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So what’s a war movie anyway? Is it any film in which shots are fired on a battle field? The question seems pertinent enough to warrant a new paperback edition of the 2011 book from University Press of Kentucky, The Philosophy of War Films.
The essay collection’s editor, David LaRocca, cites The Lives of Others as a war movie; yes, it takes place during the Cold War (is any film set between 1946-1989 a war film?) and deals with human conflict (so does Whiplash). Where’s the war, some might ask? LaRocca also includes The King’s Speech, which ends as World War II begins, but is really about one man’s triumph over personal affliction; and Argo, about geo-political turmoil that fortunately fell short of war. If one of philosophy’s tasks is drawing careful definitions, some of these choices seem decidedly unphilosophical.
Despite the almost meaningless scope LaRocca proposes for his subject, he makes many insightful observations, especially over the relation between the truth of war and the images of war on screen. It’s all fiction to some degree, but with what level of veracity? War films—movies of all kinds—are “as real, as verifiable, as true as a dream or a nightmare,” La Rocca writes. “Film is a forum for negotiation, not a fixed document; it is art, not history.”
There were many stimulating points made by the other essayists that contributed to The Philosophy of War Films. Some good thoughts are embedded in dense, hard-to-penetrate prose; other essays are lucidly written—their authors determined to communicate their ideas beyond the sterile precincts of academic conferences. In “War Pictures,” Garrett Stewart investigates the conversion of war movies from heroic epics into glorified surveillance videos (with reminders that media technology has often been driven by military R&D). The book was published before American Sniper, but his point remains apt; it’s a slow read but worth the effort. Inger S.B. Brodey’s “The Power of Memory” is actually enjoyable as prose as well as its fascinating comparison of post-World War II films by John Ford and Akira Kurosawa with cowboys and ronin as nostalgic symbols of a pre-industrial commercialized.
