Erase and Forget

Erase and Forget is an inquiry into the nature of human conscience and the limits of deniability. It premiered at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Glashuette most original documentary award.

Charting ‘the deep bonds between Hollywood’s fictionalized conflicts and America’s hidden wars’, Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s ERASE AND FORGET is a new investigative documentary which charts the extraordinary life and times of Bo Gritz, one of America’s highest decorated veterans and the ‘inspiration’ for Rambo and Brando’s Colonel Kurtz.

Using never before seen archive footage of covert US operations, and interviews filmed over a ten year period, ERASE AND FORGET provides a complex perspective of an individual and a country in crisis.

ERASE AND FORGET is a compelling inquiry into the nature of human conscience which raises urgent questions about US militarism and gun control, and embodies contemporary American society in all its dizzying complexity and contradictions.

Erase and Forget was long-listed for BIFA new talent emerging producer award, with Ameenah Ayub Allen, 2018 / Nominated for Glashuette original documentary award, Berlin Film festival, 2017 /Platinum Reel Award, Nevada International Film Festival, 2018 / Semi finalist, best documentary Hot Springs Womens film festival, 2018 / Spotlight Documentary Film awards, 2017

Erase and Forget was screened at Spring Sessions in Wadi Rum, in Jordan (http://www.springsessions.org/happenings/announcement244?edition=edition2019-en) and in a special session at Goethe Institut Ramallah, including discussion with the director (https://www.events.ps/en/Events/1086/Screening-and-discussion-with-the-director-of-Erase--Forget).

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DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT:
“You already know enough. So do I. It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and to draw conclusions.” Sven Lindqvist, from ‘Exterminate All The Brutes’

I chose to work with Bo over ten years because I needed to understand how he was part of history (as much as what history). I am fascinated by profound questions of responsibility – on the part of ourselves and others. There can be no moral high ground or hierarchy if we are genuinely seeking to understand extreme behaviour. We are part of a system that makes enormous profits out of structural and political violence. Bo is really a witness to the excesses of the military-industrial complex. I wanted to explore how a highly intelligent man came to believe, through cultural and social conditioning, that killing in such a way and on such a scale might be perceived as virtuous. My years with Bo recorded his reflections on life before, during and after his time as ‘the real Rambo – the American Warrior’- when the reasons for transgressing these boundaries had shifted.

Bo is a man of a thousand faces. His is a public life lived in the media age. It is a life made from fragments, from different positions, both politically and in terms of their mediation. His life is contradictory and assembled from all these shards. There is no single ‘right’ life or reading of his public activities.

My portrait of Bo is drawn mainly from original material, which I shot over ten years, but it also includes found footage from the world’s first truly public archive – the global online media bank, scattered across numerous platforms.

My structural approach is instinctual, distinctive, and formally rigorous articulated in tightly selected montages – each emotional unfolding is countered with a denial of feeling, hence producing a confliction emotional experience, truer the creative maladjustment necessary when grappling with structural and political violence and their spectacular representations through Hollywood (dominant) cinema. While working with a broadly chronological, autobiographical narrative, I also operate associatively, tracking parallels and seeking echoes and refrains of action and reflection across the decades of Bo’s diverse military, political and social experiences.

The exploration of this complex and constantly changing relationship between event and image is one of my key intentions in and for the film. When contentious ideas and actions enter this social mediated space, all too often crude binaries (of action and reaction, right and wrong, etc…) are created. These are, as is evident across the world today, extremely dangerous. I see my film being in creative dialogue with Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate all the Brutes, a seminal work exploring the origins of totalitarian thinking.

The film is an inquiry into the nature of human conscience and the limits of deniability. Over the course of a decade of filming, it became clear that the focus must be Bo’s own relationship with his public image, activities and response (underpinned by the known and covert activities of his military career).

Director’s Statement on the Relationship with Cinema:
Hollywood’s Ghosts

Fiction creates reality. Hollywood and political structures in the United States are tightly knit. On a material level, there are exchanges of personnel and funds. Hollywood regularly employs (often retired) covert operators and military staff as advisers and the story rights of military operations often become the properties of major studios. Whereas the purchase of such rights is, by definition, often after the fact, on occasion funding precedes the event. For instance, a covert prisoner-of-war recovery mission led by Bo Gritz was in part financed by Clint Eastwood in return for a possible option on the story. It is variously claimed, that Bo is the soldier who the Rambo series is modelled on.

