A True Anti-War Movie

I was thinking about starting a thread on this topic. My original thought was how everyone regards Full Metal Jacket as an anti-war film when Kubrick was intending on making, as he put it, a “war film”. In my opinion Jacket is one of Kubrick’s worst films. Despite having a nearly flawless first half as soon as the action moves to Vietnam it looses any kind of coherence. It makes earlier work of his, like Killer’s Kiss, look clean and focused. This doesn’t help that the only characters worth caring about are killed off at the halfway point, for the rest of the movie Modine is just a cipher for the audience. It can said that the Jacket is one of the few American made Vietnam movies that does not sympathize with the American servicemen. But it shows why so many movies fall in that trap, THE CHARACTERS ARE JUST NOT INTERESTING! After that the audience only has the film-making style to hold their attention.

I can recall a college professor of mine, he is a contributing essayist to the Criterion Collection, quote “film is a language made up entirely of nouns.” and “it is really hard to say ‘no’ in a movie”. So the very act of making a film entails validating it’s subject matter. It is entirely up to the viewer to impose whatever value judgments on the content of the movie as they wish. The closest that I have seen to an “anti-war movie” is an Aeon Flux short created by Peter Chung simply entitled War. It takes place in a fictional environment were the two sides are clearly defined. It follows one character long enough only to get a facile idea of their priorities before killing them off to follow another one-dimensional character. The action is exuberantly animated almost glorifying the violence; only taking into account whatever perspective the movie seems to be following. By the end 5 minutes the perspective has switched back and forth so many times that any meaning that can be derived from the violence has been drained away. The final shot hints that the back and forth will only continue.

come and see
paths of glory

I think you’re right in noting there are actually very few true “anti-” war films (if any at all). There is a list somewhere around here and a thread on a the “greatest anti-war movies of all time” and, big surprise, there are no anti-war movies on it! The line between a war movie and an anti-war movie is super thin and probably very subjective as well. Some consider Full Metal Jacket an anti-war movie, but it’s paradoxically beloved of mindless teenage boys and “manly men.”

In my humble oppinion, even senseless violence cannot really count as “anti-war” per se. Even Paths of Glory (while intended as an anti-war film I believe) still portrays a kind of beauty to war. Someone mentioned previously that it was more anti-military than anti-war (criticising the leadership, not war itself) and I find that statement quite exact. I really don’t think an anti-war film can exist in any real sense.

Someone please tell me there isn’t a kind of chilling beauty to the above.

“’War is wrong’ is an absolute."

I contest. Something as fundamental to human nature cannot be “wrong.” If something is “wrong” about war, it’s what it’s evolved into over the course of the last 10-ish thousand years of human history.

I do see your point Anonymouse , its just as much about the spectator as it is about the film

What Happened Was is a great anti-war movie because it’s about things that are much more interesting and important than war. The Rules of the Game is another.

-In my humble oppinion, even senseless violence cannot really count as “anti-war” per se.-

Well, yes, aestheticizing violence complicates an anti-war attitude. I think it’s fair, though, even to say that in a complex work of art dealing with complex human subjects, the pro/anti labels cannot by applied non-reductively. There’s always a certain amount of subjective distillation going on.

Sorry, but how is RULES OF THE GAME an anti-war film?

@Matt Parks: True enough. I just feel you can’t really make a movie against war. You’re just making a movie about war. For some reason you can make a movie against homophobia, abortion or whathaveyou but not war, even notwithstanding the subjective quality of cinema. A true “anti-war” film, as you noted above (apparently facetiously), could only be a film that has nothing to do with war in any way. I mean really, what does an anti-war movie truly look like? War is not a social issue. It’s a social phenomenon. Making a movie against war is like making a movie against… I don’t even know what. I have great difficulty imagining a social condition anywhere near that of war. Love? Again, not a social condition. Love is not diametrically opposed to war. A friendly meeting? That assumes war is a political issue. War is not something you can (ironically) target and slate for destruction. You can’t really grasp it. It’s somewhat of a “chimère”.

It also seems war is something fundamentally misunderstood, which doesen’t help much.

“Sorry, but how is RULES OF THE GAME an anti-war film?”

I was being facetious, Roscoe. I was borrowing the humor of some magazine I looked through a while back that listed the 10 worst Sci-Fi movies and, I don;‘t remember the exact title, but one of them was something like Gone With the Wind and for the reason the editors put "where’s the Sci-Fi." :)

@Raysquirrel:
…an Aeon Flux short created by Peter Chung simply entitled War.

That’s a good example, and in that same animation vein, I’d add a number of shorts by Jan Svankmayer which treat not organized war specifically but atavistic, endemic human aggression…

Also – I’m surprised that no one – that I’ve seen – has mentioned here Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, which he made as an anti-war film, and which fits in his body of work along with Unforgiven and A Perfect World and Gran Torino as a repudiation of physical violence and murder, whether in war or as unadorned psychotic murder or as jammed into the pseudo-moral scheme of omerta…

-I’m surprised that no one – that I’ve seen – has mentioned here Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, which he made as an anti-war film-

Yeah, that’s an interesting one (although I prefer Letters From Iwo Jima to it) because it seem specifically aimed at a single image

one of the most iconic images of WWII, with the specific goal of deconstructing what that image came to mean.

Was the controversy over whether that photo was staged or not ever resolved? The iconic Robert Capa Spanish Civil War photo has a similar debate.

@Matt -

I was struck above all by the way the horror of Ignatowski’s torture/murder is left vague, in Eastwood’s movie: he doesn’t approach it with a prurient interest. These things can’t be conceived, can’t be blithely expressed after the war, because they’re more than any man can process; they overwhelm moral and even descriptive terms and all human emotions because they’re monstrous, unnatural. (I haven’t read the book, but understand that the incident is laid out explicitly there.)

A True Anti-War Movie?

‘Je Vous Salue, Sarajevo’ perhaps: A film that communicates the devastation of war through the use of a single image. An actual image that depicts, without sensationalism, real abuse – real torment – without the need to spend millions of dollars shooting violent recreations of battle sequences that turn human suffering into a spectacle.

A depiction of the most callous act of degradation; implicating the passive observer(s) – and, by association, the viewing audience (humanity in general) – while deliberately illustrating only the ugliness and brutality of such conflict, with none of the pride or the glory.

…I reitirate: how can you be against a social condition? Anti-war, just like anti-war movies, doesen’t make any sense. No matter what your intentions were, you can’t make an anti-war film. You’ll just end up making a film about war or about some other human condition. You can’t be anti-conditional. You can only be for or against a cause or a body or a concept of some kind &c.

To be clear:

A “condition” is defined as: a particular mode of being of a person or thing; existing state.

I’m reducing this problem to a question of semantics in order to avoid cyclic argument.

Rhodapenmark.
The Mount Sarabachi flag raising was photographed twice. It is is the second “staged” photo we are most familiar with.

Beach Red, a Cornel Wilde movie, Red Badge of Courage, and I recently saw Ballad of a Soldier that in my view was very much anti war. I have always loved All Quiet on the Western Front, and Paths of Glory.