10 November 2008
A false 'Storm of Steel'
Trenches, antique tanks, barbed wire, grey crater landscapes. The images of the First World War etched in our minds are largely the product of contemporary film footage. Historians investigating the film stock of the Great War are increasingly skeptical concerning its authenticity. It turns out only a fraction of it is "real".
(Rüdiger Suchsland)
Reenactment, it turns out, is nothing new. While today the recreating of historical events in supposedly "objective" documentary films is considered controversial, in the 1920s it was thought to be perfectly normal. Only around 12 percent, at best 20 percent of the motion picture material of old documentary films from what was then called the Great War shows actual scenes from the war - the rest of the sometimes spectacular footage was later reenacted or was filmed during maneuvers. Or it came directly from the movies. If the filmmaker was lucky, the combatants would even play along, for example the French Marshall Petain, the hero of Verdun ("They shall not pass!"), who in the 1920s once again donned the old uniform for the movies and posed in the now quiet battlefields.
Such discoveries were the highlight of a symposium of the Deutsche Kinemathek, the German Museum for Film and Television, and the German Historical Museum in Berlin, which is now featuring the series 'World War I in Film'. Ninety years ago, the war was still ongoing. Only on November 11, 1918 did the fighting really end in Europe. Ten million lives had been lost, and it is no exaggeration to say that the war, despite all the horrors which happened thereafter, remains the greatest collective trauma of Europeans.
The last eyewitnesses are dying out. What remains, to get a sense of what it was really like, are the pictures. After all, this first modern war was also the first to be captured by the new medium of film. What images go through our heads, when we think of the First World War? First, the scenes of trench warfare, soldiers with frightened expressions awaiting the assault, then out of the trenches, over barbed wire, and then being mowed down "like flies", row after row. Pictures of massive artillery, requiring at least ten men to operate, the constant rain of bullets, the explosions in the field. Behind the front, the miles of supply lines, horses next to bizarre-looking tanks, and soldiers with bayonets and gas masks making them look like aliens; perhaps a few gesticulating German officers with spiked helmets. And then some aerial shots of the moon landscape of eastern France and the thousands lying dead in the shell-holes, becoming one with the earth.
Modern film science is now trying to reconstruct camera positions from old films, and is even employing experts in lip reading to determine what is being said, in order to determine the authenticity of the footage - with sobering results. It seems that filmmakers callously spliced together reels from 1917 together with those from 1914 to depict an event from 1916, when it "fit". The boundary between fact and fiction was fuzzy from the beginning; in addition, all war films of the time were used as propaganda during the war, and after it was over, to create a myth.
In particular the attempt was made to beautify the image of war for those at home. In Germany especially, fighter pilots such as the Red Baron were employed to create the propaganda myth of an honest and clean war. The dirty reality, of course, was anonymous mass slaughters, with thousands bleeding to death daily, and no small amount of civilian casualties. Time and again, the war was portrayed, however, as a contest of aerial acrobatics, and often - after the recent memory of actual war experience - war films were intertwined with melodramatic side plots, with love stories and family stories.
Films of the 1920s and 1930s, such as Lewis Milestone's magnificent 'All Quiet on the Western Front' (1930) or Victor Trivas's 'No Man's Land' (1931), created the model for nearly all subsequent war films and established the war iconography of the cinema. While dramatized documentaries of the Great War on German television shamelessly capitulate to the requirements of primetime, "adapt" documents and over-sentimentalize every little detail, justifying all of this with their supposed "artistic license", some directors, from Kubrick to Spielberg and Malick, at least attempt to bring the audience a bit closer to the actual experience of the war. This story too began with World War I.
The film theatre in the German Historical Museum in Berlin (Zeughaskino) is showing the film series 'The First World War in film', with rarely-seen films from 1915 on, and later films demonstrating the political use of the war images, until the end of November.
Fonte:
http://www.welt.de/english-news/article2700166/A-false-Storm-of-Steel.html
Mais:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30285/30285-h/30285-h.htm
http://www.welt.de/themen/erster-weltkrieg
