[D66] Sam Mendes’ 1917

[A.OUT]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/17/the-best-films-of-2019/


On 18-01-2020 07:29, A.OUT wrote:
> “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.
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