Introduction:

Famed director Steven Spielberg once stated that “every war movie, good or bad, is an anti-war movie,” implying that war is so horrendous that every depiction of it is intrinsically anti-war.  Unfortunately, his assertion ignores a prevalence of film which overtly glorifies violence, or simply fails to adequately convey antiwar messaging to its audiences.  The difficulty of responsibly depicting mass violence may have been more accurately articulated by filmmaker François Truffaut, who asserted that “there is no such thing as an antiwar film.”  Given such disparate opinions, we have to break down the initial question “What is an antiwar film?”  The word “War” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a state of armed conflict between different countries or different groups within a country,” so the simple answer would be that an antiwar film opposes that form of conflict.

But of course, the real answer is not so simple.  War itself encompasses far more than just “armed conflict.”  It is a collective state of hatred and violence, and in war, there is collective trauma.  There is collective suffering. There is mass murder and death.  Likewise, for a film to functionally oppose war, a filmmaker cannot just state that opinion in the film.  It requires, at a minimum, opposition to the vast majority of smaller forms of violence as well.  Thus effective antiwar film should just as easily be referred to antiviolence film.  Further, as a film exposes itself to a variety of audiences, realistically many might leave with a pro-war interpretation.  Is a film it still “antiwar” then?  These considerations all combine to form the central question that I will be exploring in this paper –  Given that narrative film is a medium that leaves the final determination of meaning to the audience, is it even possible for filmmakers to broadly encode antiwar messaging?  And if so, what are the strategies that help ensure this messaging

Literature Review and Methods:

My research methods revolved around my viewing of three films which, as stated by their directors, attempted to encode antiwar messaging – Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now, Come and See.  During my repeated viewings, I evaluated them on partially on their inclusion of antiwar narrative strategies listed by film studies professor Dennis Rothermel in his work “Anti-War War Film”, in addition to suggestions in the research article “Is there any such thing as an anti-war film” by Tom Brook.  Rothermel’s criteria recommends that directors “depict war as experienced by soldiers who endure fear, horror, injury [etc.]…, show how soldiers never acquire a clear sense of purpose… of the war… show how the culture of a nation contributes to the eagerness that young men exhibit for war… avoid fixing blame… upon individuals, nations, or institutions” in addition to nine other specifications.  Generally his work focused on how a film’s narrative can more accurately depict the plight of a soldier (Rothermel 2007 80-95).  Tom Brook’s article also cites, among similar suggestions, professor Sheril Antonio hope that a film should “show both sides” of the conflict (Brook 2014).  With these suggestions in hand, I began my viewings, taking note of the criteria in relation to my own notes and subjective feelings, which I felt would just as strongly inform my evaluations.

For issues that I will elaborate upon in my analysis, I found my intial criteria did not even begin to cover the overall experience of these films, having been focused so heavily on accuracy of soldiers’ narratives and other explicitly textual elements.  The film Come and See notably did not focus on a soldier narrative nor were the textual recommendations useful for describing many elements of the film.  Additionally, Brook’s article reported that even the films that passed Rothermel’s criteria, such as Full Metal Jacket, were criticized for potentially leaving a seductive impression of “wartime combat” on “teenage boys” (Brook 2014).  This phenomenon of young boys finding enjoyment in violence also extended to Apocalypse Now, despite its brutal portrayal of the soldier experience.  The film Jarhead famously included a scene wherein U.S. Marines found intense enjoyment in watching Apocalypse Now for its violence.  Given this information, I concluded that I would need to develop new criteria which reflected this potential for an audience interpretation that endorsed violence.  Thus, I developed my own theories, based on notes from each film, for why Come and See seemed effective while the others were not.  This was combined with a broader research base that varied from studies on violent media in relation to aggression to psychological studies on empathy.

Studies into the potential effects of violent media on its users have never boded well for proponents of “responsible depiction.”  One study entitled “Short-term and Long-term Effects of Violent Media on Aggression in Children and Adults” found that, upon exposure to violent media, many adults will experience strong feelings of aggression due to “prior existence of a well-encoded network of aggressive scripts, beliefs, and schemas” (Bushman et al 2006).  This effect is even more pronounced than in children, at least in the short term.  In the long term, the study “Emotional and Physiological Desensitization to Real-Life and Movie Violence” discovered in a study that sampled college students, that those with medium to high levels of past exposure to movie violence experienced some physiological desensitization (Mrug et al 2015).

