Perspectives on War: An A-Z

Fergus Daly guides us through some of the highlights in the century lens history of films dealing with war.

Chilean film-maker Miguel Littin's 'Alsino' dates from 1982 and concerns guerrilla warfare in Nicaragua in the late 1970's. Dean Stockwell plays a US Army officer befriending a local boy who dreams of flying in what is a fine example of magic realist inspired South American cinema. Episode 6 of Andrei Roublev (1995) contains some of Tarkovsky's most overtly violent imagery as Roublev witnesses the sacking of Vlaidimir by the invading Tartar army.

Jean -Pierre Melville's L'Armée des Ombres (1969), by turns thrilling film noir and moving melodrama is arguably the most impressive of all portrayals of the French Resistance. The Ascent (1976) was Larissa Shepitko's last film before her accidental death in 1979 and won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. This harrowing account of partisans captured and tortured by occupying Nazi troops in Belorussia is widely available on video.

B The Battle of Algiers - Bergman - The Best Years of our Lives.

Film Fleadh regulars will be familiar withThe Battle of Algiers (1965) since its director Gillo Pontecorvo attended the festival a few years ago. The importance for political cinema of the 1970's of this depiction of the Algerian Guerrilla struggle against the French, with a score by Ennio Morricone, cannot be overestimated. Bergman's two major explorations of war,The Shame (1968) and The Serpents Egg (1977), are highly contrasting works, the first in Bergman's singular minimalist style, the second one of his more unfortunate forays into camp theatrics.

Wyler's The Best Years of our Lives (1946) is a three hour saga, shot by Gregg Toland, dealing with the difficulties faced by three returning servicemen attempting to reintegrate themselves into civil life. Fredric March (surely Hollywood's most underrated star) is superb in a classic that is one of the few multi-Oscar winning films to deserve the awards.

C Casablanca - The Cold War - Come and See

There is little that can be said about Curtiz' Casablanca (1942) except that if you're not already convinced see it again! Cold War films are too numerous to mention, yet no one has surpassed Carol Reed in capturing the psychological cruelty and architectural barrenness of the conflict in both The Third Man (1949) and The Man Between (1953). Come and See (1985) is a startling, sometimes horrifying reconstruction of the massacre perpetrated by German troops in Belorussia in 1943 when some 690 villages were torched and their inhabitants brutally murdered. Heavily influenced by Tarkovsky, director Elim Klimov seems to rage not only against his country's invaders but also against the unfathomable twist of fate which had brought about his wife Larisssa Shepitko's recent premature death.

D The Damned

Part outlandish camp melodrama, part Baroque exploration of relationships with an insidious undertone, Visconti's 1968 take on the rise of Nazism is best appreciated as part of a great oeuvre dealing with individuals, families and societies disintegrating under the weight of the past.

E Espoir - Europa

André Malraux' 1939 account of the Spanish Civil War is much loved by Godard and features strongly in his Histoire(s) du Cinéma. Europa(1991) is Lars Von Trier's fascinating, Kafka-inspired comic fantasy set in post-war Germany and the first sure sign that he was something special, a promise more than fulfilled since then with The Kingdom and Breaking The Waves.

F Rainer Werner Fassbinder - John Ford - Fragments of Isabella.

Towards the end of his life, Fassbinder, with the Marriage of Marie Braun (1978), Lili Marleen (1980) and Veronika Voss (1982), turned for the first time to the Nazi period as an essential component in his economistic genealogy of contemporary German society.

Whether dealing with the American Civil War, the Irish War of Independence or the two World Wars, John Ford as ever never put a foot wrong. With films such as The Lost Patrol (1934), The Informer (1935), The Long Voyage Home (1940), They Were Expendable (1945) and Horse Soldiers (1959) he created some of cinema's most enduring images of battle and conflict. Ronan O'Leary's Fragments of Isabella is a feature length monologue based on a book by holocaust survivor Isabelle Leitner impressively performed by Gabrielle Reidy.

G Philippe Garrel - Jean-Luc Godard - Partricio Guzman

Garrel's Liberté La Nuit (1984), like Godard's masterpiece Le Petit Soldat (1960), is set during the Algerian War. Since the early 60's Godard has used film as his means of political intervention, for example with Les Carabiniers (1963), Letter to Jane (1972 - an analysis of a photo of Jane Fonda in Vietnam) and Forever Mozart (1995 - set during the Bosnian conflict). Guzman's film Battle of Chile (1973-8) is according to 'Time Out' "not only the best film about Allende and the Coup d'état but among the best documentary films ever made"

H Hiroshima mon Amour - Hitchcock - Hitler, a film from Germany.

