Front Lines of Community

Hermann Kappelhoff, Daniel Hendrickson

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110467338
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Based on the premise that a society's sense of commonality depends upon media practices, this study examines how Hollywood responded to the crisis of democracy during the Second World War by creating a new genre - the war film. Developing an affective theory of genre cinema, the study's focus on the sense of commonality offers a new characterization of the relationship between politics and poetics. It shows how the diverse ramifications of genre poetics can be explored as a network of experiental modalities that make history graspable as a continuous process of delineating the limits of community.

1Repair Work on the Sense of Commonality

1.1A Snapshot of History: Three War Films at the Turn of the Century

Since the mid-seventies, the Hollywood war film has almost been synonymous with films about the Vietnam War. Only at the turn of the new millennium did large-scale Hollywood productions emerge that once again looked back to the Second World War: SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (Steven Spielberg, 1998) tells of the first days of the invasion in Normandy; Terrence Malick’s THE THIN RED LINE, also from 1998, and John Woo’s WINDTALKERS from 2002 refer back to different stages of the war in the Pacific. If the Vietnam films had been about what was probably the greatest moral crisis of the United States in the last century, the Second World War, as a historical topos of the nation, stands for the exact opposite. In this war, the USA not only became the undisputed military-economic leader of the western world, it also took on – despite Hiroshima and Nagasaki – moral-political leadership.

This suggested the idea that this turn to the Second World War was politically motivated. At the end of the twentieth century it became necessary once again – as was popularly believed – to bolster the moral prestige that the United States had achieved in the greatest moral and human catastrophe of a century familiar with catastrophes. At any rate, these films, which were made before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the quickly ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, instigated a new discussion about the media representation of war and its cultural and political function. In a certain sense, we can say that this discussion continues to this day. It is animated by ever new media forms of warfare, in which the various wars take shape.

On the one hand, the interest in images of war is an immediate effect of the way contemporary wars appear in the media. On the other, and precisely in light of the turn of the millennium, it became clear that even the greatest crimes and catastrophes of humanity – the Holocaust, the World Wars, the atom bomb – fade as memories when the eyewitnesses begin to die. War films, and the discussion of war films, are thus closely linked, particularly in Europe, to a discussion about collective memory and cultural remembrance.

Correspondingly, the discussion about the war film – in part a result of the films I have just named – primarily circled around the question of the media and practices of collective memory. Hollywood’s politics of memory was especially discussed in relation to SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. Already with SCHINDLER’S LIST (1993) Spielberg had presented a film that inserted the historical testament of the Holocaust as a melodramatic staging of genre cinema into the popular historical image of Hollywood. SAVING PRIVATE RYAN also presents itself as a telling rearrangement of historical facts and visual documents. But the question was not primarily about historical knowledge or cultural forms of memory; in fact, Spielberg’s history films were discussed as examples of a post-classical blockbuster cinema, which – under the sign of the end of history – put aesthetic experience in place of historical consciousness.8 But it does not seem very sensible to me to oppose history in this way with spectacularly staged acts of remembrance. An image of history also remains linked to the poetic processes of its production and presentation, even if it is subject to the operations of scholarship.

In fact, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, WINDTALKERS, and THE THIN RED LINE each engage with media factors and poetic processes in highly specific ways, which is the basis of the historical image of the Second World War; an image of history that is quite overwhelmingly determined by photographic and film documents. So, not only in their subject matter, but also in their arrangement of dramatic conflict, the films revert to the stereotypes and visual standards that had been used to shape the classical Hollywood war film over three decades. At any rate, what these films have in common – and do not share, for instance, with productions such as PEARL HARBOR (Michael Bay 2001) or WE WERE SOLDIERS (Randall Wallace, 2002) – is that rather than referring to historical positionings they refer to pictures and documents, which themselves belong to a past time. SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, for instance, ostensibly borrows from the screen epic THE LONGEST DAY (Ken Annakin/Andrew Marton/ Bernhard Wicki/ Darryl F. Zanuck) from 1962; but above all the film refers to countless film documents that were created during the landing of the allied forces at Normandy.

