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Weekend Australian, Melbourne December 19-20, 1998
Engaging With Waco Saga
Waco: The Rules of Engagement is essential viewing for anyone who has only a dim, media-fed mem-on/of the gruesome events surrounding David Koresh, the Branch Davidians and the FBI at Waco, Texas in 1993. In the public imagination, this spectacular siege has blended into the Jonestown massacre and similar cases where a crazed "cult leader" leads his hypnotised followers to their untimely doom. The fact that it all ended in an apocalyptic fire seems merely to cap off the madness of such religious "extremism". Director William Gazecki and producer Dan Giffordâs painstakingly assembled documentary digs under the handy cover of this mythology. What official inquiries into the incident tended to cover up was the extent of the aggressive, military-style tactics used first by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and then the FBI against the Davidians. Time and again, Gazecki juxtaposes the blank denials of FBI agents --"we didn't fire a shot' -- with clear evidence that they did. In its early stages, the film gives us a careful history of the Davidian movement, which was a breakaway from the Seventh Day Adventists. Intimate, candid video footage taken inside the Waco compound shows Koresh's classes, the testimonies of his followers, and various harmless-seeming aspects of the group's lifestyle. The Davidians' "stockpile of weaponry", which the FBI emphasised, is explained in less sinister terms. Gazecki accentuates the positive in his portrayal of the victims -- politely skipping over a potentially harsher, investigative approach. The film unashamedly takes a side -- and it has big fish to fry. Recalling the method of such radical, political documenatries as Emile de Antonio's Point of Order (1963), Gazecki takes 136 minutes to trawl through both a re-creation of events and the subsequent proceedings in court, in a relentlessly linear, fact-by-fact manner. This gives it a grueling, "slow-burn" effect that is almost Biblical in its revelatory force. What emerges, ultimately, is not so much proof of any law-enforcement conspiracy, as a monumental portrait of how the exercise of state power in flashpoint situations can so quickly slide into a mire of irrationality, prejudice and violence. The film gathers an astonishing array of audio-visual materials- from news items and home movies to court footage and scientific, aerial shots of the Waco siege, not forgetting the crucial tape recordings off a telephone emergency line. The film maker's own collection of interviews with various experts and witnesses is the least revealing material of all -- except for the long sequence, worthy of' Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), in which a Dr. Edward Allard leads us to see the truth hidden in blurry flashes of "night-vision" footage. Every documentary these days is fated to bring forth charges of bias, selective focus and emotive persuasion. Waco: Rules of Engagement, whatever its flaws or holes as a thesis, is a considerable achievement as reportage, and as coolly "objective" as it can possibly be. The case itself is inherently fascinating, and many will find Gazecki's presentation of it riveting. Judged as a film, however, this doco is a hard slog. Alas, one can only dream of the montage that a more imaginative documentarian such as Errol Morris (Fast, Cheap and Out of Control) could have made.
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