Shooting A Blank: Army of Shadows and Letters from Iwo Jima

Cross-posted at newcritics

I used to love war movies. In part, because they were so darned…reliable.

Serve up a viewing of Bridge Over The River Kwai or The Dirty Dozen, and you could rely on a heapin’ helping of gunfire with the bare minimum of chit-chat. You could rely on knowing – I mean really knowing, as only fellow warriors can know – your racially-mixed band of brothers. And yes, even sniffing away an unacknowledged tear once payment came due on their ultimate sacrifice. You could rely on the fact that – no matter how many times you’d seen the movie before – your heart would race with the fear for your guys. All at once, you’d find yourself wondering if, in fact, the war had not turned out the way you’d thought it had.

Would Jim Brown still take it “all the way” before that final grenade blew up? Would Steve McQueen finally jump his bike clear of that barbed wire fence?

But above all, you could always rely on the fact that – even though the good guys sometimes lost the battle, or even died a nasty death – their sacrifice always brought an end to the insanity and chaos of war. And that meant the return to a benign world in which an 11-year-old could sit watching war movies instead of working in the fields as a Nazi slave, or even doing his homework.

Even when the post-Vietnam crop of anti-war, war movies came along, the rules of the game didn’t really change. If the soldiers’ world in Catch 22 or Platoon was immoral or absurd, it was the absurdity of the war itself, or the foolishness of the commanders, that made it so. Even more nuanced films (or those 2,500-year-old Greek plays) – hinting that the real chaos resided in the human soul – saw war as the catalyst, the releasing agent for passions otherwise held in check.

As I say, I used to love war movies. But, then, I don’t know much about war.

Perhaps that’s why I found watching Army of Shadows and Letters from Iwo Jima such a queasy experience – both in different ways but, I think, for the same reason. They left me with a feeling I can only describe as existential – the sense that behind the horror and chaos and inhumanity of war lay…the real horror and chaos and inhumanity. War isn’t just hell, in other words. It’s even worse…it’s a total blank.


Together with much praise, Clint Eastwood has also enjoyed a fair amount of criticism for his even-handed treatment of a purely Japanese perspective in Letters From Iwo Jima. In the course of the savage battle, in which 7,000 Americans and 22,000 Japanese died, Eastwood is careful to show – in Letters and in the earlier, American-focused half of his diptych, Flags of Our Fathers – instances both of courage and atrocity on the part of both armies.

This, to some critics, made him guilty of a creeping relativism – there were savageries on each side, the reasoning goes, but there was a good deal more of it on one side than on the other. Fair enough, I suppose. But I’m not sure that was Eastwood’s point.

Why, after all, would a filmmaker go to such lengths to make two different movies built around the same event? Because “war is evil, since we’re all just the same underneath the skin?” As a warning about the toxicity of jingoism and wartime propaganda? Maybe. He would have topical reasons aplenty for that approach, heaven knows.

But I don’t think that’s it. Rather, I think Eastwood wants us to experience the same feeling of nausea…of bottomless horror at the brute fact of mortality, no matter which characters are doing the dying. He wants us to feel like we’re all the same under the skin, all right. But he does it by letting us watch as the defeated Japanese soldiers transform themselves through ritual suicide – not into warrior Shinto spirits – but into bloody, truncated flaps of meat.

No glory in victory, suggests Flags. No glory in defeat, whispers Letters. Half of me wonders whether these really qualify as war movies, at all. On the one hand, of course, the action is all about war. But in another sense, the war is just a convenient place from which to look out at the abyss.


Army of Shadows is another oddity of the genre. Released just in the wake of the anti-Gaullist events of May, 1968, Jean-Pierre Melville’s story of the wartime Resistance is told in the somber voice of a still-numb survivor. Its exquisitely neutral slate-blue and gray images are like those of an often-repeated, little-welcome dream, both familiar and repellent at the same time.

Like Eastwood’s films, Army of Shadows is simultaneously about the war…and not about the war. Although the film fairly seethes with Nazis, for instance, we never see them in an act of violence onscreen. Conversely, we’re treated to a positively excruciating scene in which the men of the Resistance execute – literally by hand – a captured informer.

Again in Melville’s film, as in the Iwo Jima diptych, there is no glory in victory or defeat. In fact, there’s no glory at all. There’s comradeship. There’s duty. There’s certainly courage. There’s pity and fear…but without tragedy.

In fact, the film’s most transcendent moment is one that’s told – but unseen. During an earlier imprisonment, the movie’s protagonist, Phillipe Gerbier (Lino Ventura) is, together with his fellow prisoners, herded into a cavernous tunnel, at one end of which is a machine gun manned by German soldiers.

Told by the camp’s commandant to run for his life, Gerbier, aware of the futility, at first refuses. Seconds later, prodded by the Nazi’s pistol, he finally runs and is somewhat too-miraculously saved by his waiting comrades. Yet he soon regrets his decision to run. Perhaps he feels it was a craven cowardice, perhaps a betrayal of a central truth to his existence. The truth that in order to survive, he and the others must accept the fact that they are already long dead.

Later, in the epilogue, we learn that Gerbier, put before the German machine gun a second time, is true to himself and at last, refuses to run. This – in the still-grim winter of 1944 – is as close to a victory as Gerbier will ever get.

Indeed, Gerbier’s truth is at the heart of all three films. The single, unforgettable image for me is that of the burrowed Japanese soldiers, peering out from what will soon be their freshly dug graves into the flat, blinding sunlight of a world that no longer seems their own. They are, in fact, already dead, peering out from their tombs if only to see how the story ends.