Hiroshima mon Amour (1959) with its combination of Renais' formal innovation and Duras' elliptical script continues to startle. There is a complex interweaving of personal and global tragedies as Hiroshima and Nevers habour two incompatible memories in this hymn to impossible love and lost lives.

With Hitchcock, it's hard to choose between so many classic war based films, but the best are probably Notorious (1946 ñ set during World war II) and North by Northwest (1959 ñ Hitchcock's Cold War epic)

Syberberg's tour de force from 1977 has to be seen to be believed. Running for seven hours and featuring Hitler in puppet form, it ploughs through German cultural history mixing up Wagner, Walter Benjamin, Nazi propaganda and the cinema in an attempt "to defeat Hitler cinematographically, to turn his weapons against him." Susan Sontag has compared the film to late Joyce "the film tries to say everything. It is one of the great works of art of the 20th Century." [note: a subtitled version is currently available on video].

I Ivan's Childhood (1961)

Possibly the greatest film in existence dealing with war. Ivan, the tousle-headed boy whose learning zone is the battlefield and whose visions and memories of innocence as imagined by Tarkovosky contain some of the most astoundingly beautiful images in all of cinema.

J Jeanne la Pucelle ñ La Jetée

Rivette's 1994 reading of Joan of Arc mythology, in particular her incredible cinematic incarnations in Dreyer and Bresson, is in two parts, the first of which concentrates on Les Batailles. However, as befits a Rivette film, it is more concerned with preparations for and effects of battle, the 'dead time' between encounters, than with the events themselves.

Chris Marker's 'photo-novel' La Jetée (1962) (his only fiction film before this year's Level Five ) has a futuristic third world war scenario but, through the combination of a highly poetic voice-over and the intriguing other-worldly nature of its images, proves to be a short film of incredible melancholic intensity.

K Kader + Kloss - Komitas - Kurosawa

Kader + Kloss' The Shop on Main Street (1965) is a very moving account of the micropolitics of fascism in small town Slovakia during World War II. Don Askarian's Komitas (1988) is, by all accounts, a stunning portrayal of Armenian musician 'Komitas' and his response to the massacre of two million of his fellow countrymen by the Turks during World War I. This is the kind of film that ought to be revived by our film festivals and/or released on video. Kagemusha (1980), Kurosawa's haunting saga of warring clans in 16th Century Japan is probably the finest of his films with a war theme.

L The Legend of Suram Fortress - Letters from a Dead Man - Losey - Lutitsch

Suram Fortress (1984), the second last of Paradjanov's four great masterpieces, depicts the Georgian legend of the boy who sacrifices himself to protect his nation from Islamic forces, visualised by the director in his usual spellbinding manner. Letters from a Dead Man (1986) is Tarkovsky protégé Lopushansky's partly successful attempt to depict a post-nuclear Holocaust scenario in his master's style. Losey's great contribution to the genre was Mr. Klein (1977) in which Alain Delon plays an art dealer who is mistaken for a Jew and goes to the gas chambers in his obsessive efforts to clear his name. Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be (1942) is one of his funniest, most audacious comedies, controversial in its time for lampooning rather than condemning Nazi behaviour.

M A Man Escaped - Minnelli - Mirror

"The kind of film which inspires awe even in an atheist". 'Time Out's judgement of Bresson's 1956 film A Man Escaped captures perfectly the effect of this tale of a Resistance fighter's escape from a German prison. Of all the cinema's great 'drunk' scenes (Laughton in Hobson's Choice, Milland in The Lost Weekend, Sellers in Lolita, Donnelly in The Dead). Keenan Wynn's performance in Minnelli's 1945 charmer The Clock has got to be the most hilarious. Shot in one take lasting 3 1/2 minutes Wynn rambles at top speed from one topic of conversation to another, his body propelled by his words all around the establishment. What is wonderful is that this is the only scene in which the character appears in this tale of a pair of lovers (Judy Garland and Robert Walker) wandering the streets of New York counting the hours before Walker goes off to war. In Tarkovsky's autobiographical Mirror (one of his greatest works) the director depicts his life against the background of the wars and conflicts of the middle half of this century.

N Night and Fog - The Night of San Lorenzo - Nube alla Resistenza

The Taviani's wistful Night of San Lorenzo (1981) describes the flight from the Nazi death camps. The Taviani's wistful Night of San Lorenzo (1981) describes the flight from the Nazis of a group of Tuscan peasants. Straub/Huillet's From the Cloud to the Resistance (1979) has been summarized by Straub as follows "From the cloud, that is from the invention of the gods by man, to the resistance of the latter against the former as much as to the resistance against Fascism."

The remainder of this article can be found in Film West 29.