Synopsis
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Playing Soldier weaves together the stories of people for whom “history is a personal thing” and war is an obsession. Their stories speak to the heart of what it is to be human and the need to find meaning in the worst of human experience. The subtly absurdist documentary film follows the exploits and foibles of six WWII reenactors, weaving together dissonant themes that point towards a collective search for meaning. It is an intimate look into a small, yet significant, American sub-culture that tens of thousands of Americans participate in each year. It portrays personal dramas that are echoed in national conversations on subjects like "the importance of collective truth". Focussing mostly on the internal struggles of each character, the movie does not paint the characters as villains or heroes but rather as human beings with varying degrees of flaws. Some flaws are inconsequential, some are large & glaring. |
Playing Soldier 1080P widescreen
If you were the star of your own film, with history as your script, who would you play? What character would you be? PLAYING SOLDIER follows the intersecting lives of World War II reenactors who claim that “history is a personal thing”. PLAYING SOLDIER follows the intersecting stories of six reenactors who come from very different backgrounds and with conflicting motivations. It also shows how, through reenacting, the stories that people tell are as much or more about themselves as they are about history.
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Layla Aldredge
Linda and John Anderson
JJ Bauer and Scott Marlow
A. William (Bill) Beam
William (Bill) Bethke
Aadra Bhatt and Marc Weinberg
Stephanie Brown
Robert (Bob) Buck
Joy Cox
Carlos (Tony) Garcia
Greg Gendron
Sharon Halperin
Susan Harbage-Page
Jim Haverkamp
Troy LaFaye
Carol Magee
Judy Mitchell
Jay Miller
Tricia Maloney
Noralita
Sonoe Nakasone
Casey Pearcy
John Pearson
Lily and Michael Pregill
Madeline Schreiber and Blaine Keesee
Carole Schultes
Diana Simonson
Vanessa Soleil
Martha Sullivan
Janelle and Rob Taylor
John Veglak
Anonymous Donor
Anonymous Donor
Anonymous Donor
Layla Aldredge
Linda and John Anderson
JJ Bauer and Scott Marlow
A. William (Bill) Beam
William (Bill) Bethke
Aadra Bhatt and Marc Weinberg
Stephanie Brown
Robert (Bob) Buck
Joy Cox
Carlos (Tony) Garcia
Greg Gendron
Sharon Halperin
Susan Harbage-Page
Jim Haverkamp
Troy LaFaye
Carol Magee
Judy Mitchell
Jay Miller
Tricia Maloney
Noralita
Sonoe Nakasone
Casey Pearcy
John Pearson
Lily and Michael Pregill
Madeline Schreiber and Blaine Keesee
Carole Schultes
Diana Simonson
Vanessa Soleil
Martha Sullivan
Janelle and Rob Taylor
John Veglak
NEWS
November 19th, 2019
In a corner room on the second floor of his house, Ed Gendron was getting ready for a busy November, his attention divided between current filmmaking projects and a finished one. Playing Soldier, his documentary about World War II reenactors, would soon be shown at the Yonkers Film Festival, its first public screening outside of New Haven. Meanwhile, prints from Reenactor Moment, the photo series that began his immersion in the world of battle reenactment, were about to be shown at Yale West Campus for City-Wide Open Studios Alternative Space Weekend.
“Right now I’m in the advertising stage of everything… Putting out things to get my art show seen. Putting out things to get butts in seats at the movie theater. I need to make a flyer, or I need to put out another Instagram post. Social media is its own juggling act,” Gendron says. He turns to open the Playing Soldier promo file folder on one monitor, demonstrating the minutiae of the promotional effort, cycling through variations of digital flyers that feature images from the project. Men and women in historically accurate Allied—and Axis—uniform provide an arresting visual, posed against a recognizably American backdrop. And in one of his composites, an arm sleeved in army green mock-flies a model World War II bomber—which perhaps even better captures the obsessive spirit of historical reenactment.
