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Take away the speech that explains the slaughter, and you see what is left of a man.
Eight men set out to find one. The arithmetic does not work, and the film that stages it does not try to make it work. For decades war cinema solved this problem with a speech: someone climbed onto a crate, gave the losses a meaning, and the audience could watch the rest knowing what it was all for. In the ten films of this series that speech never comes. The first volume takes glory and meaning away from war and measures what is left of a man once those consolations are gone. The second sits in the wrong place — the enemy, the man in hiding, the industrialist making money out of the war, a retreat — and discovers it is the only place from which everything can be seen. This is the hardest material cinema handles, and the lessons are the severest: restraint as a technique rather than as modesty, the group that has to stay distinguishable under fire, violence to be received rather than admired.
Five films strip war of glory, of meaning, of the consolation that used to make sense of the losses, then watch what a man does without them. One gives up even the battle and keeps only a route; another breaks into two pieces that never get sewn back together.
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From the enemy's side, from the window of a man in hiding, from the office of someone whose profits depend on the war, from a beach where the only aim is to leave. Five positions from which nothing gets decided, and that is exactly why everything can be seen from there.
Also available in:🇮🇹🇺🇸🇫🇷🇩🇪🇪🇸
Two volumes on the material that forgives no error of tone. The first subtracts the consolations of war, the second changes the chair you watch it from. Ten films on how a mission becomes a spine, on how a squad stays recognizable, and on why restraint is the hardest choice available here.