[D66] Sam Mendes’ 1917

[A.OUT]

“A rancid propaganda film with video game aesthetics.” --Rotten Tomatoes

Inderdaad, gisteren gezien. Totaler Schwachsinn. Ik had helaas geen 
rotte tomaten bij me...


On 17-01-2020 07:38, A.OUT wrote:
> wsws.org:
> 
> Sam Mendes’ 1917: A technological step forward, several ideological and 
> artistic steps back
> By Joanne Laurier
> 17 January 2020
> 
> Directed by Sam Mendes; screenplay by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns
> 
> 1917, directed by British filmmaker Sir Sam Mendes (American Beauty, 
> Jarhead, Revolutionary Road, Skyfall), recounts a fictionalized episode 
> set during World War I, loosely inspired by stories told to the director 
> by his grandfather.
> 
> Co-written by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, the movie concerns two 
> young British soldiers on a mission to halt an attack by a British 
> battalion. That offensive would fall into a German ambush leading to the 
> possible destruction of the unit.
> 
> While the film graphically shows some of the horrors of trench warfare, 
> it fails to indict those responsible for the carnage and is oblivious to 
> the war’s socio-historical context. To put it bluntly, 1917 does not 
> qualify as an anti-war film.
> 
> In fact, the movie, treating one of the titanic events of modern times, 
> is largely conventional and intellectually shallow. Fully accepting 
> national divisions and enmities, it opens the door to British and other 
> patriotisms. While 1917 is something of a technological tour-de-force, 
> ideologically it represents a significant regression from anti-war films 
> on the subject of World War I such as Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the 
> Western Front (1930), Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937) and Stanley 
> Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957), as well as Peter Jackson’s 2018 
> documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old.
> 
> Mendes’ movie opens in Northern France on April 6, 1917 and unfolds over 
> a 24-hour period. Two young British lance corporals, Tom Blake 
> (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Will Schofield (George MacKay), receive 
> instructions from General Erinmore (Colin Firth) about a high-risk 
> mission to get a message to a British battalion planning to attack 
> German forces, believed to be in retreat.
> 
> Aerial intelligence has learned that the Germans are not retreating but 
> have only made a tactical withdrawal in order to ensnare their enemy. 
> With communication lines cut, Tom and Will must hand-deliver an urgent 
> message to the 2nd Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment to call off 
> their planned offensive. Some 1,600 lives are at stake, including that 
> of Tom’s brother.
> 
> Passing through British trenches strewn with damaged and war-weary 
> soldiers, many of them boys, the duo cross No Man’s Land, reaching 
> abandoned German bunkers. A rat trips a wire, causing the tunnels to 
> collapse, burying Will alive. Rescued by Tom, the pair continue their 
> journey through a hellish landscape of rotting, bloated corpses, 
> blown-up artillery, bombed-out buildings. It is destruction on an almost 
> unimaginable scale and scope.
> 
> During their perilous expedition, the more cynical Will tells the naive 
> Tom that he traded a combat medal he won for a bottle of wine (“It’s 
> just a bloody bit of tin”). But when tragedy strikes, Will becomes an 
> unstoppable fighting machine. He is warned by a captain (Mark Strong) to 
> “make sure there are witnesses,” when he delivers the message to halt 
> the attack, because “some men just want the fight.”
> 
> In considering 1917 as a whole, it should be noted, first of all, that 
> while Mendes’ grandfather, the future writer Alfred Hubert Mendes, 
> carried a message through hazardous territory in 1917 during the mutual 
> mass slaughter known as the Battle of Passchendaele (in which hundreds 
> of thousands of British, French, German, Canadian, New Zealand, 
> Australian, Indian, South African and Belgian soldiers died 
> pointlessly), the “life-saving” character of the mission and the 
> personal element (the desire to save a brother) are entirely invented. 
> The film has a melodramatically manipulative character from the outset.
> 
> Moreover, the title, 1917, displayed in large typeface in the film’s 
> advertising campaign, is bombastic and even deceptive. For much of the 
> world’s population, its most politically conscious elements certainly, 
> “1917” is identified primarily with the October Revolution in Russia, 
> the event that, above all, helped bring about the end of the bloody 
> madhouse of the imperialist war. If not for the Russian Revolution and 
> the threat of revolution elsewhere (the German Revolution erupted in 
> November 1918), the various Great Powers would have carried on the death 
> and devastation, resulting in even more catastrophic human suffering. 
> Whether intentionally or not, the titling of the film is an effort to 
> “reclaim” the year 1917 for the cause of national honor, patriotism and 
> military valor.
> 
> Leaving the October Revolution aside, the title is disproportionate to 
> the story it tells, which hardly encompasses even the purely military 
