War — Volume 2: The war seen from the wrong place
Five points of view the genre does not usually grant.
Your ebooks, ready now and whenever you want
- Download right after payment
- A copy by email, easy to find later
- Your personal library: sign in with your email and download again whenever you want
- PDF and EPUB for common devices, available from your library
The volume
The right place, the one the genre has occupied for most of its history, is next to the people who fight and try to win. These five films stand somewhere else: on the enemy's side, at the window of a man in hiding, in the office of an industrialist who is getting rich on the war, on a beach where an army is only waiting to leave, inside the head of an officer sent to kill an officer of his own side. None of these is a position from which anything gets decided, and that is exactly what makes them fertile: from a place where you cannot act you are forced to watch, and five times the shift leads to the same discovery, that the battlefield says far less than what surrounds it. The volume on restraint as a technique, on the heaviest material cinema handles.
The five films, and why they are here
Schindler's List
Good entrusted to a man who does not practice it, and never granted the scene where he understands it all at once.
Apocalypse Now
The journey as structure: stops that do not advance the plot and remove one degree of reason from the world containing them.
The Pianist
Taking away the protagonist's capacity to act and drawing the tension from something countable: the amount of space he is allowed.
Dunkirk
Three different durations run side by side: how to build rising pressure with the screen almost still.
Letters from Iwo Jima
How to portray the enemy by giving him back a name, a trade and a set of wishes, without letting anybody off.
Inside the volume
- Introduction to the genre: the essay that binds the volume's five titles together and says what to watch for.
- Five analytical chapters, one per film, from the dramatic premise to the legacy of the work.
- Comparative glossary: thirteen or fourteen craft concepts, tested against these five titles.
- Over two hundred pages, in PDF and EPUB, in your account library.