C'est la guerre: J. Hoberman on Cannes and the contemporary war film

LIKE MUCH IN contemporary Hollywood movies, the current model combat film was developed by Steven Spielberg. Saving Private Ryan (1998) provided a total immersion in state-of-the-art virtual carnage--the opening D-day landing is the most impressive demonstration of cinematic virtuosity of Spielberg's career--while conspicuously failing to provide any historical context. Representing World War II but thinking Vietnam, Saving Private Ryan proposed the army's band of brothers (rather than, say, the Nation or some abstract ideal or even the nature of the enemy) as war's ultimate source of moral justification.

Although released two summers too late to help the last-hurrah presidential campaign of World War II hero Bob Dole, Saving Private Ryan did create the template for the Mogadishu bloodbath of Ridley Scott's Black Hawk Down (2001) and the gruesome Battle of la Drang in Randall Wallace's We Were Soldiers (2002), both movies that, fortuitously opening during the war against the Taliban, were publicly endorsed by the Bush administration. Indeed, Black Hawk Down's "leave no man behind" sell line succinctly encapsulates the tautological argument that wars are essentially fought to rescue those soldiers who have been sent to war. (That this rationale has yet to be advanced for the American commitment to Iraq hardly means that it will not be. During the 2000 campaign candidate Bush declared Saving Private Ryan his favorite movie.)

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Of course, Saving Private Ryan isn't without its own historical context. With impressive sleight of hand, Spielberg managed to evoke the inspirational rhetoric of Ronald Reagan's 1984 D-day pageant while channeling the battle-hardened brutalism of Samuel Fuller, patron saint of New Wave and neo-New Wave filmmakers from Godard to Tarantino. Fuller, a onetime infantryman who was wounded twice in World War II, often maintained that it was impossible to show combat on the screen--unless, perhaps, one were to "fire real shots over the audience's head [and] have actual casualties in the theater."

Fuller once said that the response he wanted from his war movies was that "only an idiot would go to war"; asked if Saving Private Ryan was an antiwar film, Spielberg offered a Zen paradox: "It's an antiwar film only in that if you want to go to war after seeing this picture, then it's not an antiwar film." Fuller loathed "phony heroics"; Saving Private Ryan reconfigured World War II as a mission to save a single soldier. Hardly inspirational, Fuller's The Big Red One (1980) recounts the war as a series of grotesque (or grotesquely corny) adventures in which Lee Marvin's stoic god of war leads a platoon of callow recruits through the carnage. (In one Fullerian gag, Marvin is briefly captured and smooched by a Nazi doctor who exclaims, "I adore supermen!" Hate merges with love as the enemy is personalized.) Saving Private Ryan ends on a note of divine redemption; Fuller's stand-in in his quasi-autobiographical labor of love concludes that surviving is war's only glory.

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Last May The Big Red One resurfaced--some forty minutes longer than its release version--to shake its gory locks at the generally war-obsessed 57th Cannes Film Festival. Held in the aftermath of what was then the bloodiest month since the US-led coalition invaded Iraq, haunted by the revelations of prisoners tortured at Abu Ghraib, dominated by the first screenings of Michael Moore's rapturously received Fahrenheit 9/11, Cannes premiered not only the "restored" Big Red One but also meditations on the Bosnian war by Emir Kusturica and Jean-Luc Godard, as well as the West's canonical war text in the form of Wolfgang Petersen's Homeric epic, Troy. ("They'll be talking about this war for a thousand years," publicity-minded Achilles--or rather, Brad Pitt--predicts.)

Unlike Petersen's CGI brawn-fest, The Big Red One is all the more horrific for being obvious make-believe. Similarly, for all the impressively choreographed visceral hysteria of its first hour, Kusturica's antinationalist but deeply sentimental Life Is a Miracle--a lusty Muslim-Serb romance meant to illustrate the bromide that love conquers all--seemed more abstract than Godard's perversely serene evocation of the same conflagration, Notre Musique (Our Music). Olympian in its detachment, Godard's film is nonetheless heartfelt in its desire to simply acknowledge, as the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas might have put it, the preeminence of the Other.

Can our irascible Godard be reconciled? The question underlies the seventy-four-year-old director's meditation on landscape after battle. Notre Musique is another (and scarcely the least) of Godard's elegies--for twentieth-century Europe, the cinema, and himself. Set mainly in Bosnia, the movie takes as its ruling metaphors the ruined Sarajevo library and Mostar's stari most, the sixteenth-century stone bridge that outlived the Ottomans and the Communists and withstood two world wars before being pulverized by Croatian artillery in 1993. Godard observes the French engineer Gilles Pequeux rebuilding the Mostar bridge: The process, which involves painstakingly labeling and reassembling every stone salvaged from the river, suggests old-fashioned editing.