Sep. 09, 2009 - Issue #725: Sex in the City 2009

SideVue

Missing in Action

We may have come a long way from “go get ’em, boys” war films, with John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima as tough-guy Sergeant Stryker, the rules tattooed on his back. (And by the 1940s, the UK, Italy, Japan, Germany, and the US all had war-propaganda filmmaking departments.) But Andrzej Wajda’s Katyn—showing at Metro this weekend—shows just how few widely released films have dared to march into the backwoods, distant islands, and remote seas of the Second World War.

Most films about WWII, of course, take on the Nazis. In the past year alone we’ve seen The Reader, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Valkyrie, and Inglourious Basterds. These films revolve around German guilt, the atrocity of the Holocaust, and an effort to kill Hitler. Tarantino’s is in keeping with a grand tradition of widely-seen American films—Saving Private Ryan is the best example—that distorts the United States’ role in the war.

The complicated truth about the Second World War is that, for the most part, the 21st century’s worst mass murderer killed the 21st century’s second-worst mass murderer. Stalin’s Soviet Union lost the most people in the war—between 20 and 40 million—and the Red Army reached Berlin first, even exhuming Hitler’s body before destroying it again. Still, it’s more action-packed and marketable to make a war film—Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Enemy at the Gates (2001)—about a sniper in the Battle of Stalingrad than the hundreds of thousands who died during the Nazi siege of Leningrad, an earlier turning-point in the war (citizens ate sawdust, even dead cats and dogs, to survive).

Most features that we see here show a war where British or American soldiers take on the evil German soldiers, but the civilian massacres in the Second World War are forgotten. Wajda’s Katyn covers the massacre of around 22,000 Polish officers, policemen and civilians by the Soviet Union’s NKVD in the Katyn Forest (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4Nl_Q-EjbA) Wajda’s father was a cavalry officer killed in the massacre, which was blamed on the Nazis in Russia-controlled Poland or simply forbidden to be talked about.

The RAF-led incendiary bombing of Dresden, where at least 24,000-40,000 civilians were killed, is considered by many historians to be a war crime (likely in revenge by Churchill and Co. for the Blitz), since industrial areas were not targeted.

And it’s mostly the “losers” who seem interested in examining the unnecessary brutalities of the war. The Dresden fire-bombing and other bombings, or the sinking of a German liner loaded with refugees by a Russian submarine, are events that have been further explored by German writers W. G. Sebald and Gunther Grass, among others. But the complicated idea of German victimhood has been mostly left off the screen.

One of the most acclaimed books about the war in recent years, A Woman in Berlin, has been adapted for the screen and is premiering at the Toronto Film Festival this week. Around 100,000 women were raped by the Red Army on their march into the capital, and the anonymous writer (her identity since revealed in a controversial exposure) was one of them. The diary was first published in 1959 but then faded from consciousness until it could be republished after the author’s death in 2001 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEZxcSf9HwM).

The Ants, a 2005 documentary by Karoru Ikeya, follows one former Japanese soldier’s trip to China, where he confronts his guilt over his murder of civilians (http://www.arinoheitai.com/english.html). And Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere has just picked up distribution—though how much audiences will care about a woman wronged by Mussolini, rather than the millions killed by him, remains to be seen.

On the winning side, one of the few American films to see WWII as something far bloodier and messier than a moral mission was released the same year as Saving Private Ryan. Terrence Malick’s film about US forces in Guadalcanal, The Thin Red Line is a melancholy meditation. Why is war necessary? Why these bodies in tall grass on hills in a Pacific island? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCmlOhsIwBk).

Most WWII films offer a course of action, a clarity of purpose. After all, what could be more dastardly important to defeat than fascism? But as a film like Katyn shows, to ignore the civilian bombings, the cover-ups, the civilian rapes and massacres of war, is to ignore the trees and see only the forest—the same kind of obliterating overview that not only Hitler and Mussolini but some on “our” side took. V

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