For cinema’s entire lifespan, much attention has been paid to “anti-war” filmmaking. From 1930’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” the earliest authentic depiction of harrowing warfare, to “Saving Private Ryan,” whose opening sequence was so crushingly real that it stirred up effects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in World War II veterans, countless filmmakers have utilized the medium to provide brutally-realistic representations of genuine combat. Yet, truthful or faithful depictions of battle do not necessarily mean a certain film opposes or critiques war as a concept. In fact, “anti-war” filmmaking is not only routinely misapplied, but also much more elusive than many think, as evidenced by Kathryn Bigelow’s widely misinterpreted film “The Hurt Locker.”
Audiences and critics apply the term “anti-war” to essentially any film that depicts war in a somewhat realistic way, which means most everything outside of political propaganda and G.I. Joe. Yet, when one carefully examines the way a film treats the specific conflict shown, as well as the concept of war in general, the adoption of this characterization does not seem to fit.
Furthermore, many directors of supposedly “anti-war” films believe that true art must transcend politics. They do not want to muck about in the terrestrial domain of interminably-opposed political factions and states; leave this work to the propagandists and bureaucrats. This high modernist mindset leads filmmakers to attempt to separate the public or political dimension from the private dimensions of their films and focus on the latter.
Yet, as American Marxist Fredric Jameson has written, one cannot fully detach a work from its political context. This is not to say that the pursuit of sublime art is unattainable or foolhardy, just that one available interpretive method for any piece is always its political unconscious. Thus, though filmmakers believe they are creating apolitical cinema, these films do contain a political undercurrent that runs counter to its “anti-war” reputation, either with a mood of ambivalence or actual justification of a certain conflict.
A blatant and recent example of a supposedly apolitical “anti-war” film which satisfies neither of those categories is “The Hurt Locker.” As one of the only major mainstream films to deal with the highly-controversial United States invasion and occupation of Iraq, audiences praised Bigelow’s film as it made its way to six Oscars, including best director and best picture.
The film begins with a half-hearted reference to war as a drug, which it never sufficiently supports and never even brings up again. It depicts violence and the negative psychological effects of combat, yet it does not develop any of these into active or well-formed critiques. The film essentially only concerns itself with the individual experience of soldiers, not a broader argument on war, which ultimately only alienates audiences from formulating a commentary.
Throughout the film, scenes of violent combat tonally clash with awkward sequences that praise soldiers in almost cartoonish ways, such as a final slow-motion shot of a swaggering superhero-like trooper. In this way, Bigelow portrays war as an unfortunate, yet necessary, reality that honorable individuals undertake and that the general public cannot themselves understand or comment upon. War sometimes presents dirty and regrettable circumstances, but in the end, is as sure a thing as death and taxes. “The Hurt Locker” is not expressly pro-conflict or pro-violence; yet its message is so muddled that war as a concept emerges largely unscathed.
Contrast this with perhaps the most famous (and deservedly so) “anti-war” film ever made, the Soviet director Elem Klimov’s “Come and See.” An analysis of its unsparing two-and-a-half-hour runtime could span tens of articles on its own; but I will focus here on a moment that encapsulates “anti-war” filmmaking at its most distilled and meaningful. After suffering through weeks of horrific brutality after joining the Red Army as a teenager, the film’s protagonist, 14-year-old Belarusian Florya Gaishun (Aleksei Kravchenko), comes upon a picture of Adolf Hitler lying immobile in a puddle. With a rifle in his hand, the boy finally has some symbolic power against the man who caused the atrocities the film has so unsparingly depicted. He fires repeatedly at Hitler’s face, each shot intercut with reversed footage of Hitler’s life and World War II’s carnage. As he shoots, the montage of Hitler moves further and further back through the 1940s to the late 1930s and Hitler’s rise to power. With the shocking violence of the harrowing combat he has just endured etched onto his once-youthful face, the boy seems to undo the effects of Nazism before our eyes as he destroys the face of its evil.
Then, the montage reaches a shot of Hitler as a child, sitting with his mother, and the boy stops. Florya sees the image of the young man who will one day engender such carnage against the boy’s family, friends and country, finally at his mercy. Yet, he chooses not to continue the cycle of violence and endless warfare by killing yet another innocent. This, compared to the confused underdeveloped mess of “The Hurt Locker,” is true “anti-war” filmmaking. “Come and See” not only realistically depicts war, but through its characters and plot, actually positions itself against warfare and violence on a larger scale.
While critics apply the term “anti-war” to seemingly any realistic cinematic depiction of combat, the term should only really refer to films expressly or unconsciously opposing war on a large scale. “Anti-war” films do not need to be specifically partisan — but believing that one’s film transcends politics altogether often means an implicit acceptance of the very thing that film aims to critique.
