![]() Shot in Germany by George Krause on a meticulously prepared battlefield, Paths built its trenches two feet wider than the French originals to allow for the kind of bravura tracking shots that Max Ophuls, one of Kubrick's heroes, would have appreciated.īut when it came to immersing the viewer in the field of battle, Steven Spielberg's WWII opus Saving Private Ryan (1998) set a standard for future war movies that will be hard to match. Paths of Glory is as strong a statement as it is because its war scenes are impeccably filmed, so much so that Winston Churchill admired their authenticity. Starring Kirk Douglas and directed by Stanley Kubrick, its based-on-fact story of French military hypocrisy during the First World War shocked that nation to such an extent that the film was banned in France for nearly 20 years. (Top) Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) (Bottom) William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).(Photos: Photofest) The Devastating Consequences of WarĪmerican filmmakers not only responded to war and other cataclysms virtually in real time-sometimes within a year of when the events were happening-they also responded to the same situations decades later, when advances in movie-making technology seemed to give the newer films a kind of edge, at least in terms of on-screen wizardry.Īmerican films made on World War I, for instance, included 1957's ironically titled Paths of Glory, an anti-war epic with an impeccable pedigree. ![]() With a devastating pandemic whose ultimate impact is still unknown very much with us, coupled with widespread discontent and mass protests over racial injustice, this seemed an appropriate time to look back and examine the kinds of compelling work directors have done in this vein in the past, to examine the widely differing ways they've used their gifts to come to terms with crises that were as unimaginable then as what we are currently going through seems now. Because directors are grappling with these issues themselves, are living through the same things we are, they have thoughts for us as well. It's not answers we look for necessarily, nothing so facile as that, but rather suggestions of possibilities, ideas of how to think about fraught situations. Maybe it's because the screen is so large and authoritative maybe because we all can cite something about life we first learned from film but it is there we instinctively go. ![]() In times of crisis and catastrophe, this ability of movies and their directors to communicate with audiences, to contextualize trauma and impact public opinion with their artistry, this gift, as Samuel Beckett memorably put it, "to find a form that accommodates the mess," invariably comes to the fore.įor the truth is we turn to the movies and their makers as we turn to our friends, when we are unsettled, unmoored, unable to rest easy. Difficult though it may be to believe for today's moviegoers, awash as we are in the cinema of overwhelming visual spectacle-superhero and otherwise-the movies have always sent messages in their own way, always talked to us and offered advice on what we could be thinking. Not that it matters who said it, because it's not really true. Was it Sam Goldwyn, Humphrey Bogart or even Moss Hart who initially posited, "If you've got a message, call Western Union"? ![]() It's a movie business truism so venerable no one can agree who said it first. Stanley Kubrick, in dark suit, directs from the trenches on location for Paths of Glory (1957). Even during the worst of times, directors around the globe found ways of coping with crisis by holding a mirror to society-for good
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