A Marine filmed the Iraq invasion for a book, not an audience

Severe Clear was made in 2009 by Kristian Fraga, a documentary director, and it is built almost entirely from tapes that a Marine shot for himself during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Marine, Mike Scotti, was never making a movie.

Scotti was a first lieutenant who had already served in the first Afghanistan campaign. He carried a camcorder into Iraq and kept filming: the 40-day voyage on the USS Boxer, training on the Kuwait border, the advance on Baghdad and what followed. Fraga cut those tapes into a first-person account of the invasion, with Scotti reading from his journal over the images.

Why did he film it?

Scotti set out to document the war for a book meant to show civilians what combat is like. In 2003 he treated the camera as a video diary for his own use. The journal he wrote after his tour supplied parts of the voiceover.

He has said he never planned to make a documentary, and that if he had, he would have shot things differently. A review in Variety says the tapes were turned over to Fraga more as an afterthought.

How did the tapes become a film?

Scotti told Interview magazine how it started. He took his tapes to New York University's film school, hoping to hire a student editor who would work cheaply. An editor who worked for Fraga overheard him, asked to see the tapes and, after watching them, called his boss.

Scotti was not an embedded journalist. The Austin Chronicle reported that the film is composed almost entirely of recordings by Scotti and three other soldiers. How much footage there was depends on who is asked: Interview magazine says Fraga edited down 60 hours, a Salem Gazette interview says 50 to 60 hours, and the Wall Street Journal says about 20 hours.

The film played in the documentary competition at South by Southwest in March 2009 and opened in the United States on March 12, 2010. Stephen Holden, reviewing it for the New York Times, wrote that the profane banter among the men in Scotti's unit, more than the hand-held battle scenes, makes you feel part of the experience.

What does the title mean?

"Severe clear" is a pilot's term for near unlimited visibility. Pilots used it to describe the morning of September 11, 2001.

The date is personal for Scotti. He carried a laminated photo of Beth Quigley, a classmate from his New Jersey high school who died in the World Trade Center attacks, into Iraq. Holden described Scotti's early belief in the official rationale for the war, giving way to doubt once Baghdad turned chaotic.

Variety called the film a jarring, no-holds-barred first-person diary, said Scotti's amateur camerawork proves strangely compelling, and said it shares an ambivalently apolitical perspective with The Hurt Locker. Scotti told the Austin Chronicle he was neither for nor against the war.

Who is it for?

It suits viewers curious how a combat film can come out of a personal record. It runs 94 minutes and ends with a short coda in New York in 2004.

Documentary