On the other monitor, a bird’s eye illustration of a golf cart sits on a field of red and, superimposed, a very rough head-and-shoulders close-up of a man holding what Gendron reveals to be a Solo cup. It’s a tantalizingly incomplete glimpse of a new project, and I happened to arrive on a day Gendron had set aside for new projects. “I try to compartmentalize as much as I can. I’ll put them in a pile and go, ‘Tuesday, that’s what I’m doing.’ Social media stuff. ‘And Wednesday I’m going to draw and try to get some of this done.’” He hits a key, and, in a few frames, the golf cart begins to traverse the field. It’s an animatic, a moving sketch of an animated sequence that will one day nest inside a live-action documentary about a musician he’s not yet at liberty to name. It was at NHDocs 2019—a.k.a. the 2019 New Haven Documentary Film Festival, where he had screened Playing Soldier with an animated preface—that Gendron was approached for this commission. Film festivals that make independent work visible also provide unexpected opportunities to keep working, which is why Gendron’s social media stuff gets a whole Tuesday. Gendron adds with a shrug, “It’s part of the process to actually put it out there and have somebody experience it.”
This is especially true of a creation process that lasts for years, as Playing Soldier did. In the span of a decade, Gendron drove up and down the East Coast to attend 20 or 30 reenactments, which typically happen annually and take up entire weekends. From there, characters emerged who warranted further exploration, including a family who would arrive in vintage clothes and yellow badges of the kind German Jews were compelled to wear in 1938. “This family would just show up,” Gendron says, “and just walking through was in itself… kind of poking the bear a little bit.” Gendron sporadically encountered Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers at the events, but reactions to the family walk-throughs also varied among reenactors who were in it solely for the military hardware. “I was just standing there with my hands in my pockets,” Gendron recalls, “and I saw them walk by and it took me a minute to register, and I ran into the tent, got my camera in the dark, and off I go to chase them down.” The film also features a Jewish woman who attends reenactments as Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Gendron, sympathetic to my bemusement, says, “That was a big part of [the film]. Why do these people want to do it? Because the answer’s not always going to be there at the event.”
Gendron’s process was also a matter of unusual professional immersion. The “reenactor moment” after which the photo collection is named is the “little piece in time, very short and fleeting,” when reenactors come to believe they are soldiers fighting in a European field and not mustering in a municipal park. “There’s always a lot of effort to suppress the present,” Gendron notes. “I’ve seen people go as far as to build elaborate shells that will go around a stop sign and make it look like a concrete sign from France in the 1940s.” Gendron adopted their methods to make himself a part of the environment. He built a replica of a newsreel camera and placed his contemporary camera inside it. He bought a vintage uniform on eBay. “I was a war photographer—proper insignia and all that good stuff. There was a time when I was outside in the cold and I was developing from negatives in freezing cold water. That was my little reenactor moment.”
Gendron reflects on all that time and effort with a certain equanimity. The filming, he says, is “the easy part because you’re just compelled to do it. This other stuff is harder, raising money and making these technical things that are necessary.” When he was finished editing the film, he launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for post-production—“color balance, sound balance, things that require experts with the correct tools.”
Commissioned work relieves a filmmaker of those concerns, ideally leaving enough creative leeway that the filmmaker still feels creatively engaged. The golf cart animatic on Gendron’s monitor is a particularly engaging creative effort, representing as it does the extracurricular activities of a reasonably famous alt rock musician. Gendron elaborates, “As the story goes, [the musician] was a bit of a wild man who after a concert noticed that there was a sea of red Solo cups left by the audience as they staggered home to their cars. And now here he was in this sea of cups and he thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to borrow this golf cart and mow them down.’” Having no footage of this, the documentary’s director gave the story to Gendron to animate. Gendron says, “I didn’t think I would enjoy it as much as I do. I like doing my weird, quirky things but I also like the focus and the push toward someone else’s vision.” His digital renderings will be paired with stop motion head movements from a breathtakingly accurate, poseable model of the musician—less than a foot tall—that he built for the purpose.
