Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: The Film of Value
- Part I Film Genres, Film Classics, and Film Aesthetics
- 1 Shooting the City: The Gangster, Manhattanites, and the Movies
- 2 Back to the Future, or the Vanguard Meets the Rearguard
- 3 Flags and Letters, Men and War
- 4 Farce, Dreams, and Desire: Some Like It Hot Re-viewed
- Interlude
- Part II Classification, Re-classification, and Assessment
- Bibliography of Related Criticism
- Index
- Plate section
3 - Flags and Letters, Men and War
from Part I - Film Genres, Film Classics, and Film Aesthetics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: The Film of Value
- Part I Film Genres, Film Classics, and Film Aesthetics
- 1 Shooting the City: The Gangster, Manhattanites, and the Movies
- 2 Back to the Future, or the Vanguard Meets the Rearguard
- 3 Flags and Letters, Men and War
- 4 Farce, Dreams, and Desire: Some Like It Hot Re-viewed
- Interlude
- Part II Classification, Re-classification, and Assessment
- Bibliography of Related Criticism
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
The subject of this chronicle is not the current war in Iraq, or direct filmic treatments of that war, even though these have already begun to be made: witness James Longley's documentary Iraq in Fragments (2005), Philip Haas's fiction feature The Situation (2006), Nick Broomfield's docudrama Battle for Haditha (2007), and Kathryn Bigelow's thriller The Hurt Locker (2009). Nor is my subject metaphorical movie treatments of a “present” conflict, like the Iraq or Afghan one, through the lens of a past war (be it World War II, Vietnam, or Korea). No, my subject here is two films, produced in the twenty-first century, that are directly about World War II: Clint Eastwood's unique “double feature,” Flags of Our Fathers (2006) and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006), both of them about the same World War II battle, the first picture made from the American point of view, the second from the Japanese perspective. (The only remotely comparable work I know is The Human Condition [1961], Masaki Kobayashi's trilogy of films about one Japanese man's continuing, and harrowing, experiences during the Second World War.)
Eastwood's pictures deserve comment precisely because, though they are World War II films made during a subsequent, unpopular war, together they are not meant (as were How I Won the War [1967] and Catch-22 [1970] vis-à-vis Vietnam) to be the metaphorical lens through which we are meant to view the Iraqi conflict (except in the most generalized sense, that war is hell).
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- Screen WritingsGenres, Classics, and Aesthetics, pp. 49 - 60Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2010