From: frissell@panix.com
Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 10:40:31 +0800
To: Hallam-Baker <hallam@ai.mit.edu>
Subject: Waco
In-Reply-To: <3.0.2.32.19970604165830.0078e268@panix.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.2.32.19970604222321.006f3c90@panix.com>
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Phil,

Look, I know you're somewhat anti-private guns and somewhat anti-Right Wing 
Nuts.  I can understand all that.  I'm somewhat anti-government guns and 
somewhat anti-Left Wing Nuts myself. 

So don't take the word of right wing nuts on WACO.  Pay attention to former 
Attorney General Ramsey Clark as he sues the Feds on behalf of the survivors.

Or read the review of the new documentary WACO: THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT which 
premiered at Sundance.  

http://www.waco93.com/

http://www.waco93.com/sfbgreview.htm

San Francisco Bay Guardian March 12, 1997  (SF's Alternative Weekly)

Rewinding Waco

New doc Waco turns heads, hearts. By Susan Gerhard

"I've always voted Democrat," William Gazecki, director of crowd-displeaser 
Waco: The Rules of Engagement, told me over the phone last week. "But at this 
point, all the lines are crossing in my mind."

Ours, too. One of the most achingly sad documentaries I can remember, 
Gazecki's film sounds, on paper, more like a morning with Rush Limbaugh than 
like an evening screening at the Roxie (where it got its first theatrical run, 
last week). In Waco's world the gun "nuts" are sane, the conservatives are 
honest, the liberals are pigs, the children are in danger. The doc left even 
slackers in Roxie's rep house stunned, their ideologies scrambled and their 
consciences scarred by a slow-motion,two-hour-plus replay of the slaughter of 
a peaceful sect.

How can a jury look at the Rodney King videotape and not see a police beating? 
The same way the American people can look at the Waco inferno and see a mass 
suicide.

A radical reframing suited up in pin-striped documentary garb, The Rules of 
Engagement mixes footage that's already been heavily digested by interested 
parties: Waco in flames, forward- looking infrared (FLIR) imagery seen by 
Congress, CSPAN's coverage of the Waco hearings, David Koresh's pleas, Janet 
Reno's testimony. But this film adds to that tabloid mix some desperate 911 
calls by Branch Davidians, sections of the negotiation tapes that offer a 
dismal perspective on FBI attempts to come to a truce, the Davidians' footage 
and that of the FBI agents (a SWAT teamster jokes about being "honed to kill," 
while Davidians inside calmly express fear for their lives). Most crucially, 
the soundtrack lays new emotional cues over old footage (a Third Reichian 
drumbeat as federal agents approach, heavy-metal guitar tangle as tanks crash 
into the building). And in case anyone's sympathy for the Davidians was 
lagging, the film also has witnesses noting that armed federal agents killed 
their Alaskan malamute.


**********

Showing at

THE COOLIDGE CORNER
    Brookline, MA

    Showing daily 
    June 27 - July 4


DCF
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