- Keith B.
- Friday, June 24, 2022
Content Warning:
These movies each dwell on brutal horrors of war (murder, rape, torture) and are not recommended for the faint of heart. As General William Tecumseh Sherman said, “Some of you young men think that war is all glamour and glory, but let me tell you, boys, it is all hell!” War is no comic book green screen world of heroes and villains.
5 Films for Free: How We Fight
After the tragic loss of life at Pearl Harbor, Hollywood crowd favorite Frank Capra (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, It’s a Wonderful Life) directed a legendary series of propaganda films for the US Department of War titled Why We Fight (also free to stream on Kanopy) to help the American people understand the danger posed by the Axis Powers, hell bent on global domination and the spread of fascist social structures. Once again, our media is all abuzz with news of wars and rumors of World War III. Wars have been sold to us through images of the battlefield as a proving ground for heroism, as soldiers learn to face death with courage and execute their orders with aplomb, but many of the veterans and civilians who’ve tasted war are struck more by its chaotic evil, by the sorrow of death triumphant over life. Before succumbing to war's siren call, take a chance on these five films as an alternative anti-war clarion call.
All titles below are available through Kanopy.
Theater of War
In the years after the 9/11 terror attacks, the course of our two decades long War on Terror is rapidly drawn up, and the public is mobilized to support the president’s war and the troops. This documentary, directed by John Walter, is centered on Meryl Streep and company in 2006 preparing a production of Bertolt Brecht’s anti-war classic Mother Courage and Her Children (Adapted by Tony Kushner, playwright of Angels in America) while protests of the Iraq War wage on in the streets of New York City.
Some thought-provoking moments: when Streep says “we all live off the war”; when Kushner says of the play, “If a scream of horror was enough to end a war, there’d be no war”; when this is read from Brecht’s diary, “Years ago, when I was studying the ways of Chicago Wheat Exchange, I suddenly put down the book and thought, ‘Their way of doing things won’t do. These people live by the harm they do, not by the good.”
Strange Victory
This 1948 documentary directed by Leo Hurwitz dares to examine the dehumanizing racism faced by Black American soldiers returned heroically from battle. At the beginning of the film, Hurwitz addresses these provocative questions to the audience, as puzzled civilians line up for newspapers and magazines at a newsstand:
Why does yesterday wander through today like a ghost?Why is the news still bad?
And if we won, why do we look as if we lost?
And if Hitler died, why does his voice still pursue us through the spaces of American life?
Battle of Algiers
The French hunt down Algerian revolutionary Ali La Pointe, member of the FLN (National Liberation Front), during the Algerian War of Independence. The FLN utilizes shocking guerrilla tactics, and the French Army paratroopers respond with brutal counter insurgency reprisals, including assassinations, torture, summary executions, bombings of civilian targets. A favorite of Roger Ebert, Edward Said, and many directors including Stanley Kubrick, Steven Soderbergh, Christopher Nolan, Werner Herzog, and Ken Loach. Banned from French cinemas for five years.
Salvador
A young James Woods stars, in an Oscar nominated role, as a sleazy foreign correspondent/combat photographer who is evicted from his apartment and left by his young wife. Desperate for income, he flees unpaid speeding tickets and the horde of yuppies in San Francisco, he drives south with his buddy (Jim Belushi) to cover the Salvadoran Civil War. Having spent several luxurious months in the country in the late 60’s, and having befriended a Salvadoran colonel, he is unprepared for the deadly chaos he encounters as far right death squads terrorize the countryside, wantonly murdering anyone suspected of sympathies towards the leftist revolutionaries, including four American nuns and Archbishop Óscar Romero.
Redacted
This Brian De Palma directed found footage horror movie is set in occupied Iraq, with a few American GIs as psychotic monsters and their fellow soldiers as terrified bystanders to atrocity. Based on the 2006 Mahumudiyah Killings, which coincidentally mirrored the events of De Palma’s earlier Vietnam movie Casualties of War.
At one point a character recites this story into his camcorder:
A merchant in Baghdad sends his servant to the marketplace for provisions. Soon afterwards, the servant comes home white and trembling and tells him that in the marketplace, he was jostled by a woman, whom he recognized as Death, who made a threatening gesture. Borrowing the merchant’s horse, he flees at great speed to Samarra, a distance of about 75 miles (125 km), where he believes Death will not find him. The merchant then goes to the marketplace and finds Death, and asks why she made the threatening gesture to his servant. She replies, “That was not a threatening gesture, it was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, for I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”
After watching the film, check out the Ebert review. He gave the film 3.5/4 stars and ends with this heartbreaking sentence: “The name of the real girl, who was actually 14, was Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi.”