> side of the conflict in 1917. The movie’s principal strength is its 
> remarkable cinematography (Roger Deakins), creating an exhausting two 
> hours of terrifying war imagery. As previously noted, the spectator is 
> overwhelmed by visuals and unimpressed by the historical analysis. While 
> there is sympathy for the British casualties, there is none for the 
> German victims. In one scene, Will and Tom try to minister to a gravely 
> wounded German fighter and pay dearly for their merciful efforts. It is 
> a historical fact that the biggest danger to the British soldiers, in 
> the end, came from their own commanding officers and ruling elite.
> 
> The unceasing, tension-filled momentum of the film serves to conceal its 
> essential lack of ideas or criticism. Alonso Duralde at The Wrap noted 
> legitimately that “the movie is more successful as a thriller than as a 
> thoughtful examination of war and its horrors; Mendes seems less 
> interested in bigger ideas about the nightmare of battle and its effects 
> on his characters than he is in Hitchcockian audience manipulation.” 
> Duralde contrasted 1917 with “tales like Paths of Glory or Gallipoli 
> [Peter Weir, 1981] or [Renoir’s] La Grande Illusion, which used the 
> conflict as a way to discuss class or military injustice or the last 
> gasp of the European aristocracy.”
> 
> Along those lines, it is worth recalling director Jean Renoir’s comments 
> in his autobiography: “If a French farmer should find himself dining at 
> the same table as a French financier, those two Frenchmen would have 
> nothing to say to each other, each being unconcerned with the other’s 
> interests. But if a French farmer meets a Chinese farmer they will find 
> any amount to talk about. This theme of the bringing together of men 
> through their callings and common interests has haunted me all my life 
> and does so still. It is the theme of La Grande Illusion and it is 
> present, more or less, in all my works.”
> 
> Mendes’ movie never asks who was responsible for one of the most 
> barbaric episodes in world history, a calamity that resulted in some 40 
> million civilian and military casualties, including an estimated 22 
> million dead.
> 
> In fact, 1917 ’s one political comment on the war comes when a British 
> general utters “The only one way this war ends … is the last man 
> standing.” The claims that the film’s depiction of numerous atrocities 
> makes it an anti-war work are spurious, as is the case in regard to 
> various contemporary movies on the subjects of the Iraq and Afghanistan 
> invasions (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, Lions for Lambs, Mendes’ 
> own Jarhead, etc.).
> 
> It is entirely possible to picture the awfulness of such 
> conflicts—particularly as they affect one’s “own” side—and still insist, 
> or imply, that such conflicts are necessary, inevitable, or, once begun, 
> have to be “carried through to the end” in the national interest. The 
> uncritical, narrowly focused treatment of the immediate “facts” of the 
> war in 1917 helps plant it firmly in the pro-British establishment camp.
> George MacKay in 1917
> 
> Media accounts suggest that Mendes and Wilson-Cairns, described as a “a 
> World War I buff,” were unserious in their approach to the deeper, 
> starker meaning of the events depicted in 1917. Indiewire describes 
> Mendes—appointed a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British 
> Empire in 2000 and only recently knighted, and fresh from directing two 
> empty-headed James Bond extravaganzas (Skyfall and Spectre)—and 
> Wilson-Cairns spreading maps “showing front line locations in April 
> 1917” on the “London kitchen table where Mendes perfected Skyfall .”
> 
> Indie wire continues: “The writers figured out where the French towns 
> were, then traced—and timed—the treacherous route the two infantrymen 
> would take on foot, throwing in incidents and stories they had each 
> picked up over the years.”
> 
> There is no indication that Mendes and Wilson-Cairns carried out 
> substantive historical research into the processes that made the ghastly 
> situation in 1917 possible, much less consulted critics of war and 
> imperialism.
> 
> If they had, they might have learned that not everyone conceives of the 
> bloody inferno of World War I as a clash between the “good” British and 
> the “evil” Germans, the conception the film leans toward. As the WSWS 
> explained in November 2018, the 1914-18 war was not fought, as the 
> British authorities propagandized, “to defend the right of small nations 
> against the depredations of Germany.” Nor was it fought for any of the 
> self-serving, lying justifications provided by the other belligerents, 
> Germany, France, Austria, Russia or the US.
> 
> The relentless blasting of the guns, the senseless mass slaughter in 
> what was later to be falsely labeled the “war to end all wars” or the 
> war to “make the world safe for democracy,” was pursued for the sake of 
> markets, profits, resources, colonies and spheres of influence.” Mendes’ 
> “epic” film has no interest in such matters.
> _______________________________________________
> D66 mailing list
> D66 at tuxtown.net
> http://www.tuxtown.net/mailman/listinfo/d66