The War List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[swo17]

Out of curiosity how many people are planning on including films about films dealing with more ancient wars (let's say non-gun based for my lack of thinking up a solid all-encompassing term)?

Cabiria comes to mind as one worth consideration.

[Shrew]

I want to consider ancient/non-gun stuff, which is partially why I came up with that third rule in my list above. I do think a lot of ancient stuff falls solidly into the "epic" genre, but I feel more comfortable discounting them because of that then just because the war is fought with swords.

Case in point, I'm currently wavering on the Polish Black Cross/Knights of the Teutonic Order that I just saw earlier today. It really only becomes a war movie in the last 30 minutes, and even then it's more in the usual epic mode of battle. I plan to rewatch Ran and Kagemusha and consider them, but I think Seven Samurai probably swings toward the action/adventure genre. Ugetsu might also qualify.

As for Homefront/Homecoming films, I'm partially motivated to make one easier clean sweep that make a lot of murkier and more arbitrary choices. All Hail the Conquering Hero and The Best Years of Our Lives aren't hard to make allowances for and they're pretty directly invested in the war, but then there's a line to decide what invested in the war or its aftermath means. Is Miracle at Morgan's Creek a war film, or Some Came Running dealing enough with a soldier coming back from the army?

For now, I may just keep separate running lists of combat/war films and homecoming/homefront films and decide to mix them together later on.

[matrixschmatrix]

Dom's writeup of First Blood reminded me of my 50th place vote for the 70s list, Rolling Thunder- the most extreme and direct of the Vietnam vets alienated at home subgenre I've seen, and a brutally effective if not quite to my taste film overall.

I'm normally fairly conservative with my genre definitions, but I'm looking forward to looking at something like From Russia With Love or The Wall through the lens of a war movie- I think one of the interesting things here will be which movies try to paint war as meaningless vs. which implicitly assume the viewer will consider it of paramount importance, which make combat glorious vs which make it ugly, and which consider soldiers as people and which think of them largely as types, all of which to me require working outside of the straightforward men-in-combat kind of pictures.

There are a couple of episodes of The Twilight Zone that might legitimately be listworthy on this one, though I have to rewatch them.

[Lemmy Caution]

There are a couple of episodes of The Twilight Zone that might legitimately be listworthy on this one, though I have to rewatch them.

Interesting thought.
The first that come to mind:

A Quality of Mercy (1961) where a young American platoon leader is faced with a cave with a few Japanese soldiers, and then a put-yourself-in-their-shoes twist comes in. Pretty powerful. (S3 E 15)

Two (S3, E1) starring Charles Bronson and Elizabeth Montgomery as the only folks around, who happen to be on opposing sides.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (S5, E22)

I'm sure there are others.

[matrixschmatrix]

Those are quite good ones- the ones I had been thinking were the many episodes about the threat of nuclear war, particularly Time Enough at Last and The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, but it's a show that was particularly focused on wars past and present.

[Mr Sausage]

Can Raiders of the Lost Ark be considered a war film since it takes place in 1936, three years before war was declared (or Poland was even invaded)? Does pre-war work like post-war, and where do you make the cut-off point?

[domino harvey]

I listed it in my prelim listing (not sure it'll make the final cut though). I think anything with Nazis past, present, and future is fair game. I kinda like it but not enough to make my list, but something like the Boys From Brazil should be eligible on the other end of the spectrum even though it takes place far after the war

The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street

Huh, it's not one that immediately sprang to mind, but this is an inspired choice for a war-related Twilight Zone episode, especially since it addresses in broad strokes so much of the paranoid, xenophobic pull that wartime worries can magnify

[colinr0380]

And Colin, are Public Service Broadcasting well-known in the UK? I found the recent album pleasant in a kind of third-rate Pell Mell meets whoever did the samples for Godspeed You Black Emperor! fashion, but I have a hard time imagining any of it playing on the radio!

I'm pushing it a little describing Leslie Howard as a pop star with hordes of screaming teenage girl fans, but yes PSB's songs regularly get airplay on BBC 6 Music, this and the remix from Humphrey Jennings' London Can Take It.