The surreal visual vocabulary of both of these projects—unusual doings in public outdoor spaces—suits Gendron’s own taste for the surreal in film, which he discovered early as a student filmmaker at Radford University in Virginia. “I didn’t want to make the next Herbie Goes To Dallas.” The expressive possibilities of fact-based filmmaking occurred to him later, attending the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, where his wife’s work as an academic art librarian had then taken them. (Heather Gendron is also an artist, with her own studio at the opposite corner of the house.) “It changed my ideas of what a [documentary] film could be. It wasn’t some narrator going on about cell mitosis.”
Gendron’s camera has lately been employed to produce a music video for local singer Thabisa, as well as a pitch for a high profile-sounding project he is also bound to say little more about. Both connections were made at NHDocs—the latter after the producers had seen one of his Playing Soldier posters on display there—and came at an ideal time, when Playing Soldier as a creative undertaking was already in the past. “I’d always likened the end of those long-term projects to a divorce. There’s nothing but this overwhelming quiet that’s difficult to listen to. And so I wanted something to just drown that out.” Gendron takes an appraising glance at a stack of small cardboard boxes, each representing and containing its own project. “And now that I’ve got this stuff, I’m starting to think again about making another film. I think I really, really did need this as a stepping stone.”
“Right now I’m in the advertising stage of everything… Putting out things to get my art show seen. Putting out things to get butts in seats at the movie theater. I need to make a flyer, or I need to put out another Instagram post. Social media is its own juggling act,” Gendron says. He turns to open the Playing Soldier promo file folder on one monitor, demonstrating the minutiae of the promotional effort, cycling through variations of digital flyers that feature images from the project. Men and women in historically accurate Allied—and Axis—uniform provide an arresting visual, posed against a recognizably American backdrop. And in one of his composites, an arm sleeved in army green mock-flies a model World War II bomber—which perhaps even better captures the obsessive spirit of historical reenactment.
On the other monitor, a bird’s eye illustration of a golf cart sits on a field of red and, superimposed, a very rough head-and-shoulders close-up of a man holding what Gendron reveals to be a Solo cup. It’s a tantalizingly incomplete glimpse of a new project, and I happened to arrive on a day Gendron had set aside for new projects. “I try to compartmentalize as much as I can. I’ll put them in a pile and go, ‘Tuesday, that’s what I’m doing.’ Social media stuff. ‘And Wednesday I’m going to draw and try to get some of this done.’” He hits a key, and, in a few frames, the golf cart begins to traverse the field. It’s an animatic, a moving sketch of an animated sequence that will one day nest inside a live-action documentary about a musician he’s not yet at liberty to name. It was at NHDocs 2019—a.k.a. the 2019 New Haven Documentary Film Festival, where he had screened Playing Soldier with an animated preface—that Gendron was approached for this commission. Film festivals that make independent work visible also provide unexpected opportunities to keep working, which is why Gendron’s social media stuff gets a whole Tuesday. Gendron adds with a shrug, “It’s part of the process to actually put it out there and have somebody experience it.”
This is especially true of a creation process that lasts for years, as Playing Soldier did. In the span of a decade, Gendron drove up and down the East Coast to attend 20 or 30 reenactments, which typically happen annually and take up entire weekends. From there, characters emerged who warranted further exploration, including a family who would arrive in vintage clothes and yellow badges of the kind German Jews were compelled to wear in 1938. “This family would just show up,” Gendron says, “and just walking through was in itself… kind of poking the bear a little bit.” Gendron sporadically encountered Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers at the events, but reactions to the family walk-throughs also varied among reenactors who were in it solely for the military hardware. “I was just standing there with my hands in my pockets,” Gendron recalls, “and I saw them walk by and it took me a minute to register, and I ran into the tent, got my camera in the dark, and off I go to chase them down.” The film also features a Jewish woman who attends reenactments as Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Gendron, sympathetic to my bemusement, says, “That was a big part of [the film]. Why do these people want to do it? Because the answer’s not always going to be there at the event.”
