Some Drivel On...Little Flags

Unable to secure a bouncy castle the likes of which we have never seen before for the south lawn of the White House to celebrate the King’s, er, Supreme Leader’s, er, President’s birthday, the federal government decided to throw him a parade in the guise of one for the Army. It will be the first of its kind since the National Victory Celebration on June 8th, 1991, to mark the end of the Gulf War and a tickertape parade in New York two days later to celebrate the same thing. It was the latter that Jem Cohen documented with his 16mm camera in a six-minute short “Little Flags” that was not released until 2000 (and which is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel). He never explicitly identifies this parade; there is no title card, no voiceover, and looking up through the downtown canyons at the tickertape falling from the sky, one might for a moment think it’s the New York Rangers victory parade of 1994. It innately evokes the age-old overlap between nationalism and sports. “U-S-A! U-S-A!” we hear people chanting. Our country kicked your country’s ass! Cohen, though, never shows the troops, meaning he renders no judgement of them or even of the war. In fact, he hardly focuses on any one person or group at all. Rather, he creates a collage of sensations and of little flags, so many little American flags, so many little American flags that wind up strewn on the streets with so much shredded paper. And in the sound design, transitioning from diegetic jubilation to an eerie non-diegetic drone-like noise, it’s as if all those littered little flags are the excess jingoist sludge from patriotism fed into the blast furnace of a big, beautiful parade.