a car driving down an isolated desert road, with the occasional pan from what looks like bombed out wreckage on the side of the road to show the car go by. There’s even a couple of grazing camels. A man steps out of a car and picks a spot in the sand, where he digs out some electronic equipment. It looks like he checks a couple of batteries with equipment he’s carrying, and then he buries them again. He carefully sweeps sand back over the spot in order to make it smooth. What’s he doing? We have no idea. So far, there’s been no dialog. We then see a different guy driving down that road who stops to speak with some soldiers and has a little trouble communicating owing to some language problems (a not unusual Wiseman situation). When he explains he's counting trucks to keep track of what the sensors on the side of the road will record, then we can understand the previous scene. (When he drives off we see “SFM” on the side of his car, which we figure out too given the film’s title.) We now maybe don’t know why one would use sensors to do this or why trucks need to be counted, and this will take several more scenes later to fill in, when the mission of monitoring the buffer zone is explained. But the point is, we can pull the connections together, and there’s a logic that gets us from place to place. That’s part of what makes the films so great - what likely preoccupies Wiseman in the year or so he works to put them together. Again, it’s not usually a chronology or following a single character. It’s usually a logic of ideas.
In this case of the opening, it’s not hard to see these connections, but the point is, elsewhere in Wiseman’s films it may be a lot more difficult. But it’s still a certain method or style that we can come to appreciate. I’d say Sinai Field Mission would be an excellent entry point to Wiseman’s work, a kind of Wiseman 101. I’d liken it to say, Strangers on a Train among Hitchcock films - a fine work in its own right but maybe not as challenging or complex as a Vertigo or a Rear Window. Still, it’s full of rewards, and if it’s the twelfth we’re watching, it has that enjoyable feel of extending from earlier work in recognizable ways and still trying some new things, something I have the feeling I'll be saying more than once as we go along.
One enjoyable thing about it is how cinematic it is. It really takes advantage of its desert location and while it’s not Lawrence of Arabia, its visual inventiveness is richly in evidence. I’ve already mentioned the bombed-out wreckage and the camels at the start, and we get lots of inventive expressions of the isolation and beauty of the desert. There are at least a couple of slow pans in the 180-degree range showing the emptiness of the area, and we keep getting sharp angles up to the small building on a hill where the Mission operates. There are a few isolated viewing spots, and we’ll observe the sentries with binoculars watching the expanses in front of them from their lonely outposts. And when we get a party scene, it will be visually engaging too - a boot passed around everyone’s drinking beer from, lots of singing, and a lone couple dancing in the background. And of course the film must end with a military parade, this time with elaborate choreography in the large group of marching soldiers, the camera sometimes so close that the soldiers moving by are just abstract patterns. And the final shot is really well done - the soldiers march by, and the camera does a slow movement in on a desert vista one last time. It’s just pleasant to watch Wiseman flexing some cinematic muscles. (And since this is a few years (six) after a fiction film about Americans in a remote place, Altman’s M*A*S*H, with the TV show in full swing at the time of Sinai Field Mission, there’s a clear shout-out with the frequent P.A. system cryptic announcements - “Mr. Hunt, please call 201” and the like.)
I’m not going to do a favorite scenes thing here or explain much of what’s going on, but maybe we can start with some similarities to his previous film, Canal Zone, made easier for me because I just watched it two days ago. Like Canal Zone, Sinai Field Mission is very economical in getting the basics across in its first few minutes (maybe like fifteen or twenty, as in that film too). We have a convenient group of visitors (some Israeli soldiers) receiving an explanation from a Mission person, standing for a while even in front of a large map filling us in on what their purpose is for being there. Like Canal Zone, we’ve got a bunch of Americans far away (later one will sing a song called “7,000 Miles from Home"), but now there are no families and no cities, just some government personnel and contractors. (A total of 163 we’re told.) I think we should marvel at Wiseman’s smartness in seeing the possibilities in this situation, as it’s far from obvious that there would be a film in this. But a film there certainly is, and while I may emphasize some of the quirkier goings on, much of what we watch is solid Wiseman fare - it’s practically a bureaucratic nerd’s heaven - lots of scenes about following rules and who has jurisdiction and how do we resolve thorny problems. It’s not Welfare, but there are plenty of people sitting at desks arguing through the facts of a situation. The real set piece is late in the film when a wounded Israeli soldier needs to be evacuated by helicopter, and all the complexities of the Mission seem to be called into play - needing approval first by the UN Authorities (who are separate from the Mission), the informing of the Egyptians of the unexpected helicopter, and decisions first about who does what in the process. Besides detailing these steps, there’s some drama because one of our people objects to the delays which include having to send a teletype rather than make a phone call ("Meanwhile the guy's bleeding to death”). There’s a fairly heated internal argument, and Wiseman has to film a part of it through partly opened office window slats, another quite cinematic sequence. It’s got those mounting levels of complexity and issues of rebelling against procedure that are like Wiseman signature scenes. This is far from the only one, but you get the idea hopefully.
