The single greatest SHOT ever...?

[Brian Kaz]

I wouldn't say SPR celebrates war. It celebrates the courage of the men caught up in it. It'd be tough to do an anti-war film about WWII seeing as that was one of the few wars that actually needed to be fought.

 

[Jason Murphy]

I'd say that Saving Private Ryan celebrates war in a way that The Thin Red Line does not. I'm not sure that Spielberg necessarily intended this, but as talented as he is from a technical perspective, he's never been one to carefully think through the ramifications of his movies.

I think it's very legitimate to be against war, even when one concedes the need for it at (hopefully incredibly rare) times. That said, the best war movies generally have a very complex and nuanced relationship with war that can't be easily described as 'anti-war' or 'war-glorifying.'

Bringing it back to movies: two examples of the sort of complex relationship to WWII that I'm describing were recently released in the US for the first time, though both were made in Europe over 30 years ago.

The first is Army of Shadows (directed by Jean-Pierre Melville in 1969), about several people caught up in the French Resistance during WWII. It's pretty cold, stark and brutal. Speaking of great shots, the opening shot of this movie is incredibly iconic.

The second is Overlord (directed by Stuart Cooper in 1975), about a young British recruit's experiences from training until the beaches of Normandy. Much of the film was edited from absolutely stunning archival footage, which really needs to be seen to be believed.

Anyway, both of them are distributed on DVD by the Criterion collection, and have been recently released. They are two of the best WWII films ever made, and while they are both in many ways against war, they approach it in a much more complex way than the typical "War is hell" mentality. I'd say that both of them are worth checking out for anyone interested in WWII movies, but, really, both of them are worth checking out for anyone with an interest in movies, period.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

I don't agree -- "Saving Private Ryan", from the first battle shot where the doors of the boat open and half the men are killed instantly, clearly shows war to be a horrifying experience, an enormous waste of human life on an epic scale. My reaction to seeing the D-Day battle was definitely not "gee, I wish I were there!" What's glorious about seeing a man picking up his own severed limb? You even see American soldiers shooting surrending German soldiers during the battle. You're not thinking every time someone dies in the movie "oh well, at least it was for a good cause!" The characters in the movie are constantly questioning the point of everything they are involved in, with no easy answers given.

It's a major discredit to the people involved in the making of the movie to say that it is a "pro-war" film. All decent war movies are essentially anti-war movies.

Certainly SPR is a more conventional war film than "The Thin Red Line" but there are dramatic problems with that movie too, even though it is a more poetic and artistically challenging movie.

---

On a different note, it's interesting to compare "Burmese Harp" to "Fires on the Plain", both by Kon Ichikawa, both adapted from different books by Natto Wada. Totally different views of mankind, the first having a kind of John Ford humanism and the second being the bleakest look at war you'll ever see (starving Japanese soldiers reduced to hunting each other for food).

 

[Shawn Nelson]

"War has never solved anything except for creating the United States and for ending: slavery, Genocide, the Holocaust, Fascism, Nazism, etc." Heck, I agree to not glorify unnecessary conflict, but if our brave boys were defeating said above attrocities, let's show it decently eh? Though to keep the pendulum swinging too far, movies need to show it accurately. Remembering the words of Robert E Lee "It is a good thing war is so terrible; else we should grow too fond of it"

 

[Tom Lowe]

Well, The Thin Red Line certainly celebrates war less then Private Ryan. You don't see any flag waving in TTRL. "War don't ennoble men, it turns 'em into dogs..."

That is not to say that SPR's view on war is wrong. It is not. Most every American views our efforts in WWII as a noble and necessary cause. I fully support the message of Saving Private Ryan, but it's not as philosophical nor deep as TTRL, in my humble opinion. I fought in the first gulf war, and I can tell you that 99% of your time is spent waiting and thinking about your life and thinking about your woman back home, for the first time contemplating your own mortality, and so on. Only a tiny fraction of war is actual combat, so in that sense I felt more of a connection with TTRL.

Actually this SPR vs TTRL debate is a longstanding one for cinema fans.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

"War has never solved anything except for creating the United States and for ending: slavery, Genocide, the Holocaust, Fascism, Nazism, etc." Heck, I agree to not glorify unnecessary conflict, but if our brave boys were defeating said above attrocities, let's show it decently eh?

Even a justifiable war is never as clean-cut as that, morally-speaking. Lincoln initially sent Union troops against the South to hold the Union together, not to free slaves -- and the U.S. certainly did not enter WW2 to stop the Holocaust nor end Fascism (how many brutal dictatorships have we supported over the decades?)

Also remember that (I believe) something like thirty Soviet soldiers died during WW2 for every single American & British soldier killed, and without that massive sacrifice by the Red Army in the eastern front, Germany might not have lost the war -- my point being that the Red Army certainly wasn't marching to end the Holocaust or defeat totalitarianism; they were marching for revenge and to expand the Soviet empire.

So no war ever stands on clear moral grounds, and as they say, history is written by the victors.

