Art History for Filmmakers: The Art of Visual Storytelling (Required Reading Range) by Gillian McIver

Author:Gillian McIver [McIver, Gillian]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781474246200
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-03-23T04:00:00+00:00

4.6

The Third of May 1808, 1814

Artist: Francisco Goya (1746–1828)

One of a number of compositions that Goya created around the subject of the Peninsular War in Spain. Critic Robert Hughes says that here “Goya speaks for the victims: not only for those killed in French reprisals in Madrid, but for all the millions of victims destroyed, before and since, in the name of The People.”12

War films have generally been less graphic, though in the harrowing Come and See (1985, dir. Elem Klimov), set in World War II, the child protagonist witnesses a pile of bodies being stacked behind a house, a barn full of people on fire, and a gang rape. All Quiet on the Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930), released as a silent and a sound film, may be the first true “war film” in its realistic depiction of an actual conflict. It did not hide the violence of war: in one memorable scene, during an attack, a soldier grabs onto barbed wire, but when a shell explodes, only his arms are left, hanging from the wire, a scene strongly reminiscent of Dix’s Der Kreig.

The introduction of the Hays Code in 1930 limited the possibilities for screen violence in war films; the emphasis was on bravery, self-sacrifice, and often romantic subplots. During World War II, films occasionally used strong violence to jolt the audience into heightened awareness of the war’s dangers. Bataan (Tay Garnett, 1943) chronicles a horrific defeat of Americans in the Philippines; made just a year after the 1942 events, it depicts stoicism, bravery, and sacrifice but also reveals graphic violence. In the final scene, hero Dane (Robert Taylor) runs out of ammunition but continues firing, with the machine gun pointing at the audience. Interestingly the Battle of Bataan was the subject of two further films. Cry “Havoc” (Richard Thorpe, 1943), about the nurses at Bataan, shows less violence, but at the end has the women surrendering to Japanese forces, their terrible fate implied. Back to Bataan, made in 1945, directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring John Wayne, is highly fictionalized; here the tone is much more upbeat than in Garnett’s film, and the combat less graphic.

The post-Vietnam era offered new departures in visual storytelling. Casualties of War (Brian De Palma, 1989), based on a true story, details the violent rape and murder of a Vietnamese girl by US troops. De Palma returns to the same theme in Redacted (2007), also depressingly based on a true story from the Iraq war, but in this later film he uses a different aesthetic, digital video—camcorder footage, YouTube-like video clips, documentary footage—all created by De Palma. The film is often referred to as a “docudrama,” but it is entirely constructed.

FURTHER VIEWING

Watch these war films for their depiction of violence:

La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)

The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)

Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987)

Interesting war films revisiting history:

Glory (Edward Zwick, 1989)—the US Civil War and the Battle of Fort Wagner

Days of Glory (Rachid Bouchareb, 2006)—French Algerian troops in World War

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