In no way do I understand this recourse to the previous visual documents as any self-sufficient postmodern poetics of pastiche; the films are much more concerned with the audiovisual images as the circulating testaments of a historical catastrophe that is fading in the memory of the living generation. I would like to discuss how this is presented in detail by means of three film-analytical sketches.

I begin with Spielberg’s SAVING PRIVATE RYAN before turning to John Woo’s WINDTALKERS and finally to Terrence Malick’s THE THIN RED LINE.

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN: the sentimental scene of commemorating war

One family, three generations … parents, children, grandchildren. A field of graves, endless, unrestricted by any horizon. The montage forms an impression that is already implied by the architecture of the military cemetery. Gravestone after gravestone is lined up in diagonal rows; each of them can be singled out and enumerated in itself, but seeing them all together like this, they all add up to an image of the literal innumerability of the dead. The white monuments are as homogenous as the uniforms of soldiers, the only difference being that between the Christian cross and the Jewish Star of David.

A close-up shows the face of the veteran (see Figure 2). This introduces a flashback, which begins with the event testified to by the innumerable stony witnesses in the graveyard: the great loss of life at Omaha Beach. The sound design, the sound of the landing boat, already pulls the spectators into the visual space, even before the ramps are opened and the infantrymen at the front of the boat are relinquished to enemy fire.

With no establishing action, the theme of the next 20 minutes starts with a bang. The first rows of soldiers die as a living shield, making it possible for those following to advance, step by step, row by row, onto the beach peppered with mines and fencing. The troops push onto the land, while the individual soldiers, tattered and shot to pieces, head toward the prize made possible by this movement.

Within its first twenty minutes, SAVING PRIVATE RYAN draws on all the registers of audiovisual rhetoric that the cinema has developed for battle scenes to put this monstrosity on the screen. A montage of dissociated spatial and sound perspectives opens up a space of chaotic perception; the camera moves between diffusely attributable shots, just above or below the water, like a swimmer – or a drowning person; sometimes obstructed by the water spraying up; sometimes the smeared spurts of blood make the lens itself visible. What we see gets detached from any attributable perspective, becomes distant, viewed as through a glass pane. Even the level of sound is composed out of an impression of multiple perspectives, moving between the muteness of the soldiers falling into the water and the deafening noise of the explosions.

Finally, the audio perspective opens up to the emptiness of a muffled echo chamber; the effect is like the self-perception of the inner sounds of our body, like what we hear when we hold our ears closed. In fact, this echo chamber, shut off to the outside, is the first perspective clearly attributed to an individual body. The turmoil of the battle becomes a horror film; mute cries, thudding inaudible shots, soundless grenade explosions, bodies torn to pieces. We see the protagonist’s face: a shell-shocked face.

Figure 2: The face (SAVING PRIVATE RYAN).

As a whole, the staging of the scene is aimed at producing the largest possible discrepancy between the perspective of a living individual, enclosed and disorientated in the events of the battle, and the cinematographic description of that battle. The paralyzed face joins these two perspectives to each other.

Enclosed within the thunder of shots, then in the quietness of this foreign body, a peculiar form of subjective perspective unfolds for the spectator; he senses himself to be physically quite near, and at the same time he is kept at an absolute distance – as the counterpart to the traumatized face. The camera simulates the fragmented view of overextended perception, while nonetheless maintaining the position of the sovereign spectator.9 What the troops manage to achieve only through great suffering and sacrifice is possible for him without any effort whatsoever. Seeing and hearing the whole time, the spectator crisscrosses through the spatial simulation of the chaotic perceptual consciousness of a body dazzled and numbed by horror and pain; he finds a first narrative foothold when he sees the face of the star, Tom Hanks, associated with the muffled echo chamber, which surrounds him in the movie seat (much like the interior view of the shell-shocked face). A dialogue is initiated; first still without sound, then comes the first exchange of words. Little by little a figuration of plot is formed from the scenario of horror: “How can we crack that bunker up there?” When the soldiers overtake the beach, scale the bluffs, and take the bunker, the spectator finds himself in the action space of a clear reality, once again securely in the space of classical narrative cinema.

