reiher@amethyst.jpl.nasa.gov (Peter Reiher) (01/20/90)
Three War Films
Comments by Peter Reiher
Copyright 1990 Peter Reiher
[This is not intended as a review, in the usual sense. Consider it a sample of
the sort of thing that I think would be interesting to see in a newsgroup like
rec.arts.cinema.]
War movies used to be a staple of American and international film. They
provided an excellent mechanism for combining action with patriotism, which fed
the studios' wallets and the immigrant studio heads' nationalism at the same
time. But war movies died with Vietnam, in the U.S., at least. The only war
movies one sees today are anti-war movies -- an excellent mechanism for
combining action with idealism, which feeds the studios' wallets and the
shallow studio heads' superficial sense of social involvement at the same time.
(Things change, but not much.) Anti-war movies have a much more limited
audience, though, so not nearly so many of them are made. Which makes the
chances of seeing three new war movies in a single month rather unlikely.
None the less, I did. It helped that two were made outside the U.S. What
is interesting about the experience is that the films covered three different
wars from three different periods of history, using three different
perspectives, and had three different themes. The up side of the decline of
war movies is that they are no longer out there glamorizing war. The down side
is that war is a powerful catalyst for the artistic impulse, and has been a
fundamental component in many great artistic masterpieces. These three films
found three different ways to use the power of war without glorifying it.
HENRY V is an adaptation of Shakespeare's play about Britain's great
warrior king, the victor of Agincourt. During World War II, Olivier used this
material to fashion propaganda, creating a world of pageantry in which plucky
little England overcame tremendous odds to gloriously win a continental war.
The new version of the film, directed by Kenneth Branagh, takes a very
different view of things. The same play, edited differently by the two
directors, provided two different views of war. Branagh presents a dynamic
young king prodded and duped into fighting a bloody, vicious war whose victory
is undone within a generation. This HENRY V contains no fields of honor and
thundering hoards of glistening knights. It is full of dirt, mud, and gloom.
Despite a decisive victory with small losses, Branagh's Henry is a king who has
seen the horror of war, and is happy to compromise his demands to avoid a
return to battle. England is a nation led by a duped leader into an
unnecessary and horrible war to uphold a dubious territorial claim. War here
is futile, nasty, without any redeeming value.
Branagh furthers his achievement, though, by presenting the seductive side
of war. Henry is a tremendous leader of men, able to stir and cajole them to
unbelievable efforts. How many in the audience would not follow Henry into
battle after the speech he gives before Agincourt? Precious few, I think.
Yet, while that battle was forced, it was fought in a war that would benefit
only the few, if anyone at all.
GLORY is a very different film. GLORY, directed by Edward Zweig, tells
the story of the first black regiment to see combat in the American Civil War.
During that War, one of whose major causes was slavery in the Southern states,
the Union was reluctant to use black soldiers. Underlying prejudice against
blacks was nearly as widespread and deep in the North as in the South.
Moreover, the South made it very clear that they intended to treat black
soldiers and those who fought with them very harshly. So, despite the intense
desire of blacks to participate in the war that would liberate them, the Union
dragged its heels on using them.
But the persistence of blacks and the enlightenment of a few white
Northerners finally prevailed. Black soldiers were recruited, trained, and,
eventually, used in battle. GLORY tells the true story of the first regiment
of black soldiers to see battle. Their bravery in some hideously deadly combat
proved that black soldiers could be just as effective as whites. Unlike HENRY
V, the war in GLORY is necessary, and, in a destructive way, liberating. The
soldiers in GLORY die in enormous numbers, but they die for a reason, and their
deaths have meaning and value. The horror of war is not minimized, but the
focus of the film is how some men used war for good purposes, sacrificing
themselves for the benefit of others. Not a popular point of view, nowadays,
and only the socially acceptable message of racial equality made this film
possible, at all.
TALVISOTA, the third film, has a more modern setting, and is primarily
concerned with the destruction of war. In 1939, the U.S.S.R. invaded Finland
with a huge army, basically seeking to incorporate it into the Soviet Union,
or, at least, to seize strategically important chunks of the country. But the
Soviets made two important errors -- they invaded in winter, and they
underestimated the resolve of the Finns. Unprepared for a winter campaign
against a determined opponent, the Russians took tremendous losses, despite
equally tremendous numerical superiority, and the war was eventually ended.
Finland had to give up some territory, but maintained its independence.
The few Americans who know of this war tend to view it as a dashing affair
carried out on sparkling snow, with daring Finnish ski troops encircling
lumbering, incompetent Soviet units. It has a clean, surgical image,
reinforced by clear heros and villains, and a situation in which the underdog
basically prevailed. TALVISOTA smashes that image. A Finnish film directed by
Pekka Parikan, it does not suggest that the Finns were responsible or in the
wrong, but it makes clear that no modern war has anything of glamour about it.
TALVISOTA follows a group of Finns who are conscripted to help defend the
country. Their war is not a matter of swooping down on bumbling Russians, but
a horror of trench fighting against seemingly endless hoards of enemy troops,
with intermittent moments of terror as Soviet artillery and aircraft pound
them. One after another, they die, suddenly, nastily, usually with no
particular rhyme or reason. Charging into the enemy sometimes proves safer
than going behind a tree to relieve yourself. The soldier next to you can be
blown apart while you aren't scratched. Every time a man goes out of your
sight, it might be the last time you ever see him.
No film I have seen has ever painted as strong a picture of the
destructive power of war as does TALVISOTA. The film is three harrowing hours
of death and explosion. Forests are reduced to fields of shattered stumps.
Men are ground down to the point where they are hardly living at all. Death is
rarely clean, and usually very messy and unpleasant. The soldiers are killed,
their families are torn apart, the countryside is destroyed. And, worst of
all, the whole awful process is unavoidable. Finland didn't want the war,
didn't ask for the war, but could only avoid it by submitting entirely to the
enemy. TALVISOTA is easily the bleakest of the three films, for it shows no
redeeming feature of war, yet also suggests that the best intentions in the
world cannot always allow you to avoid it.
These three films demonstrate the artistic power of war. How could an
activity that, by its nature, involves death on a large scale and the clash of
fundamental ideals not be a powerful subject for art? The true shame of most
war films made during the greatest flood of combat movies is perhaps not that
they made war too heroic, but that they treated the subject so shallowly, with
Errol Flynn and company mowing down faceless battalions of Japanese and
Germans, at no real cost to themselves or even to the enemy. Toy soldiers fell
over, and our side won the game. Branagh, Zweig, and Parikan have artistic
visions -- war as horrible waste, war as a terrible but necessary step in
liberation, war as tragically unavoidable destruction. These sorts of war
films are important even in times of peace, and even to those who oppose war
for any purpose. They are the cinema's contribution to one of the great issues
of all times, and are every bit as important as books, editorials, and
speeches. This is cinema as art.
Peter Reiher
reiher@onyx.jpl.nasa.gov
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