Gendron’s process was also a matter of unusual professional immersion. The “reenactor moment” after which the photo collection is named is the “little piece in time, very short and fleeting,” when reenactors come to believe they are soldiers fighting in a European field and not mustering in a municipal park. “There’s always a lot of effort to suppress the present,” Gendron notes. “I’ve seen people go as far as to build elaborate shells that will go around a stop sign and make it look like a concrete sign from France in the 1940s.” Gendron adopted their methods to make himself a part of the environment. He built a replica of a newsreel camera and placed his contemporary camera inside it. He bought a vintage uniform on eBay. “I was a war photographer—proper insignia and all that good stuff. There was a time when I was outside in the cold and I was developing from negatives in freezing cold water. That was my little reenactor moment.”
Gendron reflects on all that time and effort with a certain equanimity. The filming, he says, is “the easy part because you’re just compelled to do it. This other stuff is harder, raising money and making these technical things that are necessary.” When he was finished editing the film, he launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for post-production—“color balance, sound balance, things that require experts with the correct tools.”
Commissioned work relieves a filmmaker of those concerns, ideally leaving enough creative leeway that the filmmaker still feels creatively engaged. The golf cart animatic on Gendron’s monitor is a particularly engaging creative effort, representing as it does the extracurricular activities of a reasonably famous alt rock musician. Gendron elaborates, “As the story goes, [the musician] was a bit of a wild man who after a concert noticed that there was a sea of red Solo cups left by the audience as they staggered home to their cars. And now here he was in this sea of cups and he thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to borrow this golf cart and mow them down.’” Having no footage of this, the documentary’s director gave the story to Gendron to animate. Gendron says, “I didn’t think I would enjoy it as much as I do. I like doing my weird, quirky things but I also like the focus and the push toward someone else’s vision.” His digital renderings will be paired with stop motion head movements from a breathtakingly accurate, poseable model of the musician—less than a foot tall—that he built for the purpose.
The surreal visual vocabulary of both of these projects—unusual doings in public outdoor spaces—suits Gendron’s own taste for the surreal in film, which he discovered early as a student filmmaker at Radford University in Virginia. “I didn’t want to make the next Herbie Goes To Dallas.” The expressive possibilities of fact-based filmmaking occurred to him later, attending the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, where his wife’s work as an academic art librarian had then taken them. (Heather Gendron is also an artist, with her own studio at the opposite corner of the house.) “It changed my ideas of what a [documentary] film could be. It wasn’t some narrator going on about cell mitosis.”
Gendron’s camera has lately been employed to produce a music video for local singer Thabisa, as well as a pitch for a high profile-sounding project he is also bound to say little more about. Both connections were made at NHDocs—the latter after the producers had seen one of his Playing Soldier posters on display there—and came at an ideal time, when Playing Soldier as a creative undertaking was already in the past. “I’d always likened the end of those long-term projects to a divorce. There’s nothing but this overwhelming quiet that’s difficult to listen to. And so I wanted something to just drown that out.” Gendron takes an appraising glance at a stack of small cardboard boxes, each representing and containing its own project. “And now that I’ve got this stuff, I’m starting to think again about making another film. I think I really, really did need this as a stepping stone.”
Written and photographed by David Zukowski.
Playing Soldier Showing in Hamden
11/5/2018
I will be showing Playing Soldier at Best Video in Hamden on Monday Nov 12th at 7pm.
As an added bonus, the movie will be preceded by a short little animated film :-)
Come on out, have some fun! See it on the screen - with an audience, the way movies are meant to be seen!!
As an added bonus, the movie will be preceded by a short little animated film :-)
Come on out, have some fun! See it on the screen - with an audience, the way movies are meant to be seen!!
Playing Soldier selected for Yonkers Film Fest 2019
9/7/19
Playing Soldier Showing at NH Docs on June 2nd
5/2/2018
m very pleased to announce that Playing Soldier will be showing at NH Docs in june
9:30 PM June 2nd
-Screening Room 208,
Yale University,
Whitney Humanities Center,
53 Wall Street, New Haven CT
Playing Soldier (Edwin Gendron, 2018) – 72min – Connecticut Premiere – in competition for the Audience Award for Best Feature Film
Click here for more info on NH Docs:
http://www.nhdocs.com/saturday-june-2nd-2018/
9:30 PM June 2nd
-Screening Room 208,
Yale University,
Whitney Humanities Center,
53 Wall Street, New Haven CT
Playing Soldier (Edwin Gendron, 2018) – 72min – Connecticut Premiere – in competition for the Audience Award for Best Feature Film
Click here for more info on NH Docs:
http://www.nhdocs.com/saturday-june-2nd-2018/
That's All Folks! 12/18/2017 0 Comments
After a long stay in post production, I am pleased to announce that work on Playing Soldier is finally completed!