The transition into the mode of narration is marked by a precise cusp. Only at the moment when it becomes possible to catch a glimpse of the enemy by means of a mirror does the narrative perspective become stable.10 The journey into the interior of the country, the landscape of Normandy, the reconnaissance patrol with the special mission, the decisive battle, all of this takes place in the mirror of the classical Hollywood war film and of the audiovisual documents of the Second World War, which circulate in the media.

We understand the flashback as a movement of memory, described not only in the fiction of the character, but also on the real level of the film spectator. What for the character is a passage through a trauma, behind which the space of memory opens up, functions for the spectator as a mirror reversal of the sequence of action in the classical war film. There, the agony of the soldiers, the shell-shocked face, is the last image; here it is placed at the beginning. In the spatial simulation of the chaos of a catastrophe that overstrains every individual consciousness, the presentation of this face forms the first crystallization on which an episodic action can gradually become anchored, the germ of a narrative, of a genre tale.

The same reversal also takes place on the level of the dramatic conflict. While the opening sequence offers up all possible means of cinematic representation in order to allow the unbearable act of violence to be grasped by the senses, an act which consists of literally employing the life and limb of the individual as the medium of the onward motion of the troops, the film’s plot reverses this order. It is not the individual who dies for the intangible community, but the mission of saving the individual life that brings death to nearly the entire unit. With this story, Spielberg seems to resolve the fundamental conflict of the classical war film, that between providing an image of sacrifice and testifying to an act of violence, in a paradoxical way of reading the founding act of the nation. The right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, this highest value of the political community, is secured and maintained through the sacrificial death of innumerable individuals. In fact, however, the face of the weeping veteran among his family transfers the historical pathos of the shell-shocked face into a sentimental image of remembrance. The soldier, who comes back to the graveyard, thinks of his commander’s last words: “Earn this.”

After nearly everyone has fallen so that he, James Ryan, can keep the right to life and liberty, this last order seems as terrible to us as the image of the battle at the beginning of the film. But the guilt that this survivor has to deal with consists only in bringing to an end the platoon’s mission, for which the others died. He owes the dead nothing more than to use his life and liberty to pursue happiness. This is why, at the end of the film, it is not the pathos formula of the shell-shocked face that we see, but the weeping face of the remembering survivor.

The surviving soldier at the grave of his fallen comrades, his face, the tears turned away from the family; the wife, the children, the grandchildren stand slightly off in the background, their gaze fixed on the weeping man. This scene is also a reprise of another scene; we might think of it as the primal scene of bourgeois sensibility. Indeed, here Spielberg is reconstructing a scene of pathos-laden remembrance, and its serial repetition almost designates the movens of sentimental entertainment culture: the family gathered at the father’s deathbed, merging into a community, their feelings focused in the same direction as they empathetically gaze at the dying man. In his play Le Père de famille (1758), Diderot deployed this scene as the prototype of the sentimental theater with the purpose of newly re-staging it over and over again in order to awaken in the audience the idea of a community connected to one another by the bond of their shared sensations.11 For the sensitive bourgeoisie, this bond was sentimental compassion. Seen in this way, it is in fact the primal scene of an art and entertainment culture that constructs media in order to configure affects. At any rate, the closing scene of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN could not have been better arranged to illustrate the character of the absorbed beholder, which Michael Fried has developed as the type-case for this subjectivity.12

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN lets the war film end in this scene of sentimental remembrance. In fact, Private Ryan’s family, positioned in a half-circle in the background of the image, confronts the film spectator as a community, literally drawing him or her into their circle; indeed, they are connected through the shared gaze at one and the same scene of someone weeping at a graveside – as if the circle of community were closing around the mourning face together with the gaze of the anonymous audience in front of the screen. The montage breaks up the figuration with a line crossing in order to link this c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Shell-Shocked Face: Prologue
• 1 Repair Work on the Sense of Commonality
• 2 The Poetology of Genre Films
• 3 The Emergence of the War Film Genre: A Construction of its Poetological Origins
• 4 Genre and History
• Genre and Sense of Commonality: An Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Film index
• Subject index