Waco: The Rules of Engagement

(William Gazecki, USA, 1997)

Waco: The Rules of Engagement is essential viewing for anyone who has only a dim, media-fed memory 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.

William Gazecki's 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 of what 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 us 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 documentaries as Emile de Antonio's Point of Order (1963), Gazecki takes one-hundred-and-sixty-five minutes to trawl through both a recreation of events and the subsequent proceedings in court in a relentlessly linear, fact-by-fact manner. This gives it a gruelling, slow burn effect which 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 filmmaker's own 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 Ellard leads us to see the truth hidden in blurry flashes of 'night vision' footage.

Every documentary is these days 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 like Errol Morris (Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, 1997) could have made with such rich material.

© Adrian Martin December 1998