Just for a bit more Canal Zone comparison, holidays figure big again, partly because they bring out the real American-ness of the group - the big one in Canal Zone of course was Memorial Day with an earlier Law Day (whatever that was) thrown in too. Here it’s a big Thanksgiving, and then a Fourth of July party. The Thanksgiving starts in that “figuring out” Wiseman way, with our watching a bunch of food unloaded from a truck. Then we see a large kitchen where food is being prepared, and the cook starts opening an industrial size can of cranberry sauce. Our clues mount up as he works on a tray with corn in it, and finally we see some roast turkeys and we’ve probably done our pleasurable figuring out that we’ve got a holiday meal in store. (We’ll get to the fun evening at that Fourth of July thing in just a bit.) And I think another Canal Zone counterpart is our somewhat nutty preacher or at least leader of a little bible study group (four other men at a card table in a big empty room), who makes his God talk be mainly about loneliness (which he says “has its benefits” because you can get closer to God as a result). Recall that in Canal Zone the long sermon was about marriage, clearly a substantial issue explored in that film. Our guy here sounds a little out there when he tells his small group that the way to start praying is to “begin by telling Him, very plainly, we know we're stinkeroos”, and that’s when we know he could have moved to Panama and been right at home. Americans in far off places look to God in unusual ways - ways that sound more like self-help than religious observance. I forget if Maneouvre does the same, but I’ll be watching for it tomorrow.
I think it’s fair to say that Sinai Field Mission is loaded with music, so overtly and explicitly that it becomes humorous. We can now expect it based on our earlier discussions, but there’s nothing about being in the middle of nowhere that would have made this likely. I especially marvel at how often Wiseman gives us complete songs, upsetting what might be documentary expectations that we’d just catch snippets, making them either bizarre respites or overt didacticism or maybe sometimes both. Our first taste is on Thanksgiving evening after the meal when they start relaxing, and we get a full rendition of the song "Southern Nights”. (It’s not the excellent version by its author Allen Toussaint, but whatever is on the juke box they’re stuck with.) As I said, we hear the whole thing, as we watch recreational activities. Besides the song evoking home for a bunch of them, there’s a great line - “Wish I could stop this world from fighting” - which I deeply believe is why we hear it - one of those moments Wiseman is quite sharp at catching, as this is the whole purpose of the Mission. It’s equally as overt at a later party when a group of Texans have banded together to drink lots of beer from a cowboy boot and then sing the song “The Eyes of Texas”, even singing the lines "The eyes of Texas are upon you. . . You cannot get away" twice. It’s a curious song, since surveillance is a main part of what they’re doing here, and if we don’t quite get their meaning, one of the drunken rowdies even says as the song concludes "That goes for Israel and Egypt too”. Like they say, you can’t write this stuff. But you do have to be smart enough when you film it to know what you’ve captured.
When the Fourth of July festivities start, we don’t know it’s a holiday event. What we’re thrown into is a live country show, some personnel we’ve already seen in a group singing "That Good Ol' Mountain Dew”, a very appropriate song given the large amount of heavy drinking we see in the film. It’s followed by a song Wiseman must have loved, a solo ditty sung quite nicely by one of the women called “Mama Picked a Loser Again” which is a tale in some detail about placing a bet on a horse. It’s almost like he’s thinking that “Racetrack” is just a few films into the future. Our third song I mentioned already, one of the officers we’ve seen a lot of singing a song clearly of his own creation, including the lines “We are lost and lonely in this desert land, without wives or sweethearts close at hand . . . And we're 7,000 miles away from home." He also gets to sing this while sitting in front of a large American flag pinned to the wall. Completely on point, it’s a full song (the third of that evening) describing the travails of their situation. Like I said, we’ve got a real musical going here, a topical and appropriate one.
Singing, shows, and partying are just some of the recreational activities, and maybe I should have mentioned this earlier in our brief Canal Zone comparison, as it was another film very interested in how remote Americans filled their days with a variety of sports and entertainments. I’ll just quickly reel off the huge variety, as the film shows a lot of interest in what this group does to fill their lonely non-working time. Here goes: ping pong, pool, foosball, darts, reading newspapers and napping on a couch, practicing drums, playing Pong (came out in ’72, so still fairly novel), watching a belly dancer video (we get shots of the screen too of the woman dancing - held for quite a long time), playing poker for fairly big stakes, touch football, darts, drinking at an in-house bar (“I enjoy it a great deal”), sunning yourself in a chair (no swimming pool nearby), jogging, playing baseball (just the Americans - 5 Ghanaians with the UN stand and watch through a fence), a weight and exercise room, a sauna (which you wouldn’t think would be so enjoyable in a desert), a mention of nightly bingo games (we already saw one at length in Canal Zone, so only spoken of here and not shown), a great bit of archery, and a lone basketball player. I’ve probably missed a few, but you get the idea. It’s an isolated place, and you get your kicks how you can. Wiseman seems to take a special pleasure in cataloging the variety.
I’ve been pretty selective on this one, but I hope I’ve left the impression that there’s quite a lot here for a film that I don’t think gets the attention it merits. I’ll end with another encouragement to watch for the end credits every time. Here we’ve got a couple of amusing gags easy not to catch. Rather than the customary Wiseman font, watch for the Middle Eastern style font that’s used, as the military music of the closing scene plays in the distance. Then if you’ve watched your credits well in earlier Wiseman’s, you might have noticed the frequent credit of Oliver Kool, whose name is there I think as either Camera Assistant or Assistant Director in a number of films. Here the Camera Assistant credit goes to Ali Kul, presumably the same guy. After all that time in the desert, they deserve their fun.