Beyond exclusively violent media, other academic works research the various forms of emotional responses with which audiences may respond to the language of narrative film.  Keith Oatley, in his work “How Cues on the Screen Prompt Emotions in the Mind,” describes how film attempts to guide an audience’s emotional response by portraying a number of thematic cues.  “When a schema is invoked by a cue, we project our schema (our understanding of love, fear, angry conflict, or whatever it might be) onto the scene,” imagining how we would respond had we been in the story ourselves.  This imagining is guided by the filmmaker’s use of shot juxtaposition, which in effect is “a suggested progression through a series of the audience member’s emotions” (Oatley 2013).  Carl Plantinga’s “The Affective Power of Movies” detailed how audiences will often develop allegiances to certain characters, often to the point of experiencing “projection: the desire to emulate a character, typically incorporating both strong sympathy and allegiance, but extending to cognitive and affective activities and responses beyond the viewing experience.”  Ultimately, filmmakers may try to manipulate with whom an audience emotionally align themselves, but this response is, in the end, left to the viewer’s bias (Plantinga 2013).

However, filmmakers have developed quite effective methods for directing the audience’s empathic response, which follows along the guidelines of empathy development.  First, by depicting a world as experienced by the protagonist, the filmmaker invites us to partake in what psychologists Erie and Topolinski call “visuospatial perspective-taking” or imagining ourselves in another’s visual circumstances.  Their research also suggests that this visual process is an effective stepping stone to psychological perspective taking i.e. imagining how that person thinks (Erie et al 2017).  Other film strategies for invoking empathy include the close up shot on a person’s face, which may prompt an audience’s psychological response of emotional mimicry. The paper “Emotional mimicry signals pain empathy as evidenced by facial electromyography,” suggests that, in particular relevance to antiwar film, seeing another person’s face in pain prompts a mimicked reaction, implied to be an indicator of the empathic process (Sun et al 2015).

With this new information, I revisited each film, checking specifically for severity of depictions of violence, which we’ve noted can have a desensitizing or aggression invoking effect.  Additionally, I looked for close up shots and shots that seemed invite taking a visuospatial perspective.  Finally, given that audiences will often project themselves onto the main protagonist, I asked myself about the psychological and moral implications of empathizing with those characters’ experiences.

 

Results and Analysis:

Spielberg’s assumption about war film’s innate antiwar messaging manifests itself in the more problematic elements of his film, Saving Private Ryan.  While purportedly an antiwar film, Spielberg’s grimy portrayal of an ill-fated WWII rescue mission by American soldiers contains several textual elements that undermine its intent.  Take for example the film’s bridge battle scene; though we as an audience, feel for the death of each American soldier, the battle itself is dramatized as a sort of last stand, generating cinematic excitement and violent catharsis rather than dread.  Or note the final moments of the film, wherein Ryan, our secondary protagonist, does a military salute to his fallen comrades, and then the film fades to black on a shot of an American flag as uplifting stringed ensembles play.  This finale leaves audiences with a confusingly jingoistic impression of the violence depicted, tying the soldier’s personal struggle to a romantic image of the entire U.S. army.  The film’s attempt to balance Hollywood entertainment value and the realistic horror of war fell on the side of the former.

To his credit, Spielberg went to great lengths to depict battlefield violence in a realistic manner.  The camera work is disorienting, the battle scenes are hyper realistic, and characters demonstrably experience real trauma.  The film itself follows an Army captain, whose visual perspective the camera often takes, followed by close-ups of his shocked reaction.  This invites the audience to take the perspective of a soldier traumatized by the violence of war and guides them to an empathetic response.  However, the graphic violence itself, while shown to be traumatic to our main character, is often depicted as a one-sided tragedy.  There are scenes that depict the emotional perspective of a German, but generally there is little emotional weight placed on their  deaths.  This may mirror the experience of the American soldier, who were not supposed to empathize with the enemy, but that fact reveals a shortcoming of military based war film.  By adopting the mindset of the dutiful soldier, the viewer can certainly empathize with the trauma of his experience, but without other textual measures, they also adopt the perspective of a person trained to kill without empathy.