On including older films, I'm definitely going to find room for Kagemusha somewhere, as that is really all about leadership in battle!

[YnEoS]

The more I abstractly ponder my preliminary list, the more I realize how many great films there are that are set within wartime, but that I wouldn't necessarily consider pure war genre films. I think when I start writing out an actual list, I'll realize there are way too many great movies that clearly fall into the genre to bother worrying about borderline cases.

But since we're making room for Homecoming/Homefront films and Cold War spy films. I'm wondering how many people are considering something like Closely Watched Trains, which doesn't appear in Criterion's own war films page. Or is anyone else planning on saving their #50 slot for something like Grand Budapest Hotel?

[bamwc2]

With the discussion of war episodes of The Twilight Zone, I immediately thought of the episode "The Purple Testament". It's about a WWII soldier who mysteriously develops the ability to tell which members of his platoon are going to die that day, and the reaction of his fellow soldiers who want to know whether it's their turn. It's far from their best episode, but still an above average one in my book.

[rawlinson]

Can I throw in a recommendation for Jennings' The Silent Village? It's the story of the Lidice Massacre, relocated to a small Welsh mining village.

[Black Hat]

This is an interesting list to me as you're not quite sure what fits in the list, would something like Zerkalo qualify? What of the many Polish films, Ashes and Diamonds, Austeria? Eroica on the other hand for sure. On a more recent tip, what about The Grand Budapest Hotel? A case can be made for that to be included as well.

[Mr Sausage]

There's no point in history untouched by war, so you could conceivably choose anything. Making a list will be a lot easier if your personal rules about what counts are more, rather than less stringent.

[Lemmy Caution]

episodes about the threat of nuclear war, particularly Time Enough at Last and The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, but it's a show that was particularly focused on wars past and present.

I also thought about Maple Street -- one of the classic TZ episodes.
Another unconventional sci-fi war-related episode: The Invaders (S2, E15) in which Agnes Morehead single-handedly battles an invading force.

[Black Hat]

There's no point in history untouched by war, so you could conceivably choose anything. Making a list will be a lot easier if your personal rules about what counts are more, rather than less stringent.

Of course but it will remain highly subjective.

[YnEoS]

Well, I'm personally going to weigh my votes based on how much I like the film as a war film. So I won't be selecting a group of films that qualify and then selecting my favorites out of those. I'd rather compare them based on how important their war elements play into my appreciation of them. So my top votes will go to the films that I think are both masterpieces and clear examples of the war genre, and if I find 50 of those, then that's my list.

But I do think it's interesting to discuss films where war is an important factor, but dealt with more tangentially. Since there are a lot of films I may not have considered war films when I first watched them. But if a lot of people think they make an important contribution to the genre, I might be more likely to re-watch and re-evaluate them under the war-genre lens.

[Gregory]

A great Civil War themed Twilight Zone episode is "The Passerby" from season 3. And another
"nuclear war fear" one is "Third from the Sun" from back in season 1. And an episode that deals with veterans experiences and also had a Vietnam War subtext was "The Encounter" (season 5), though it was deemed offensive to Japanese Americans due to something in one of the characters' backstory and the episode was pulled from syndication.

[zedz]

Settle down, this is going to take some time.

The reason I voted for this genre is because I realized a while back that a lot of my favourite films count as war movies, even when that’s not the way I primarily think about them. Andrey Rublyov, Ugetsu Monogatari, The General, A Canterbury Tale and La maison des bois are all fundamentally films about life during wartime, even if none of them might leap to mind as conventional ‘war movies’ – and I daresay all of them are all a lot more insightful about what war actually means to ordinary people than nine out of ten men-in-combat movies. So I figured this would be an interestingly pliable genre with which to play, and it could take in a lot of really great films.

So what isn’t a war movie?

I’m defining war as, you know, actual war. Wikipedia suggests a reasonable definition of “an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political communities.” If that’s the background of a particular film, then it’s fair game for me, whether the focus on the film is armed conflict, the homefront, the resistance, prisoners of war, life in the warzone, or immediate recovery from the war. In some cases that background might be too much in the background for me to consider a film a ‘war movie’ (The Cremator springs to mind), but that’s more of a feeling than anything that’s easy to define.

