|
|
|
Movie Reviews
| Flags of Our Fathers. Dir. by Clint Eastwood. Prod. by Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, and Robert Lorenz. Dreamworks skg, 2006. 132 mins. (Paramount Home Entertainment, http://www.paramount.com/)Letters from Iwo Jima. Dir. by Clint Eastwood. Prod. by Robert Lorenz. Amblin Entertainment, 2006. 141 mins. (Warner Home Video, http://www.warnerbros.com/)
|
| A filmmaker's finding something new to say about World War II must be a little like a historian's adding to the literature on the Founding Fathers. What could possibly be left to say? Yet filmmakers and historians continue to pick up the gauntlet. And sometimes, as Clint Eastwood has done in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, they even succeed. The two movies, released about three months apart in 2006–2007, tell two entirely separate stories about the battle of Iwo Jima—the former dealing with the U.S. experience, the latter with the Japanese. |
1
|
|
Flags of Our Fathers functions more as a history of memory than a history of the battle itself. Its treatment of war and memory is not particularly innovative; no one who has thought seriously about these issues will be surprised by its conclusions. But I find that most of my students have not, and so it will be valuable in classes for that reason alone. |
2
|
|
The film is particularly concerned with how one image—Associated Press (ap) reporter Joe Rosenthal's iconic snapshot of six soldiers raising the American flag on the island of Iwo Jima on February 23, 1945 (often cited as the most reproduced photograph of all time)—has become the archetypal representation not only of that battle, but of the entire Pacific war. Of the six soldiers in Rosenthal's photo, only three survived the battle, and the film focuses on how their role in such an intensely scrutinized event changed their lives forever. |
3
|
|
Flags of Our Fathers is based on the book of the same name, published in 2000 and written by James Bradley, the son of John "Doc" Bradley, one of the three soldiers involved. In researching the battle to gain a better understanding of his father (who steadfastly refused to talk about the war), the younger Bradley discovered that all three soldiers felt deeply ambivalent about how the battle became remembered. Because of the overwhelming emotional response to the photograph back home, the U.S. government decided to use it as the centerpiece in the ad campaign for the seventh, and final, war bond drive later in the spring of 1945. The three soldiers were then flown home to serve as political props in the nationwide tour to drum up support for the bond drive. They were asked to pose as the heroes of a glorious narrative concocted by the government, when they simply felt lucky to be alive. (Clearly, they also experienced varying degrees of survivor's guilt.) |
4
|
|
Furthermore, it soon became clear to all three men that government officials intended to perpetuate various falsehoods about the circumstances surrounding the raising of the flag. For one thing, there were actually two flag raisings (hence, Flags rather than Flag)—the first one spontaneous, the second one (the one Rosenthal shot) when commanders strangely ordered the original flag replaced with a larger one. The men who raised the first flag received no similar coronation. Also, the photo did not record, as was often implied, victory in battle. Rather, it was taken on the fifth of thirty-five days of fighting (which explains the subsequent death of the other three soldiers depicted). |
. . . |
There are about 771 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