Similar textual and subtextual problems revealed themselves during my viewings of Apocalypse Now.  The film acts as a satire of the U.S.’s role in the Vietnam by placing the audience in the mind of a soldier driven to madness by a mission.  However, the film runs into a problem intrinsic to satire, namely the fact that if you aren’t aware of the central conceit, the film opens itself to wildly disparate interpretation.  This problem might explain the aforementioned Jarhead situation, wherein it was used as pro-war military propaganda, directly undermining its antiwar intent.  The film depicted violence against Vietnamese people without explicit criticism, so it failed to challenge some pre-held notions of its audience.  Additionally, from a narrative standpoint the film failed to account for the fact that “madness” is often romanticized in American culture, so the close-up shots of the increasingly violent protagonist have little deescalating effect.   Dangerously they may even encourage a similar violent mindset, as per the mimicry response to close ups.  The film never places its audience into the perspective of the Vietnamese victims, leaving viewers to wallow in the mindset of a soldier who is explicitly desensitized to the violence.  Nothing about the film conveys empathy.  It unwisely assumes its audiences are already empathizing with the invaded population, and as a result, leaves them vulnerable to further dehumanization by the film’s viewers.

The final film on my viewing list, Elem Klimov’s Come and See, does not follow the typical antiwar formula.  Rather than conveying the plight of a soldier, it explicitly invites its audience to not only see, but project themselves into the horrific experience of a child in war.  Textually, the film’s narrative has an expressly antiwar message, portraying the horrific experience of a fourteen-year-old Belarusian boy Florya’s at the hands of Nazis.  The audience sees his starting position as a boy with romantic notions of joining the Red Army.  But once the war actually arrives at his doorstep, his perspective of violence changes from romantic notion to legitimate horror.  His village and family are massacred, his attempts to help the partisans are brutally cut short as his friends die seemingly at random, and he ends up the sole survivor of a village that is burnt to the ground, without ever getting the chance to fire a shot.  In this film, the costs of war to the innocent are devastatingly apparent.

After his victimization at the hands of Nazis, the film’s climax dangles the possibility for Florya, and by extension the audience, to experience vengeful catharis.

Upon the offscreen capture of many of the most prominent Nazi characters, the commander of the partisan forces asks three different soldiers to explain their actions, each providing a different story.  “We are not facists.  We were forced to fight” says one.  “I have never harmed anyone.  I wish to see my family again” says a medic, followed by the most disturbingly fanatical soldier asserting “some nations don’t have the right to exist.”  The commander, as well as a Red Army soldier, try to use their justifications to motivate the devastated villagers to enact revenge against the Nazis.  Florya offers them a can of oil, which one Polish Nazi proceeds to pour on his former comrades.  Florya, for the first time, receives the opportunity to kill his victimizers.  Yet before he can light the flame, a woman villager screams “enough” and firing a gun directly at the prisoners, sparing them from being burned alive.  The film denies the devastated Florya and the audience, their attempt to recapitulate sadistic violence against even the most “deserving.”  Every act of violence comes with the full emotional weight of its consequences, no matter the target.

After this scene, Florya finds a framed photo of Hitler floating just above the surface, and Florya, enraged, unloads his gun into the image.  He fires over and over at the photo, and the film then juxtaposes his face with a montage of Hitler’s rise to power in reverse.  From the initial invasion, to the Nazi rallies, to Hitler in the military, Florya continues to fire upon the frame, until finally we reach an image of Hitler as a child and then a baby.  Florya stops.  The film zooms in on a close up of the baby’s face and cuts back to Florya’s.  They look similar.  Florya lowers his gun, seemingly disgusted with himself.  Again, Klimov dangled the possibility of catharsis for us, and followed up by damning that very inclination.  The film justifies self-defense, but clearly implies that even the most horrific humans, even Hitler, cannot ethically become an outlet for vengeful sadism, lest we become like them.

Subtextually, Come and See matches its intended messaging far better than most other antiwar film.  The music, color schemes, cinematography, and setting get progressively more disgusting as war’s violence rears its head in Florya’s life, allowing no real entertainment value. However, unlike most war movies, explicit violence is rarely depicted on screen.  There are no battles, avoiding the pitfalls of desensitization.  Instead much of the cinematography focuses on the increasingly pained face of the young Florya, invoking the natural empathetic mimicry that comes from viewing others in pain.  This framing begs we empathize with an innocent person viewing violence but spares us from seeing the graphic horror for ourselves.  Thus the film avoids prompting the potentially short term aggression that comes with viewing violent media, as per the Bushman study.

