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Violence of one kind or another is present in just about every genre, but few have had as conflicted a relationship with cinematic brutality as the war movie. Whereas violence always lurks in the fringes of the ambiguous film noir landscape, or in the primordial morality of the Western, it is right at the heart of the war movie, its modus operandi. For the sake of convenience, people tend to classify the genre into neat extremes, either as pro- or anti-war. This overlooks the fact that most war movies fall somewhere between the two, also imbuing anti-war films with the sort of hushed respectability that irons out its subtler areas and, subsequently, encourages viewers to swallow them whole. The anti-war picture, from All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory to Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down, has usually received more knee-jerk admiration than in-depth analysis, often surrounded by an aura of pious daring, bent on enlightening the unwashed masses on the horrors of the battlefield. The logic behind a good number of them seems to be that to criticize them means to be a warmonger. A less reverential critic might argue that, for all the noble intentions at play, the highly-regarded battle sequences in Saving Private Ryan are not completely free of the kind of manipulation of violence used in something like Rambo: First Blood Part 2. The camera has a tendency to transform physical suffering into aesthetic excitement, thus saying one thing while really showing something else. As Andrew Sarris put it, "The war film traditionally exploited man's inhumanity to man while professing to deplore it." That's not to say that to forge an anti-war statement on celluloid is inevitably doomed to become hypocritical and specious. Movies by Roberto Rossellini (Paisan), William Wellman (The Story of G.I. Joe) and Samuel Fuller (The Steel Helmet), who have experienced war personally, show it is possible to eschew rhetoric while finding emotional truth on the battleground. However, Steven Spielberg and Ridley Scott are on much shakier ground when they try to tell audiences what "it was like" in wars they know about solely through old movies or CNN reports. By trying to outdo their forerunners, today's anti-war movies have simply upped the ante in realistic carnage: orgies of orgasmic violence are unleashed upon viewers to show that war is hell, while making sure that the good guys (that is, "us") always win at the end. If "false" is too harsh a word for them -- "naive" may be closer to the mark -- these works nevertheless strike me as almost inevitably self-deceiving. As a resolute pacifist, I would point away from most revered anti-war movies and back to 1937, the date of release of Grand Illusion, one of the few trul, radical anti-war films ever made. Nearly 65 years later, its message comes across as possibly more pointed now than ever before. Directed by Jean Renoir, in my opinion the greatest filmmaker who ever lived (as well as a First World War vet), the film punctures the psyche behind war without including even one battle sequence. The story, set during WWI, follows a group of French soldiers after they are captured and sent to a German prisoner camp. The standard procedure would have been to depict the soldiers as plucky heroes and their captors as beastly decadents -- the old "us" vs. "them" ploy American audiences have grown so used to. Renoir, one of the great humanists of the cinema, would have none of that, though: he knew and loved life too much to see a person completely cut off from the rest of the world. Every character, including the camp's monocle-wearing kommandant, is given a dimension of full existence, the sense of a living being beyond the stock role. The people in Grand Illusion, whether French or German or British or what have you, possess an almost intuitive feeling of respect for each other as human beings. They feel a far greater affinity to each other than to the governments their uniforms are supposed to represent. War here is a truly invasive force, degrading and perverting a person's innate humanity -- a far more eloquent and provocative idea than all the blood spilled in Black Hawk Down.
Perhaps no other scene illustrates it more movingly than the brief confrontation between the anguished French
prisoner locked in solitary and the old German soldier guarding his cell. It is pointless to describe it, because all of its
emotional connections, visual subtleties and behavioral richness could not be reproduced on paper. All one can hope
is that President Bush and all those pushing so relentlessly for war take a good look at it before getting even more
trigger-happy.
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