No metaphorical wars. There are so many films revolving around major armed conflicts between or within states that you don’t need to stretch the definition of war to find worthy movies. So: no ‘war on drugs’, no ‘gang war’, no ‘war of the sexes’, no ‘class war’, ‘war on conformity’ or ‘battle of the bands’. And no Cold War films. Just because it’s a pervasive metaphor doesn’t mean it’s not a metaphor. As has been pointed out, most of these are espionage films, and a different generic beast, and lord knows there have been enough actual international conflicts arising from the Cold War to fill up any quota. I can probably excuse The Manchurian Candidate, since it’s specifically tied to the Korean War. I also won’t be including films that focus on the military, but not in the context of a war (e.g. Beau Travail, The Desert of the Tartars). So, no to Bill Douglas’ My Way Home, but yes to Miklos Jansco’s.

Sometimes it’s a very hard call to make. I’m strongly inclined to include Alan Clarke’s Contact, but I don’t think I could include Elephant. Same general conflict; different perspectives.

So now let’s throw out some contenders. I’ll suggest a few frontrunners in each category, then follow up with other random recs that spring to mind.

Straight War Movies

Films about men in combat:

Men in War (Anthony Mann) – About as good as this stuff gets, with the psychological acuity you’d expect from Mann in this period.

Objective: Burma (Raoul Walsh) – A perfectly generic subject elevated to greatness by Walsh’s brilliant three dimensional mise en scene.

The Red and the White (Miklos Jansco) – One of the few films that conveys just how arbitrary, bewildering and terrifying warfare must be for your average footsoldier.

The Marines Who Never Returned (Lee Man-Hee) – Yes, that title is a bit fat spoiler, but the filmmakers know that their film is so great that it doesn’t matter. This film has some of the best defined and most visceral combat sequences I’ve ever seen.

Plus: Cross of Iron, The Big Red One, The Thin Red Line, They Were Expendable, Wooden Crosses, Ivan’s Childhood, Overlord

The Homefront

Heimat (Edgar Reitz) – Only a portion of this fifteen-hour monster deals directly with WWII, but it’s a hefty portion, and that material colours the entire film.

La maison des bois (Maurice Pialat) – Maybe the most bucolic war movie ever made, with WWI haunting the film rather than imposing itself upon the action.

Organ (Stefan Uher) – If you’ve seen The Sun in a Net, you’ll want to see all of Uher’s 60s films. Well, here’s one that relates to this project! A military deserter hides out in a monastery in a small town.

The Catch (Nagisa Oshima) – Some Japanese villagers capture a black American airman while Oshima gleefully tears the scabs off Everything That’s Wrong With Japan Today.

Plus: The Song of the Grey Pigeon, A Canterbury Tale, Spirit of the Beehive (perhaps), Cargo 200 (probably not, but it’s a film where the impact of a distant war on people back at home is absolutely catastrophic)

Resistance

Homefront films tend to shade into resistance ones, but that’s no matter:

Went the Day Well (Alberto Cavalcanti) – A speculative homefront / resistance / invasion film that’s like Powell & Pressburger gone feral, and it’s absolutely brilliant.

Confidence (Istvan Szabo) – One of the most chillingly paranoid films ever made, as well it should be.

The Train (Frankenheimer) – Just a great, rollicking, downbeat action movie

Plus: Army of Shadows, The Mortal Storm (if I stretch a couple of definitions), Kanal

Life During Wartime

Civilians living in warzones, or the people servicing the military. Some really great films here, looking at war from a slightly skewed angle.

Red Angel (Yasuzo Masumura) – The first time I saw this movie, I realized with a jolt that I’d never actually seen a truly anti-war film. Sure, almost every war movie worth its salt pays lip service to the old ‘war is hell’ saw, and many go a lot further than that, but almost all of them can find some saving grace in the situation, even if it’s only comradely solidarity. In this film, it’s just unrelenting horror and waste. You have been warned. This is the first of my spotlight films.

