*Extra Credit* Thematic Essay

During World War I, film was introduced as part of the strategic war-waging mechanism to capture a bird’s eye view of the enemy. That niche evolved in the Second World and Cold wars when film became fodder for the propaganda machine, and, hot or cold, war was the popular dynamic between clashing ideologies. More recently, film has exported the experience of war beyond the real-time audience of boots on the ground. By making the human carnage of the Gulf and Iraq wars (as well as of humanitarian crises) visible (read: “real”) to an otherwise uninvolved public, and given an international community struggling to substantiate the lip service it pays to international law and assumptions of human dignity, film has turned the idea of “cinema as war fodder” on its head and made the declaration of war in fact less viable. Whether used to inflame or arrest public support for military intervention on behalf of nationalism, capitalism, “freedom”, or [insert your favorite call to arms here], for both its sensory appeal and elucidation of human tragedy, filmic representations of war make for good cinema.

As described by the French director Abel Gance, cinema is unique for its ability to give the audience “that strange sensation…of cancelled time and space.” Because war is already ingrained in the cultural logic of men, when used to portray the “facts” of a war story such a temporal vacuum easily absorbs the audience. Barthes adds to this the idea of the studium of war, its “application to a thing, a taste for someone…[participation] in the figures, the faces, the gestures, the settings, the actions.” Great cinema magnifies real human truths: just as comedians are funny when they reflect real-life frustrations (See Ellen Degeneres on mechanized toilet flushing), and drama is sad when the tragedy is relatable, so too is war universally feared (or, if not, then respected) for its wake of human destruction. Everyone can relate to something in that; everyone knows or at the least can understand the humanity in a war film, the frequent ambiguity of good and evil, and the extenuating circumstances and cultural logics that prevent absolute distinctions. The sensory and emotional appeal of war is such that every individual is drawn into the proverbial bigger picture, regardless of spatial or temporal displacement.

Good cinema is emotive and “travel[s] straight to the hearts of audiences” through a conduit of individuals: it is through the vicarious experience of characters that the experience of war is internalized. Film viewing can be likened to a hallucination in which the screen acts as “point of passage,” transporting the audience to someone else’s time and place. The sensory overload of war is sufficient in its own right for the purposes of historical transportation; what defines “war” as a cinematic genre, however, is the handling of truth through individual suffering without the expense of macro-world depth. As Peter Almond explained, in film stories, it helps not only to have dramatic characters in dramatic situations that determine their direction in the story and make the story compelling, but that there must also be a strong, familiar premise (e.g. war). The war backdrop presents the audience with the inherent absurdity and depravity of war. As such, its continued representation through a medium of recognizable characters may contribute to its obsolescence (a new angle on the democratic peace theory).

War is cinematic because the micro-level storyline allows for unpredictability, despite the known outcome of an historical event. The characters that carry the film against the backdrop of epochal issues are the instruments of suspense, such that a script must be character-oriented, thereby attaching the audience to their fate, when that of the world has long-been decided.

“War is cinema and cinema is war,” says Paul Virilio. Without experience in the film industry, it’s difficult to back up that latter statement, but the first assertion speaks to the fact that society often tries to make sense of reality, of tragedy, loss and the gamut of human emotion in a cinematic way: that is, by presenting them via the experience of believable film characters, proxies for real world people.

In his efforts to bring well-known historical events (and non-events) to life, Koji Masutani used several stylistic tools: augmenting the background noise at President Kennedy’s press conferences such that those scenes completely filled Joukowsky as if it were Kennedy’s own stage; trapping modern footage in black and white such that the passage of thirty years was blunted; and using as few filters as possible, thereby allowing Kennedy to speak for himself. Without the juxtaposition of modern-day interviews with Kennedy’s contemporaries, the audience saw Kennedy not as a historical figure but as someone speaking to them about carrots and sticks.

The premise of Kennedy’s ability to avoid recourse to violence against the Red Threat in Cuba and Vietnam, while interesting of itself, is already known to “Thirteen Days” and “Virtual JFK” audiences. What makes the threat – and, in other cases, practice – of war cinematic, is the careful character development against the larger premise and alongside a powerful musical score such that the viewer is transported into the storyline and lives the anxiety and absurdity of war. Assuming a world of rational actors for whom human suffering is, at best, distasteful, continuing to bring war into the cinematic realm may increase the pressure for nonviolent resolutions to transnational conflict.

My lease on this idealism expires in May; let me enjoy it until then.