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In Reply to: Ditto posted by Victor Khomenko on November 15, 2004 at 10:20:01:
Maybe I'm missing something, but I feel like you're knocking it almost a priori for its content on the basis that Normandy battle-vets are liable to be moved by it a priori for its content. I sympathize with this prejudice to an extent: extremes too often earn quick and easy praise. Actor's who play, for example, retards almost always turn in, in my opinion, meretritious performances, while those successfully creating nuanced, three-dimensional characters get overlooked in favor of the former. So, yeah, Big Battles designate Serious and Important Work, often regardless of their real cinematic merits. But surely there will be attempts at depicting what it's like to be in the thick of battle that fail and attempts that succeed (whether the viewer was there or not). How would you have done Spielberg's Omaha Beach sequence differently from a stylistic standpoint and why? I'm curious.
Follow Ups:
If I may interject...One way to show the horror without graphic detail, is to show it in the eyes of the survivors, and in the way they interact with each other after the battle, and how they interact with their (new) reality. Of course, that has been done before with varying degrees of success by other directors, so Spielberg would have had to be creative to come up with his own way of doing it - something that he seems incapable of.
Actually, the famous beach scene just raises the bar for the next guy, to make such scenes even MORE realistic, and thereby de-sensitizing the audience to such scenes.
In Vino Veritas
***Maybe I'm missing something, but I feel like you're knocking it almost a priori for its content on the basis that Normandy battle-vets are liable to be moved by it a priori for its content.Not at all. I am 'knocking' if you will the attempts at using the vet's reaction as some proof of film's quality. As I said, that reaction has more to do with the history and events rather than the way it is being portrayed. When it comes to events to which we have strong emotional attachment the artistic means almost don't matter, as long as they are within reason.
How would I do it I don't know. I guess that is why I am not a script writer or director. But I have seen enough films to know it can be done differently, and most importantly, it concerns the ways in which the horrors are related.
Yes, when the bullet hits the body we all react. But many great directors have been able to convey the shock, the horror, the fear, etc, without actually resorting to plastic guts and red paint.
I am pulling this at random, but for instance the final scene of Gallipoli has as much grip and horror, yet there is no actual bullets and open wounds. And somehow it becomes more effective.
...showing horror without showing horror is art. Showing horrir by showing horror is artisanship.Often it is the anticipation of horror that is much more horryfying than the very act of violence. Spielberg is unable to do that, he needs to show the actual act.
Esp. with the Gallipoli reference, but I think there's something about the sanitization of violence in film--a problem I think in a lot of ways retroactively exposed by the first twenty minutes of SPR--is a real problem, specifically in cases in which, as a matter of content, violence can't be avoided. For example: the storming of Omaha Beach. I think most film deaths elide something essential to the experience of loss by almost always letting us somehow say our goodbyes. When a hero or even just some minor character or friend or foil is killed, there's always some kind of looking into the camera, a conscious recognition of impending death on the actor's face, some kind of communion between the departing and the soon-to-be-berieved. Rarely dead and that's it. No goodbyes. The shock of authentic-looking violence in SPR--of violence done to the human body, the destruction often so complete that, if there's any thing left to say goodbye to, it's still been mangled and distorted beyond recognition--I think comes closer, above and beyond the gore, to presenting the reel sensory violence of loss than any other war film I've seen, Gallipoli included (though Gallipoli is far and away the superior film--again, I'm talking specifically about how Spielberg rendered the storming of Omaha Beach).But in other scenarios, delicacy is best. The murder of the son in In the Bedroom, for example. You're with the girlfriend when she hear's the gunshot, not with the victim when he receives it, which is exactly the right move, as the victim's experience, given that he's killed, isn't a viable perspective through which to present that scene, as the dead don't live with experience and have nothing to say to us about how they died. As a movie about loss, it must be done from the perpective of the berieved, and the horror of that gunshot and the site of his lifeless body on the kitchen floor after, deformed and deprived of goodbyes, is powerfully affecting, and not the kind of move I'd ever expect from Spielberg, that's for sure.
Well, what you are saying makes sense, and perhaps I will re-watch the SPR's Omaha part to see if this is true... as I watched it last time I simply felt cheated, and the hair on my neck is usually good indicator - you know, you feel it without wasting words. All my reactions to it were negative, and I am a guy who loves battle scenes.I hope you don't ask me to watch the rest of that gem, though.
I need to watch Gallipoli again. It's been years.
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