In 1991 Reed Paget was huddled in a dark hotel room in Israel with ten strangers, waiting for Iraqi bombs to fall. Paget wore a gas mask and held a 16-millimeter camera. In the accompanying narration to this climactic scene of his documentary Amerikan Passport, he confesses, “I’ve never felt more alive.”
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Amerikan Passport, which opens the Chicago Underground Film Festival on Friday, is part adventure travelogue, part polemic, part analysis of man’s bloodthirsty nature. Paget quickly found he had a knack for being at the scene of momentous historical events: Tiananmen Square, the fall of the Berlin Wall, apartheid violence in South Africa, the American invasion of Panama. In three years of travel, Paget traveled across five continents and 12 war zones, shedding his youthful idealism in the process. Yet the film is often funny, the violence interrupted by encounters with such disparate characters as Nelson Mandela, televangelist Robert Tilton, globe-trotting heiress Stephanie DuPont, whiskey-swilling Cambodian soldiers, and Bianca Jagger. Overlaid with Paget’s narrative, the result is a juiced-up road movie modeled after Ross McElwee’s idiosyncratic documentary Sherman’s March.
As Paget worked to bring the narrative threads together–charming romance, hard-core diatribe, backpackers’ guide to tourist-free locales (tip: go to countries known for land mines)–he struggled to make sense of his own politics, which drifted toward the center. “Maybe instead of seeing the cold war as an either-or question–America’s either exploiting the third world or saving it from communism–it’s both,” he says. He uses interviews with citizens of the former Soviet Union to defend his ideological shift, but he still feels unsure about it. “Maybe there is no clear right answer….We have to deal with that murky, ambiguous, paradoxical, problematic reality.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