Even the creation of the United States was not on clear moral grounds -- it was a tax revolt, more or less, plus the recognition that we were too independent to continue to be a royal colony without equal representation in Parliament. But one of the reasons that U.S. citizens supported ending British rule was that the British government would not allow further expansion into Indian territories west of the Ohio River. Not to mention that our institutions of slavery were starting to rankle members of Parliament, who wanted to limit the expansion of slavery into new territories. So taking lands from Indians and expanding slavery was a motivation for some of the people supporting the end of British rule. Hardly the romantic view of the early history of the U.S. that they teach in grade school...

 

[Shawn Nelson]

Aye David, good thoughts

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Uh oh...politics. I won't get into the discussion, but this statement isn't really true (i agree with Davind on a lot of things, though). The Soviets were invaded. They fought because they had to fight. There was no moral ambiguity for them.

I wasn't talking so much about the fight on Soviet territory, but the march to Berlin afterwards. Yes, I guess I wasn't clear about the fact that the Soviet Union was attacked brutally first (I figured everyone knew that part already...)

I said "revenge"... but self-preservation certainly was also a part of it, but so was Stalin's intent to take advantage of the situation to expand Soviet domination. To say that the invasion alone justified everything that Stalin did afterwards, that there was no moral ambiguity there, simply isn't true. There is always moral ambiguity in any large complex war when it goes beyond simply defending the homeland. I guess you are saying that for the Soviet soldiers involved there was no ambiguity as to why they were fighting, which is probably true. I'm talking about the broader question of whether the Soviet Union's motivations that led to the fall of Germany were completely pure.

But yes, this isn't a good place to discuss this. I was just trying to make a point that nothing is ever really simple when it comes to nations waging war on each other.

(History is a bit of a hobby lately - the last three books I read, before I read a recent Edison bigraphy, were John Keegan's "The Second World War", and "Overlord" and "Armageddon", both by Max Hastings. And before that, it was three American Revolution books...)

 

[Shawn Nelson]

So no war ever stands on clear moral grounds, and as they say, history is written by the victors.

True, but now movies can tell the other side. Imagine movies that showed the regiments of free black men who fought for the Confederacy, or a movie portraying SS who were not racist and thought they were fighting for their land, or one showing Vikings as decent fellows, or one showing Romans as the better side altogether. I'm not saying such movies should be made nor that I endorse such views, just making some extreme points here. So let us not forget that films can go against the cultural grain and present the viewpoints that our so-called history decided for us are not presentable.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

It's tricky business, of course, because you don't want to fall into moral relativism either. Paul Verhoeven got into trouble with some critics for his recent movie "The Black Book" (which I haven't seen) for presenting some of the Dutch resistance as bad and a few Nazi's as good, etc. as if there wasn't an obvious moral difference between the two (I'm not saying the critics were right or wrong, not having seen the movie, only that that's the risk you take as a filmmaker if you're not careful.)

You get into safer territory when you simply cover the plight of soldiers in war, even on the other (losing) side, as in "Letters from Iwo Jima" or "All's Quiet on the Western Front", because your message is basically humanistic.

Anyway, I'm more interested in the depiction of war from a directorial and cinematographic standpoint, and SPR and TTRL are obvious examples of different styles to portray a WW2 battle scene.

 

[Gbabymogul]

I wasn't talking so much about the fight on Soviet territory, but the march to Berlin afterwards.

Thanks for clarifying.

The problem with ascribing changing modern prisms of context to historical events is that it oft leads to moral relativism (not saying that's what you're doing) or with more specificity moral revisionism. <- edit wrote that before you posted.




:Guinness:

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Yes, it's a tricky balance between maintaining a sense of true right and wrong in life and history while recognizing most people are fed a lot of propaganda about wars, because basically it's hard to get citizen-soldiers to fight if the causes and goals are not clear. But for the sake of clarity, you get oversimplification, flag-waving, etc. and it can take decades to get beyond that and view the events and motivations surrounding a war more objectively.

My point was that SPR is not a simplistic work of pro-war propaganda -- it definitely falls into a tradition of anti-war movies. But I agree that it is also not particularly deep or original, other the brilliant ferocity of the portrayal of the D-Day landing, the highlight of the movie from which it never really recovers dramatically. As soon as they reach the top of the hill and overlook the beach after the battle, you feel like you can pop the DVD out of the player and put it back on the shelf, satisfied to some extent. That opening battle is like a great short movie.

I get a little thrown by "The Thin Red Line" because all the internal voice-over monologues remind me a bit too much of David Lynch's "Dune" (which I like too). It borders on the pretentious sometimes.

Both are interesting in how they portray the "reality" of battle, reality in SPR being that which resembles WW2 combat photography, reality in TTRL being ultra-sharp widescreen color photography that has an immersive you-are-there IMAX movie quality. Both styles sort of suck the viewer into the reality of the situation, yet both are opposite versions of what "reality" means. SPR is the reality of old documentary combat photography, shakey, grainy, monochromatic, while TTRL is the reality of how your eyes would see the setting, the jungle, the grass, etc.

