After Victory
Olaf Möller
War is big, the movies tell us. The most hyped-up, cost-intensive, special-effects-laden films of the last, say, two years have almost all been about war: at the time of my writing this, James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) has just hit the screens, while Michael Bay’s Transformers – Revenge of the Fallen (2009) still hasn’t vanished from them. But war is all the rage not only in the realm of the blockbuster (sic!). Smaller-scale and/or more art-house-minded works also deal with the subject these days, and are taking top honours: the last Golden Lion at Venice was awarded to Samuel Maoz’s claustrophobic tank film Lebanon (2009), while San Sebastian’s Golden Shell went to Lu Chuan’s monumental re-envisioning of the Nanking Massacre, City of Life and Death (2009).
The film’s interest in the enemy’s motivation made City of Life and Death a scandal in certain strata of the People’s Republic of China society: Lu Chuan, contrary to ‘established practices’, portrays the Japanese as something other than riben guizi (Japanese devils), without trying to find any excuses for their behaviour – and why should he? At the same time, worshipping the spirits of the war dead at Yasukuni Shrine is becoming an increasingly acceptable practice in Japan – especially ever since a prime minister was seen lost in prayer (or campaigning) there.
More examples at every scale and of every provenance could be given, all adding up to a single, disquieting truth: We do seem to live in a time of war. But was there ever a time when we did not? All through the past century of cinema, this war or that was raging, with veterans a daily sight on our streets. It’s just that we stopped noticing them after a time. Looking at war and cinema is therefore a rather logical thing to do.
Concerning the programme’s title, ‘After Victory’ should invite an ironic reading, as victory (or defeat) seems to be the Alpha and Omega of almost each and every war movie, with the aftermath of all the mayhem/spectacle as an addendum. But then, this aftermath is actually the programme’s main interest: nations, their mythologies, are built on wars and their (re)telling; people’s lives are haunted by the experience of combat, the memories of what they have seen and done; landscapes and soulscapes are ravaged for decades and centuries.
In the end, I decided to focus the programme on four wars (particular war theatres) for which historians as well as politicians have expressed renewed interest in the last few years: the Lebanon War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Algerian War and the Philippine-American War. Each of them was the subject of an outstanding film/video work in 2009: Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon and Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death have already been mentioned; then there’s Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Where is Where?, and finally, John Gianvito’s Vapor Trail (Clark).
A fifth war – or more precisely, a whole inter-connected set of wars, the Break-Up of Yugoslavia – is the focus of a short film programme on war veterans and their ways of living amongst us after the war is over.
Veterans, their memories, are also key to the programme’s Israeli section. Both Lebanon and Yossi Somer’s Resisim (1989) are based on memories of war veterans, while Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort (2007) was criticised in some quarters for featuring actors who hadn’t done military service in some of the more important roles. One might say: That’s the reaction of a society Yaky Yosha warned us about in The Vulture (1981).
The fact that the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Algerian and the Philippine-American Wars are generating so much interest shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise. The campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have colonial motives written all over them, so looking at colonial wars seems rather obvious.
The Philippine-American War won the US its main base in Asia, which later made the wars in Korea and Vietnam possible (to simplify something far more complex). What’s rather telling is how few people actually know about this war, one of the last century’s most important. The paradoxical-seeming title Memories of a Forgotten War (Sari Raissa Lluch Dalena & Camilla Griggers, 2001) does indeed nail something. A reason, certainly, why John Gianvito went to such lengths to tell this war’s history in detail in Vapor Trail (Clark) while investigating the pollution caused by Clark Air Base: the destruction of a whole ecosystem, the death of thousands and the illness of probably millions. Vapor Trail (Clark) deals with war’s aftermath in ways few other films ever have.
The renewed interest in the Algerian War is certainly in no small part due to the much-advertised War on Terror. Here we have another war against people of Islamic belief, another war rooted in a concept/practice of terror, another war that brought torture back into the public eye. Which, probably, inspired Nikos Papatakis to re-work his chef d’œuvre vraiment maudit Gloria mundi (1976/2004), a meditation on terror tactics, film making and the limits of empathy.
The latter is something that Ahtila’s rich and truly astonishing Where is Where? and René Vautier’s masterpiece Avoir vingt ans dans les Aurès (1972) are fascinated by as well: How, if at all, can you feel the pain of others? Is it possible to re-live other peoples’ brutalisation? Asking these questions apropos a work from a country that had absolutely nothing to do with the war in question seems appropriate, for an injury to anyone haunts culture as such (or at least it should…).