The flow of funds from Hollywood to the military is not exclusive. The Pentagon contributes by providing army assistance (military advisers, helicopters, use of bases, etc…) to productions that it deems supportive of US policy. Such films inform climates of public opinion within which policy operates. They open imaginative spaces and arenas of ethical consideration in which certain kinds of military operations are validated. Furthermore, Hollywood cinema serves as a curious, discursive space for policy makers (and thus for speechwriters as well as scriptwriters). Ronald Reagan, on numerous occasions, publicly drew on the Rambo series to articulate his foreign policy vision and promote his political aspirations:

“After seeing Rambo last night, I know what to do next time this happens.” [Ronald Reagan, 1985]

Where Reagan at times dipped into the movies to illustrate an argument, Bo is produced as if he were a movie star, by both the media and by his own public performances. On January 31st, 1983, CBS News described Bo’s foray into Laos as “the stuff from which movies are made…a case of life imitating art”. The inadvertently implied elision of difference between ‘life’ and ‘art’ in this strictly nonsensical news-speak is telling. Does the above mean that ‘this mission is a model for movies that this mission is modelled on’?
Touring the country for his own presidential campaign, Bo is hailed on national television as the ‘real-life Rambo’ as well as the “model for the real life Rambo”.

The description of Bo as a mythical figure has been drawn in terms of another such character: Colonel Kurtz. A journalist on Nevada Regional news, declared that Bo is “[…] the mythical Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now…”. It was not just the news media however, that tried to fuse Bo with the ‘mythical’ Colonel Kurtz. In 1975, Francis Ford Coppola’s production company approached Bo during the making of Apocalypse Now to ask for permission to superimpose Marlon Brando’s face over Bo’s. As Bo explains, “he wanted to use the photograph in General William C. Westmoreland’s book showing me with Nurse Toi kneeling in front of a lot of really mean-looking Cambodian mercenaries as the headliner for his new movie. Colonel Kurtz was commanding a Cambodian army and I was Major Gritz, and I did command a Cambodian army. Matter of fact I was the first to do so”.

What does it mean that Bo so eagerly figures himself as the man who inspired these representations? After all, he is not unaware of the fact that Coppola’s Kurtz and indeed, the entire plot of Apocalypse Now, is taken from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and set in the context of the Indochinese war. Rather, Bo’s suggestion that ‘Kurtz’ is a play on ‘Gritz’ not only indicates a desire to project himself as famous and infamous, it also points to a willingness to perform his own history, including that of his covert operations, in accordance with the conventions of Hollywood cinema.

Bo’s willingness to perform according to a ‘script’ (both inspired by Hollywood and subsequently itself adapted and produced by Hollywood in a feedback loop between the silver screen and covert policy) gives the POW ‘production’ an actual star – a star who becomes a simulacum of the Hollywood characters and vice versa. Bo’s authenticity is produced not only by his own insistence that he is the basis for his Hollywood avatars, but equally by his parallel insistence that he has no interest in these figures or, as he dismissively puts it, ‘Hollyweird’ and its ‘play acting’. This denial, by masking his desire to identify himself as the ‘original’, therefore makes his identification more plausible, precisely by producing him as ‘the real thing’.

The chicken comes back to roost

Rambo III was released in 1988. The film ends with a dedication printed over its final scene: ‘This film is dedicated to the gallant people of Afghanistan’. At the time of its release, the Reagan administration’s covert funding for operations in Afghanistan was at its highest. The film premiered as President Gorbachev announced the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, a policy decision that was welcomed by none more than the marketing team working on Rambo III. The film rode the wave of euphoria for US political and military ‘success’. This was, then, a historical context which enabled the film’s hero to be figured – both by the film’s marketing team and, indeed, by audiences, who read the film in the social and discursive context of the times – as individually responsible for the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan.

There is another, utterly un-distributed film that stands as testimony to the Reagan government’s dedication to the ‘gallant people of Afghanistan’. Untitled and shot on Super 8 Sound film in the autumn of 1986, it is the record of a secret training program for Afghan Mujahedeen on US soil. Bo claims that the training program was initiated by the National Security Council (NSC) under the direction of State Department official William Bode and that the funding was allegedly channelled through Stanford Technology, a CIA front-company.

