By Filmink Staff
Spending his time between Australia and Japan, US born Roger Pulvers has walked along a circuitous path to arrive at filmmaking. His debut as a director, Star Sand, based on his own novel, is a Japanese production, which will premiere at the Canberra International Film Festival.
I have chosen five films that relate to war, since it is a war – perpetrated by the United States – in Vietnam that sent me away from the country of my birth more than fifty years ago. The theme of war also became the subject of my novel and feature film, Star Sand.
ASHES AND DIAMONDS, directed by Andrzej Wajda
This 1958 film is the third in a trilogy that deals with the war in Poland, with the complex network of motivations and arbitrary fates that all wars create. Growing up with an American war cinema where everything was black (the enemy) and white (Americans), Ashes and Diamonds opened my eyes to the truth: that in war we are all victims; there are no winners. The title refers to a metaphor created by the 19th-century poet Cyprian Norwid. Diamonds, starlike, may be found inside a pile of ashes. In March 1970, I was fortunate to meet Andrzej Wajda and have a friendship with him that lasted until his death in October 2016. In the summer of 1970 I stayed in his country home some 40 kilometres east of Warsaw. It was a manor house that had a small plaque on the wall reading: “In this house Cyprian Norwid was born.”
MERRY CHRISTMAS, MR. LAWRENCE, directed by Nagisa Oshima
Oshima said to me on a number of occasions, “A film that does not equally treat the enemy from his side cannot be called an antiwar film.” I recall often looking around the lush landscape of Rarotonga during the shoot and thinking, “Such brutality taking place in such a beautiful natural setting!” The direct experience of working as Oshima’s assistant on this film taught me a great deal about the process of filmmaking, how the director must have an overall vision of what the film is going to look like – and feel like in its pace and internal rhythms – and ensure that that vision comes through the intense and spontaneous creative process of the shoot. The bonds sensed and experienced between enemies is the theme of this film; and those bonds can be more meaningful and significant for the future than bonds among compatriots.
BALLAD OF A SOLDIER, directed by Grigori Chukhrai
I saw Ballad of a Soldier several years after it was released in 1959. It was at the Cinémathèque in Paris in 1967, when a comprehensive Soviet film festival was held. By then I had already made two month-long trips to the Soviet Union and was enamoured of Russian cinema. The love story between the young soldier Alyosha, who goes on temporary leave to visit his mother, and the young Shura moved me to tears, as it still does. It is a long bright flash of innocence in the midst of total blackness. Before I learned Russian I had been taught that the Russians were devils out to destroy God’s own (and only) country. This film showed me that all young people yearn to live out their lives free of the fetters wound around them by old people seeking “glory.”
JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN, directed by Dalton Trumbo
Made in 1971 by the famous blacklisted scriptwriter, this is one of the very few American films that can truly be called antiwar. The usual “antiwar” American film – such as Saving Private Ryan or Hacksaw Ridge – is a nationalistic display of self-righteous flag-waving in the guise of a peace march. This film’s hero, Joe, is destined to lie in a locked-in state pleading with an outside world that cannot hear him. While he was a victim of World War I, it was clear to Trumbo that this “Johnny” was every soldier in every war; and that we can all be turned into half-dead Johnnies at the whim of crazed leaders. The call to arms “Johnny Get Your Gun” harks back to the American Civil War and even morphed into a song by America’s most popular composer, Stephen Foster. The lyrics haunt me …
Johnny get your gun, get your gun
Satan’s coming, don’t you hide
Johnny get your gun, get your gun
THE HUMAN CONDITION, directed by Masaki Kobayashi
No other film treats the merciless drudgery and senseless cruelties of war more relentlessly and honestly than this three-part nearly-ten-hour-long antiwar epic made between 1959 and 1961. Based on Junpei Gomikawa’s bestselling novel, The Human Condition was a popular and critical success in Japan at the time, attesting to the deeply-held antiwar convictions of the Japanese people. The hero, Kaji, stands up to the callous and often savage treatment dealt him by his military superiors, and yet never loses his will to survive or the belief in decency and love that he cherishes. That this work is titled what it is makes it a narrative for all of us, not just Japanese, who may be caught in the trap that is called, with affected pomp and trumped-up glory, in every country, “patriotism.”
Star Sand screens at 6pm on October 29, 2017 at the Canberra International Film Festival.
Thanks Roger, i know only two of these and Mr Lawrence is standard fare and not as good as Town Like Alice. But Johnny got his Gun is original in every way and powerfully acted and shot. After all these years of great anti war films and the same truisms in every one of them, dare we admit that they actually have no effect on the world at all? Their messages never reach the people eager to start yet another war and destroy thousands if not millions. Can we bear to empathize yet again with the lost, the innocent and the homeless? We have learned that war also turns people to monsters. But do we need to be told again. Perhaps we may as well entertain ourselves to death with more musicals and dancing girls. And of course much more difficult to write a really good comedy. Your article really depressed me.
I could not agree more with this ‘…the director must have an overall vision of what the film is going to look like – and feel like in its pace and internal rhythms – and ensure that that vision comes through the intense and spontaneous creative process of the shoot’.
That is what makes directing a film so extraordinarily difficult and rewarding.