Story of a Prostitute (Seijun Suzuki) – Almost a companion piece to Masumura’s film, but the hallucinogenics take the edge off.

Signs of Life (Werner Herzog) – This and the next recommendation are sort of ‘eye of the storm’ films: films about soldiers in wartime which eschew combat and focus on downtime. In Herzog’s masterful debut, though, that downtime drives the protagonist up the wall. This film must take the prize for cinema’s most artfully sublimated battle scene.

A Time Out of War (Denis Sanders) – Lovely Oscar-winning short in which two civil war soldiers get to know one another during a one-hour truce, before they have to start trying to kill each other again. If that doesn’t get your attention, consider that Charles Laughton saw this film and immediately hired the Sanders brothers to help him realize the river sequences in Night of the Hunter.

Plus: Ugetsu Monogatari, Andrey Rublyov, The Silent Village

Prisoners of War

I don’t really see how you could exclude Holocaust films from consideration here.

Captured (John Krish) – Amazing ‘instructional’ film that works even better as a nuanced psychological drama.

Diamonds of the Night (Jan Nemec) – One of the most beautiful, harrowing and exciting films on my list. Filmmaking doesn’t get much better than this.

The Round-Up (Miklos Jansco) – Psychologically punishing film that demonstrates with depressing efficiency that some techniques of abuse never go away.

Plus: The Ascent, Passenger, War (Balabanov)

Documentaries

So very many to choose from, but I’m probably going to be reasonably sparing with them in my list. I’d say, for instance, that The Architecture of Doom – relevant as it is – isn’t really a war documentary. Shoah, shure, and likewise The Sorrow and the Pity.

Crazy (Heddy Honigmann) – Honigmann practically specializes in examinations of the impact of war (and other catastrophic geopolitical events) on the lives of everyday people, and this doc (which also placed high on my documentaries list) is probably the most poignant and intimate of them all. A bunch of people who have worked in modern war zones select a piece of music that relates to their experience and listen to it, then start talking about what it means to them. A devastating film (and not just because you have to sit through Guns ‘n’ Roses Geneva-Convention-violating version of ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’). This is my second spotlight title, if you can find it.

Witnesses (Marcel Loszinski) – In place of Shoah, I’m opting for its dwarf cousin. Less than half an hour, but just as horrifying. It’s made all the worse because technically, it’s a (shudder) post-war film.

S.S. Ionian (Humphrey Jennings) – I know I pimp this in just about every list, but I’m quite prepared for it to be my most frequently recurring orphan. Obviously there’s a lot of Jennings in contention for this list. Do yourself a favour and grab the BFI’s sets.

79 Primaveras (Santiago Alvarez) – At the moment, it looks like this might be my only Vietnam film.

Plus: Night and Fog (obviously), Brutality in Stone (maybe), Lessons of Darkness (oddly enough), Blockade

Odd Ones Out

But wait, there’s more! Some of these don’t fit into any other category easily, or are great films I’m in two minds about classifying as war movies.

The General (Clyde Bruckman / Buster Keaton) – One of the greatest comedies of all time, but also featuring a beautiful and painstaking reconstruction of the Civil War. Doesn’t readily fit into any of the above categories (it’s hardly a conventional combat movie, even if it is all action) but will nevertheless be near the top of my list.

Chimes at Midnight (Orson Welles) – Great battle scenes in this one, even if it might not immediately spring to mind as a war film. Plenty of Shakespeare qualifies, but only Olivier's Henry V stands a chance of also making the grade.

The War Game (Peter Watkins) – Speculative war movies are a bit of a grey area (how about The Sacrifice, a film entirely about averting WWIII?) but I don’t see how this can be ruled out. And check out Culloden as well.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Powell / Pressburger) – Obviously a war film, even if it sprawls across a number of the above subgenres.

City of Sadness (Hou Hsiao-hsien) – Whether or not I include this will depend on whether on not I can count the White Terror as a continuation / extrapolation of the Chinese Civil War. I’m tending towards inclusion, since it’s set before the technical end of the war in 1950. If I hung its inclusion on Taiwanese martial law than I could bring in A Brighter Summer Day as well, which is tempting but seems wrong to me.

