The personal narration sequences — images taken in a variety of locations, with voice-overs by the director or others — include a pinkish, orange-tinged scene (shot on Super 8 by Matt Kohn) of a smiling Hadleigh-West sitting on a bed. The director says that the beautiful coloring resulted from the lighting in the room. Another scene presents a gauntlet of construction workers in a wonderful shade of blue. "It wasn't supposed to be blue," acknowledges Hadleigh-West. "That's the beauty of Super 8; sometimes you can get beautiful mistakes."
The Hi-8 cinematographers knew going in that their color footage would probably end up as black-and-white. Schreiber factored that into her calculations, trying to set the contrast for black-and-white even though she was shooting on a color medium. "I rode the exposure all the time, and I was constantly changing it as I was moving the camera, adjusting for the light levels," Schreiber reflects. "There was a lot of moving around; we would be shooting into the sun, out of the sun, going in tight on somebody's lips, moving back. Video, like film, is very sensitive to changes in light level, and I was constantly adjusting to make sure the skin tones were the same and that the contrast levels were constant within a scene."
Converting their color footage to black-and-white helped the filmmakers to create an effective ambience. "There's nothing warm and fuzzy about black-and-white," comments Schreiber, who adds that spending eight hours and more a day on the streets was sometimes depressing: "You see all the dirt, all the nastiness, the trash, the crowds, the rich parts of town and the poor parts. And no matter where we were, there were always men checking out Maggie and harassing her."
War Zone offers more than just gritty street scenes, however. The film's final image is an eerie, ethereal color shot of a man on a swing with a baby on his lap. As the swing flies toward the camera and then away, the ghostlike image of a woman can be seen standing behind it. "It's a triple exposure, shot by my grandfather many years ago," explains Hadleigh-West. "Apparently he had trouble with his memory. He would forget that he had shot footage, and just film other things over it."
One of the most hypnotic sequences in the film is a traveling shot taken from a boat on a Louisiana swamp, near where Hadleigh-West spent her summers as a child. She had shot the footage many years earlier, before she ever thought of making her movie. The sequence begins with the director sitting on a window sill in New York, reflecting on events in her past. As she talks, the image cuts to the swamp. "I was talking about the places we go personally, [areas of our mind] which can be very dark and scary," she notes. "Metaphorically, I felt the swamp was the perfect place to be, because there is so much life there and everything festers and grows, like fungus. There are things lurking there, but it's very seductive at the same time. Furthermore, I was telling a story about something that happened to me in Louisiana when I was 21, [an incident] which profoundly affected my perceptions."
That incident in question occurred in a small town, where Hadleigh-West was threatened at gunpoint by a man in a passing car; she was spared when another car appeared and frightened off her would-be assailant. This experience opens an important window into the filmmaker's thoughts and feelings about street abuse and the ever-present danger of physical or sexual violence which it portends. While many people draw a distinction between a man uttering verbal remarks and merely looking at a woman's body as he passes her, Hadleigh-West sees little difference: "Men who look at my ass or breasts, make comments or make kissing noises cause me to feel creepy and self-conscious. It's still sexual."
Hadleigh-West admits that when she started her documentary project six years ago, she would launch into a lecture on the matter when interviewing her male subjects. She recalls, "I was a proselytizer. It was boring, didactic and really unproductive. I learned to keep my mouth shut."
Another valuable lesson she picked up while making the film was to let the men speak, rather than chopping their comments into short sound bites. "Previously, I annihilated the men in a way," she describes. "I cut them into sound bites so they weren't interesting characters. They said what they needed to say, but I lost the essence of who they were. I learned to just let them speak. People recognize that a lot of them are regular nice guys who could be their father or brother or boyfriend, which brings [the film's message] closer to home and makes it even more disturbing."
She always tried to approach her subjects in a non-threatening manner, aware that a camera can make anybody a little defensive. In general, few of the men noticed her camera when she passed. "They were looking at my breasts or ass," she points out, "and I wasn't walking with the camera up. Men's experience isn't that women turn cameras on them when they harass them, so there is no expectation of that."
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