 

[Alex Boothby]

You know it's a shame that some of the truly important war stories would probably make lousy films by virtue of the fact that they are inherently un-cinematic. War pretexts, media spin, profiteering and back door funding deals are just not as sexy as blood and guts. The Gulf of Tonkin non-incident is not as riveting as the Tet Offensive. Trotsky's funding drives in New York are not as dynamic as the Odessa Steps. And Prescott Bush's indictment under the trading with the enemy act of 1942 is just way more boring to watch than the Battle of the Bulge. Oh ya - and Smedley Butler lacks leading man status.

Oh well.

 

[Gbabymogul]

When it comes to the subject, somehow i like Kurosawas films.
:beer:

 

[David Mullen ASC]

Yes, one aspect that I admire about "Seven Samurai" is that while it is an action movie with clear heroes and villians, killing itself is never glamorized, it's always a bit tragic -- for example, the scene where the samurai light the bandits' fort on fire and kill them as they emerge, or when the villagers surround the fallen bandits in the rain during the final battle.

For Kurosawa, the only difference between a hero and a bad guy was the moral choices they make, not who they are intrinsically. We are defined by our actions. There's that scene in "Stray Dog" where the young cop hunting down the killer discovers that the killer has the same background as he does, came to the city broke as an ex-soldier, etc. But his older partner reminds him that he chose to become a cop and the other chose to become a criminal. And when he finally catches the young killer, they fight in the mud until you can't tell them apart. It's sort of like the end of "High and Low" when Mifune confronts the killer/kidnapper in jail and their faces are reflected over each other in the glass. Kurosawa suggests that none of us are completely free of the possibility of doing evil, but we make a moral choice not to, and that's what separates us.

--

I thought about writing a screenplay about the political forces at work that led to the internment of Japanese-Americans during WW2, but it's hard to bring all of those oddball incidents into a dramatic whole. But there are a lot of weird stories, like how the California poultry industry asked the U.S. government for an exemption for Japanese "chicken sexers" -- apparently the Japanese poultry workers could determine the sex of a baby chick and separate them in half the time as the other workers. Or how the U.S. government froze the bank accounts of Japanese-Americans on the West Coast after December 7, but didn't ship them off to camps until late February, by which time many Japanese-American businesses had declared bankruptsy because they couldn't pay their bills or their workers.

 

[Tom Lowe]

I get a little thrown by "The Thin Red Line" because all the internal voice-over monologues remind me a bit too much of David Lynch's "Dune" (which I like too). It borders on the pretentious sometimes.

For you it might, but not for others. Generally pretentious means something aimed at drawing attention to itself, or making one's work seem more important than what it is. I find neither to be true for Malick, though everyone is entitled to their opinion. Malick hardly seems like the type to want to drawn attention to himself or inflate his work beyond its true worth. The man hasn't spoken to the media since the 1970s. I think his achievements speak for themselves.

 

[Sanjin Jukic]

Storaro interview

Storaro interview

Storaro is talking about use of a natural light in the work of Gianni Di Venanzo another revolutionary Italian cinematographer.

Ipod size of the clip 320x180, 17min, about 205 MB.
ftp://84.112.86.213/Library/FTPServer/FTPRoot/Movies/storaro-venanzo.mov

Open the next 24 hours.

 

[Evin Grant]

Honestly I love Malick's work, especially Days, but I think TTRL is his weakest piece. Even The New World seemed more thought out. I know the meandering was a device as well as the symbolisim (Poor little birdie) but when it comes right down to it I almost always pull one of his other films or SPR off the shelf, although my favorite WWII film is actually Empire of the Sun.

David, I'm also a big Dune fan myself. "The lips aquire stains the stains become a warning, it is with wil alone I set my mind in motion"

 

[Alex Boothby]

Love it. Love Dune. A true guilty pleasure. And the worst final line in movie history - pure joy.

 

[David Mullen ASC]

For you it might, but not for others. Generally pretentious means something aimed at drawing attention to itself, or making one's work seem more important that what it is. I find neither to be true for Malick, though everyone is entitled to their opinion. Malick hardly seems like the type to want to drawn attention to himself or inflate his work beyond its true worth. The man hasn't spoken to the media since the 1970s. I think his achievements speak for themselves.

Well, the voice-overs in TTRL do call attention to themselves -- how many other war movies can you name where so many characters have inner monologues that you hear on screen? It stands out as being different than any other war movie I've seen, hence why the device draws attention to itself.

And at times, the thoughts expressed are fairly poetic, which in the middle of a war movie, can be thought of as a bit precious. Hence why I think it borders on being pretentious -- it has pretentions of being high art, of saying something significant about the human condition. Obviously that was just my personal reaction... and of course if you feel it was successful at being high art and at saying something significant, you wouldn't think it was pretentious therefore.

But to me, the movie is a bit "arty". I still think it's a good movie though, just that it is problematic in a very different way than how SPR is problematic.

I'm not accusing Malick of trying to draw attention to himself, just that TTRL is a very ambitious movie conceptually and artistically, and I'm not sure he was completely successful in pulling all of his ideas together.