Spectres

Bo was part of a world where deniability lies at the forefront of action on the uncertain line between knowing and unknowing (post-truth before the event …). The spectral nature of covert operations resides in their being officially, ‘neither confirmed, nor denied’. Thus the spectral is produced by official discourse, but admissible to it only as that which cannot be admitted. However, rather than being a product of official denial, it is a product of ‘deniability’. This involves not the denial of a particular event, but the denying of official authorisation of an event. Dislocating action and intention, cause and effect, creates a shadow realm from which strategic operations march forward like zombies. An operation appears to have been carried out in the absence of an originating order. The action is spectral in as much as it seems to escape the laws of causality that govern the rest of the world – it is an effect without identifiable cause.

A methodology of making

This led me to develop a film making approach through which I have tried to understand the person within this context of visibility and invisibility – between deniable reality and fiction. There is a curious symmetry between the careers of Reagan and Bo. On the one hand there is the actor turned politician, who became President and imagined he’d been a soldier; and on the other there is the soldier who would have been President, who flirted with the movies and now defines himself as ‘real’ in contra-distinction to them. The relationship between Bo and the President he served has surely been subject to Bo’s mythologizing autobiographical imagination. Nonetheless, the speculative discursive space that has opened around the relationship (in biographies and autobiographies, in news reports and internet conspiracy sites) has effected a conflation of political drama and movies, of covert operator (whose modus operandi is disguise, dissemblance, subterfuge) and movie actor. And so, focusing on such a figure as Bo, has allowed me to trace a series of discursive and imaginary movements that issue not so much into an exchange between domains, as a conflation of domains. Bo seems to induce a certain ontological confusion, a collapse of fiction and history, biography and popular myth, which is not restricted to his own imagination. It is a confusion that the media are happy to propagate (this is so for his detractors as well as his champions, for the major news channels and fringe internet conspiracy blogs alike). And how timely for our times this is…

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‘..like a Lynchian nightmare of right-wing America.’ Total Film ★★★★

‘The film is so loopy you end up like Laocoön, wreathed by serpents of paradox and contradiction.’ Financial Times ★★★★

‘Zimmermann marshals her material…with relentlessly thought-provoking confidence.’ Empire ★★★★

‘An especially probing portrait of a wounded man and his role in the fetishisation of state-sanctioned violence.’ Time Out ★★★★

‘This illuminating portrait of a rather broken champion is enriched by extraordinary archive footage.’ Filmuforia ★★★★

‘Gripping and jaw-dropping, it’s a documentary that needs to be seen to be believed.’ Morning Star ★★★★

‘Bo’s nonchalance when talking about his behaviour in countries such as Panama makes your jaw drop. An education.’ EVENING STANDARD

‘This is a new way to make a documentary, exploiting the bountiful public record of the Internet age.’ Variety

…like a Lynchian nightmare of right-wing America.
Tim Coleman, Total Film

Erase and Forget reflects the kind of ideological instability that has contributed to the US's surreal political moment.
Jessica Loudis, Frieze

ERASE AND FORGET explores ‘the deep bonds between Hollywood’s fictionalized conflicts and America’s hidden wars’ through a complex portrayal of US soldier, whistle-blower and ex-presidential candidate Bo Gritz, taking us to a world before President Trump.

One of America’s highest decorated veterans, the ‘inspiration’ behind RAMBO, Colonel John 'Hannibal' Smith (THE A-TEAM) and Brando’s Colonel Kurtz (APOCALYPSE NOW), Gritz was at the heart of American military and foreign policy – both overt and covert – from the Bay of Pigs to Afghanistan, before turning whistle-blower and launching anti-government training programmes.

Today he lives in the Nevada desert where he once secretly trained Afghan Mujahedeen, is loved by his community and still admired as a hero figure by white supremacists for his role in the Ruby Ridge siege of 1992. This event was a key turning point in the rise of the far right and militia anti-Government groups in the US.

Filmed over ten years, Zimmerman’s film is an artist's perspective of an individual and a country in crisis, which raises urgent questions about US militarism and gun control. Deploying confessional and exploratory interviews, news and cultural footage, creative re-enactment and previously unseen archive material, ERASE AND FORGET explores the implications on a personal and collective level of identities founded on a profound, even endemic violence. It examines the propagation of that violence through Hollywood and the mass media, the arms trade and ongoing governmental policy.

Revealing the filmmaker’s own nuanced relationship with a controversial subject, without judgment and sensationalism, ERASE AND FORGET proposes a multi-layered investigation of war as a social structure, a way of being for individuals and countries in what is becoming an era of ‘permanent conflict’.

UK general release, spring 2018

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