Newbies

Rather than bury them in the above categories, I wanted to draw attention to some great war movies from the last ten years or so.

Generation Kill (various directors) – This is what David Simon did after The Wire, and it often gets described as ‘The Wire Goes to War’ or somesuch, but apart from its density and scepticism about institutions it’s really a different kettle of fish. And it’s great. Go watch it.

In the Fog (Sergei Loznitsa) – Tense, gorgeous resistance drama from one of Russia’s greatest ‘new’ filmmakers (he’s actually pushing fifty).

Between Two Worlds (Vimukthi Jayasundara) – This stunning visual experience is part realized myth, part psychodrama, but in the background some kind of armed conflict is spreading across the landscape, and the movie evokes that particular kind of disorienting nightmare brilliantly.

[domino harvey]

As this project's Il Duce, I'll direct your attention to the first post: one Spotlight only. The trains, however, will be running on time. I assume you'll want Red Angel to be your pick of the two? Or has this Amazon review swayed you in a different direction?

this is NOT what I was looking for.
It is all subtitles, very violent, rape etc. not for me or my family.

[zedz]

As this project's Il Duce, I'll direct your attention to the first post: one Spotlight only. The trains, however, will be running on time. I assume you'll want Red Angel to be your pick of the two? Or has this Amazon review swayed you in a different direction?

this is NOT what I was looking for.
It is all subtitles, very violent, rape etc. not for me or my family.

That's swayed me in the right direction! (And Crazy is probably moot anyway unless it's surfaced on subtitled DVD somewhere.)

Whoever mentioned The Miracle of Morgan's Creek above: I remembered it just after I submitted my post and immediately added it to my list, so that's one vote for it!

[Gregory]

Red Angel (Yasuzo Masumura) – The first time I saw this movie, I realized with a jolt that I’d never actually seen a truly anti-war film. Sure, almost every war movie worth its salt pays lip service to the old ‘war is hell’ saw, and many go a lot further than that, but almost all of them can find some saving grace in the situation, even if it’s only comradely solidarity. In this film, it’s just unrelenting horror and waste. You have been warned.

I'm not clear on how comradely solidarity would negate a film's portrayal of (a) war as a futile, tragic mistake based on lies. As in one of the most notable examples, All Quiet on the Western Front, I think that quality just makes it all the more tragic when lives full of promise just keep going down the drain. The "war is hell" theme you mention that's in so many combat films keeps them ambiguous or even skirts around potential questions about whether it's "hell" but in the noble cause of protecting our side's freedom, or is it "hell" and also a wretched, terrible thing to spill all this blood under the orders of distant leaders and their planners and advisers?

[zedz]

Red Angel (Yasuzo Masumura) – The first time I saw this movie, I realized with a jolt that I’d never actually seen a truly anti-war film. Sure, almost every war movie worth its salt pays lip service to the old ‘war is hell’ saw, and many go a lot further than that, but almost all of them can find some saving grace in the situation, even if it’s only comradely solidarity. In this film, it’s just unrelenting horror and waste. You have been warned.

I'm not clear on how comradely solidarity would negate a film's portrayal of (a) war as a futile, tragic mistake based on lies. As in one of the most notable examples, All Quiet on the Western Front, I think that quality just makes it all the more tragic when lives full of promise just keep going down the drain.

Oh, I don't think it negates any of that larger stuff, but it's still remains as a positive factor within the film, or a saving grace in a horrendous situation. For me, Red Angel is so striking because it's so thoroughly stripped of anything remotely positive, and when I was watching it I realized just how rare that is in movies.

[Gregory]

That's true. Another contender, and an equally harrowing (but recommended) viewing experience is Come and See.

[domino harvey]

I haven't seen Red Angel but yes, Come and See is my default "anti-war" pick too. A great film that will make my list despite having no desire to ever experience it again

[swo17]

What kind of a zedz list is it without Sherman's March? (Or does that veer too far off topic to qualify?)