WAR FILM – Some historical and theoretical ‘ways in’.

SHIFT IN IDEOLOGY - FROM PATRIOTISM TO PACIFISM (and back again?)

British and American WW2 films as a rule were overtly patriotic – partly due (in America) to being made under the studio system, a very business and profit-driven model which had to appeal to as many people as possible. More personal films were possible after the studio system collapsed (in 1954), thus more ‘alternative’ views – anti-war, for example – gradually started to appear. Many people would argue that the less patriotic modern films are not as good as the older efforts, however.
Hay’s Code – Ceased to hold sway in 1968; film-makers generally got more power to focus on non-traditional representations. Many directors who went on to make important war and anti-war movies started working around this time (Stone, Cimino, Scorsese...)

‘With the end of the war and the breakup of the studio system, the Code and its underlying cultural assumptions were subjected to changes marked by increasingly graphic images of violence in films ranging from Westerns to crime and war films.’
Slocum, J.D., ed. Violence and American Cinema, 2001 New York: Routledge, p7

'Vietnam' films in particular are ambiguous about who the 'bad guys' are; they are generally not simple Proppsian narratives with clearly defined heroes and villains. This might be due to a relaxing of the Hay's code and studio system; it could also be a result of the fact that this war was the first 'televised' war and as such it was the first where audiences back home got to see some evidence of what war was actually like. It may also have been a result of the type of war Vietnam was; there was no Pearl Harbour or 9/11 to 'begin' it and it wasn't clear who or what the enemy actually was. It could even be seen as symptomatic of a more 'postmodern' approach which resists definite answers and clear definitions; it was simply more difficult to say that one side in a conflict was 'better' than another.

There have always been movies which communicate a patriotic ideology, though; Pearl Harbour (Michael Bay, 2001)is one such. In it, the same men who were in Hawaii when Pearl Harbour was bombed supposedly end up taking part in a revenge attack on Japan. This revisionism is utterly non-historical and is simply done to engage a mainstream, largely patriotic audience. It is a simple revenge narrative which appeals to a very basic sense of right and wrong. The attack scene is here; how are the audience being positioned? How are their sympathies being courted and allocated?





America, by the way, is hardly alone in revising the past in this manner. Ip Man (Wilson Yip, 2008), whilst based on a real character and heavily advertised as an autobiography, is extremely revisionist. This scene, for example, is completely fictional, but extremely popular. Given the relationship between the two countries, and the social, historical, economic and political (SHEP) context, why might this be so? (More thoughts on Ip Man here.)

Such revisionism, of course, often results in harsh criticism for the filmmaker. German film Der Rote Baron (Mullerschon, 2008) is a suposed biopic of real-life World War 1 fighter pilot Manfred von Richthofen. It is an extremely patriotic movie, celebrating a (partially fictional) account of the man's exploits. Such patriotism is extremely suspect in Germany, however, and the movie itself was heavily criticised on release. It is visually spectacular; but perhaps this is an instance where audiences are unable or unwilling to ignore the degree to which the director has revised historical fact.

REALISM

Realism is an important issue in War Film, for a number of reasons. If the film is based on true events (Saving Private Ryan, or Pearl Harbour, or Ip Man, or Der Rote Baron, for example), then there is perhaps a responsibility on the part of the director to represent the experience as realistically as possible; not to let the apparatus of film-making (edits. lighting, make up, costume, SFX, camera angles, stars and so on) come between the viewer and the experience being recreated or represented.

‘Realism’, however, is a tricky term in Film Studies. There is an approach to film-making which we refer to as ‘Realistic’, and it involves little camera movement, minimal editing, ambient sound and light, non-professional actors, real locations, non-Todorovian narratives and so on. This is not what most people mean when they are talking about ‘realism’; rather, they are usually referring to what we might call psychological realism, an approach which attempts to get the audience to experience some of the horrors of war. Approached like this, the famous opening section of Saving Private Ryan is not particularly realistic – we are given a privileged view through the use of several camera perspectives, we ‘know’ that Tom Hanks and the other main characters, helpfully picked out for us in close-up, are safe for the time being, we have carefully edited sound and Foley sound to make the experience more engaging and engrossing. But all of this – the use of stars with whom we automatically like and empathise, the use of skilful editing to ‘bring’ the experience to the audience, the imposition of a narrative – is most definitely NOT ‘realistic’ as we understand it in film studies.

But – a narrative film is not a documentary. If we take an auteur position, perhaps we could argue that the job of an artist is not merely to record and present experience, but to re-imagine it for us; to give us the opinion of the director (usually) rather than a simple retelling of the facts. Shakespeare’s history plays, for example, are not noted for their historical accuracy. Theorists differ on this topic; Siegfried Kracauer, for example, believed that photography and film, alone of the art forms, had the ability to exactly mirror reality and that is what it should do. In his book ‘From Caligari to Hitler’ he argues that the tendency towards fantasy and abstraction in German Cinema (growing from German Expressionism) was evidence of a national mood or psyche which would not or could not face reality, and that was what enabled the rise of Hitler. Kracauer, then, would say that filmmakers had a responsibility to stay as close to reality as possible. However, ALL film is mediated. It ALL chooses what to include and what to exclude, it is all filtered through the psyche or eye of a director or someone. As such, is there any point in pretending that ‘realism’ is possible or even desirable? Rudolf Arnheim said that the point of film-making is ‘not simply to copy, but to originate, interpret and to mould’; that is, to use all the tools available to the film-maker to achieve the desired effect.



Do we really want realistic representations of war anyway?

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