Basic Training

The documentary follows the basic training of a group of recruits at Fort Knox in Kentucky in the summer of 1970. From the haircut to the mess hall, from rifle drill to evening roll call, the days pass in order; the camera makes no comment, uses no narration and asks nobody any questions. How a civilian young man is turned step by step into a soldier appears by itself, in the orders given and the words taught. That it was shot in a year when the war in Vietnam was still going on stands behind the whole account. Frederick Wiseman’s eighty nine minute American documentary is part of the director’s series of films about institutions; it was completed in 1971.