I will receive the files early in the new year.
I will then proceed to make DVDs for donors and other folks as well.
I hope to ship them out in late January.
Thanks to everyone who was/were so patient throughout this long process.
Thanks to everyone who contributed either in the form of donations, time, or simply enthusiasm.
-Ed Gendron
I will receive the files early in the new year.
I will then proceed to make DVDs for donors and other folks as well.
I hope to ship them out in late January.
Thanks to everyone who was/were so patient throughout this long process.
Thanks to everyone who contributed either in the form of donations, time, or simply enthusiasm.
-Ed Gendron
At long last, the end is in sight!! 9/4/2017 0 Comments
I spoke with the lab and the end is in sight now!!
They have some final work to do, then I have to review and approve that work, and then DVDs get made (and distributed) and film goes off to festival.
Thank you everyone for your patience and support!!
Ed Gendron
They have some final work to do, then I have to review and approve that work, and then DVDs get made (and distributed) and film goes off to festival.
Thank you everyone for your patience and support!!
Ed Gendron
Tech edit is done, film is off to the lab!! 1/19/2017 2 Comments
The technical edit is finally done and the film is now off to the lab in order receive its finishing touches.
Many thanks to everyone who shared their stories with me!
Thanks to those who have supported the project and been so patient throughout the whole editing process.
This may take several months. I'll keep you updated as things develop.
Many thanks to everyone who shared their stories with me!
Thanks to those who have supported the project and been so patient throughout the whole editing process.
This may take several months. I'll keep you updated as things develop.
Finish line is in sight! 1/5/2017 0 Comments
Furiously heading towards finish line. If all goes according to plan, the film will go to the lab in a couple of weeks. It will stay there for a couple of months before completion.
Thank you everyone for your patience and support!!
Thank you everyone for your patience and support!!
Technical Edit 4/22/2016 0 Comments
In talks with a post-production lab about the deinterlace process. That means that the Tech Edit is coming, hopefully soon!!
Revision 1.0 is off to the editor...fingers crossed! 3/14/2016 0 Comments
Revision 1.O is off to the editor.
Undoubtedly there will be some changes.
But overall, I'm hopeful and I have my fingers crossed.
Once I get a thumbs up, i will "lock it down" and move on to the technical stuff.
Revision 1.O is off to the editor.
Undoubtedly there will be some changes.
But overall, I'm hopeful and I have my fingers crossed.
Once I get a thumbs up, i will "lock it down" and move on to the technical stuff.
I'm back! 12/26/2015 0 Comments
Just a quick update since I've been quiet for so very long.
First off, I moved, and that took a couple of months out of my work schedule. Of course that was a piece of cake when compared with reason number two.
Second, I began working on the film again in early October and immediately suffered an outright hard drive crash.
Seven years of work disappeared right in front of my eyes. I had a few delays before i could work on the rebuild. And believe me that made for very long days and sleepless nights.
Rest assured, the danger has passed and I did manage to rebuild the film (minus a couple of inconsequential files).
Im back at work and hope to have some updates for you in the new year.
Thank you all for your patience and understanding!
-edg
First off, I moved, and that took a couple of months out of my work schedule. Of course that was a piece of cake when compared with reason number two.
Second, I began working on the film again in early October and immediately suffered an outright hard drive crash.
Seven years of work disappeared right in front of my eyes. I had a few delays before i could work on the rebuild. And believe me that made for very long days and sleepless nights.
Rest assured, the danger has passed and I did manage to rebuild the film (minus a couple of inconsequential files).
Im back at work and hope to have some updates for you in the new year.
Thank you all for your patience and understanding!
-edg