Following Mark’s lead, obliquely, I recalled a film celebrated in Z Channel that I’d always meant to see. I dutifully stuck Stuart Cooper’s Overlord onto my queue, and with equal diligence forgot entirely about it, ’til Mark’s recent post … and dug it out, moved it up–and here we are.
It’s worth seeing. In brief, Cooper tells the story of one soldier off to boot camp in preparation for the D-Day invasion, but he tells it in and out of time, with dreamlike flashforwards and -backs, sequences that seem half-dream or disconnected memory, interwoven with archival footage–particularly many stunning sequences of planes strafing, bombing, or just ominously dragging a shadow over bucolic landscapes. It’s a compact Thin Red Line, as dreamily philosophical as Malick with half the gas, at a third the length; its impact on Spielberg seems evident, as well, as at a fraction of the cost Cooper captures the terrifying moments before and at landfall in Normandy. Maybe that’s unfair, but since aside from Z I’d never heard of the film, and it only recently got the Criterion treatment, it seems crucial to trace its impact on those later acclaimed films.
And like those films, Cooper’s war is gorgeous. Here’s the thing that got me posting–I’d recently seen Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, which deploys some of the trademark Morris tactics (slow-motion, recreation, face-to-camera with long-silent-stares) to untangle both what happened at Abu Ghraib *and* something about the nature of those photographs. It is the former question that matters but the latter question that motivates; the film is strangely uninvolving, too disjointed and oddly without affect, around the brutalities of that prison, and the more insidious bureaucracies which shaped and then disavowed those brutalities.
But something threw the film off: maybe too many voices, too much information to set up, or just the curse of the uncharismatic patsies whose conduct (or, rather, whose photos of their conduct) brought this one instance to very public light. Reading the very engrossing narrative by Philip Gourevitch, drawn from the many hours of interviews Morris compiled, there’s outrage to spare, but there’s also a deep empathy engendered by some of the actors involved, particularly Sabrina, whose flat smiling face repeated–with almost uncanny similarity from shot to shot–next to a tortured corpse, piles of naked men, and so on. She’s a startlingly sad case, her every word seeming a clear indictment (of her narcissistic failure to see anything much beyond how her own point of view) and defense (of her deep sympathies, despite that failure of empathy, and her deer-in-the-headlights personality so far, far out of her ability to make sense). And the book turns from such testimony to the damning evidence of the photographs… and builds a sharp, pointed case aimed at us viewers. With all the outrage rightfully to direct toward the architects of this war and this particular set of circumstances, the book articulates how our attention to these pictures is not unlike Sabrina’s attention to these prisonsers — full of our aroused passions, yet detached from the realities of their production, disassociating from the pain and suffering of those photographed and those snapping shots. In other words, it is an aesthetic argument, aimed at the limits of our appreciation and understanding of photographs to illustrate the profound limits of our political and social empathy.
Morris’ doc hints at such ambitions, but it covers too much ground, too many talking heads, but (worst problem) too many beautiful technologies of film (particularly a lovely, informative graphic which visualizes how the photos from three cameras were time-linked by an investigator). The film’s attention to its own aesthetic production stifled the meta-aesthetic fury of the book; or maybe (we circle back to Overlord and other war films) there’s something too damn pretty and spectacular about much war footage? (Admittedly, I stretch the case with Morris’ documentary, which may be more a prison than a war film. Still…)
Building on our earlier conversations about war films here, and here.
Cooper’s and Malick’s films are both startling and wonderful in many ways… yet they’re so abstract as to be existential. For all the verisimilitude–or, with Cooper, for all that archival verity–these are not films about war but about life and death. Spielberg’s, for all its blunt narrative bludgeoning in the later half, gets something right by using visceral spectacle to prompt our attention to these lives, and these deaths–to the particularities of pain, blood. But there, too, the experience of the cinematic war overwhelms me with the experience of cinema, and war doesn’t register with anything like the same force.
We just re-watched Terence Malick’s “The Thin Red Line,” (1998) a movie which obviously belongs under this heading. I had watched half of it once before, but wasn’t in the right mood at the time. (and you do need to be ready for to get through something like this.) At nearly 3 hours, we watched it all in one sitting – and it’s slow, beautiful, heart-breaking and all of that.
I’m not a fan of war movies. I’d rather watch a dozen horror movies or 7 slow Antonionis before sitting through a “Saving Private Ryan.” And this is a war movie. Adrien Brody gets shot at a lot: good practice for fighting Predators (A.B.V.P.). But while getting shot, we daydream, watch plants, sleep in the rain, admire the natives, listen to the wind, wax philosophically with Sean Penn and all that. I’m not making fun of this. It’s a fantastic piece of art, as hypnotic as Days of Heaven, and with enough surreal bits to make me think of Apocalypse Now frequently.
The cast, talented as it is, can be distracting. After 20 years away from filmmaking pretty much everyone jumped to be in Malick’s comeback movie. Up until the very end new characters are introduced, A-listers to boot, which just seems odd.
I seem to be repeating reviews now that I posted several years earlier. What will this blog look like in 20 years?
Me: “Hey, anyone here like Monty Python?”