Some years ago, a friend, off to a debate on free speech, noted merely that he was set to discuss “yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre”. The point being that, in such discussions, someone inevitably argues that this is one of the things free speech should not allow.
Similarly, any consideration of the pros, cons or mere existence of the anti-war film will quickly get around to an indestructible quote from François Truffaut: “There’s no such thing as an anti-war film.”
The French film-maker’s argument was that the persuasive tools of cinema – editing, acting, cinematography – cannot fail to generate a surge of interest. All that talk about the gruesome opening of Saving Private Ryan put viewers in a state of heady, wary excitement before we had even cut back to 1944. They were then urging the troops on as the ordnance churned blood into the surf. Maybe Truffaut was on to something.
The quote gets dragged out every few years. It was about when Sam Mendes’s film 1917 almost won the best-picture Oscar. It was about when the most recent version of All Quiet on the Western Front also came close. It has been wielded this month as Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare makes its own counterargument to Truffaut’s dictum.
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The harrowing film, re-enacting an incident from the Iraq War, has already caused gnashing of teeth. On the one hand, Gregory Nussen, writing in Deadline, calls it a “perfidious advertisement for military recruitment”. On the other, Will Poulter, star of the picture, argues that “this is as much an anti-war film as you can possibly hope to see”. Empire magazine agreed, suggesting “it may well be cinema’s most effective, purest anti-war film”.
One does want to hear if those (and there were more) calling it a recruitment film themselves felt inclined to sign up. Or are they better able to see through propaganda than poor, ignorant Joe Six-Pack?
Based entirely on first-hand accounts, the film goes among members of a US navy Seal squad as, eviscerated by grenade and IED, they hold off antagonists until help arrives. We see limbs blown off. We see intestines splayed. The latter half is underscored by the desperate wailing of the injured.
Then again, though the film does nothing to recommend the combat experience, one struggles to locate an argument for the wider ineffectiveness of war as a method for settling disputes. Horror is not enough. The beginning of Saving Private Ryan is disturbing – for a mainstream release, anyway – but nobody with even half a brain could argue that Steven Spielberg’s film sees the Allies’ methods as unjust.
Saving Private Ryan is anti-pain. It is anti-death. But it is, at least as far as one side is concerned, reluctantly pro-war. Garland and Mendoza’s film, in contrast, seems unmoved by the rights and wrongs of the larger conflict. Focused on the platoon alone, it allows no Iraqi a voice or viewpoint.
So there’s no such thing as an anti-war film? Truffaut would surely accept that even the most unapologetically gung-ho combat flick tends to include some brief “war is hell” content as balance. Alistair MacLean adaptations such as The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare allow their heroes – Gregory Peck and Richard Burton, respectively – impossible moral dilemmas alongside opportunities for selfless bravery. The Great Escape ends with a massacre in a field.
Few of those titles most proudly trumpeted as “anti-war” manage to follow through on the billing. Apocalypse Now? Don’t make me laugh. For all the babies with severed arms and maniacs placing heads on spikes, Francis Ford Coppola’s picture remains one of the self-consciously coolest entertainments of its time. Lieut Col Kilgore, the surfing cavalry officer played by Robert Duvall, is as charismatic as he is crazy. Dennis Hopper is a riot. Laurence Fishburne is the bees’ knees. All this to The Doors and The Rolling Stones.
Elem Klimov’s renowned Come and See, many smart people’s prime candidate for greatest anti-war film, could certainly not be accused of inclining to rock’n’roll cool. Detailing unspeakable atrocities during the Nazi occupation of then Byelorussia, the 1985 Soviet film is unrelenting in its ratcheting of audiovisual horror. It is free of sentimentality. It is free of mythic heroism. It does not absolve even the home partisans of cruelty. And yet. Nothing in Come and See deflates admiration for the Soviet Union’s epic response to the German invasion. There is no implicit argument here for placing flowers in the SS’s Schmeissers.
The big truth is that, while most sensible people are anti-war, at least as many are in favour of certain individual (just?) wars. The little truth is that the counterargument – non-negotiable pacifism – does not make for good cinema. An Odyssey in which Ulysses was interned as a conchie would never have survived for more than 2,000 years.