Additionally, because Florya never actually adopts the soldier mindset, it avoids the pitfalls of allowing a potentially violent audience to project themselves into the role of violent actors.  Instead it projects the audience solely into the victims of violence and frames them in a manner that matches their emotional experience.  And in forcing the viewer to visually empathize with the face an infant Hitler, using the same facial mimicry as for Florya, it names violent inclinations in all of us itself as the primary antagonist.

 

Significance:

At the risk of revealing my personal politics, I must preemptively state my stance in opposition to war.  Additionally, it is my belief that we are at a historical point wherein, the world may witness a rapid resurgence in extreme violence as a result from global instability caused by climate change and refugee crises.  Given these positions, the importance of artistic messaging for peace cannot be understated.  Every communicative medium has the ability to promote this message, but film is uniquely privileged in its ability to combine visual, audio, and timed sequencing, evoking meaningful and lasting emotions in an audience.  As such, filmmakers taking on this important role have a responsibility to ensure their work stays true to intent.

With the rise of the unregulated internet and exposure to violent media at an all time high, I worry that young people with high levels of exposure to this media may be more vulnerable to the normalization of violence.  But I also believe in the power of media to have a positive effect on its users, provided they have the analysis tools to break down it down.  Violence in media, even when shown with the most positive intentions, can so easily backfire and cause harm.  Come and See is an incredibly strong example of of visual art that considers the potential negative consequences of depicting such sensitive subject matter.  It stays true to the goal of condemning violence, and even more importantly, imparting empathy for the most terribly victimized.

Unfortunately, I cannot see film’s like Come and See being created with any level of c0nsistancy soon, at least in American studios.  While this film was incredibly popular with those who experienced the pains of Nazi occupation, it made little headway in the United States.  The experience of an antagonistic occupation is foreign to most Americans.  Additionally, Hollywood today tends to demand entertainment value over critical substance, often with the cost of negative messaging. But the U.S. is seeing a rapid resurgence of violent right-wing politics today, and the film’s warning about collectively adopting that hateful mindset needs to be imparted in some way.  Though the Come and See itself will likely not make a resurgence, due to its age, subject matter and foreign language, the lessons from each of these films’ successes and failures should be of critical importance to antiwar communicators.

 

Conclusion:

When considering how to dissect “antiwar” film, one cannot simply consider the filmmaker’s intention or the explicit textual elements.  The language of film goes far deeper than screenplay.  The decision of whose stories are told is just as important as the stories themselves.  As real audiences’ interpretations of these films demonstrate, antiviolence is an incredibly difficult message to impart in film.  Even if a filmmaker ensures that not a single positive thing is said about war or violence, a film may still unintentionally impart the violent mindset of a violent character.  It may invoke the same desensitization to violence the filmmaker explicitly condemned.  And, most dangerously, it may accidentally frame violence in a manner that inspires similar violent behavior in the audience.  To responsibly encode antiviolence into a film, every textual and subtexual choice must be consistent with that intension.

According to Elem Klimov, the original title of Come and See was going to be “Kill Hitler.”  It is difficult to imagine film with that title could be antiwar, given its apparent call for violence.  However, Klimov once elaborated on his speculative title, stating “the goal of this film is to kill Hitler, not the person, but the idea.  That everyone should kill the Hitler in themselves.”  In its final moments, Come and See begs the question “would you kill Hitler as a child, as he did to other children.”  The response provided by Florya is no.  Florya who in his traumatic rage had every conceivable motivation to enact revenge, saw the face of a potential victim, and could not fire the final shot. Antiwar film will likely never convince everyone to oppose violence, but films like Come and See demonstrate that the most effective antiwar visual strategy is not encoding the message “war is horrific.”  The most effective strategy is encoding the message of “why war is horrific,” and that requires an incredibly amount of empathy, even for those that lack it themselves.  Humans have the programmed capabilities to both empathize and to commit violence.  If filmmakers want consistent messaging, they can choose to impart only one in their films.

 

References:

Bertrand, P., Guegan, J., Robieux, L., Mccall, C. A., & Zenasni, F. (2018). Learning Empathy Through Virtual Reality: Multiple Strategies for Training Empathy-Related Abilities Using Body Ownership Illusions in Embodied Virtual Reality. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 5. doi:10.3389/frobt.2018.00026

Brook, T. (2014, July 10). Culture – Is there any such thing as an ‘anti-war film’? Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140710-can-a-film-be-truly-anti-war

Bushman, B. J., & Huesmann, L. R. (2006). Short-term and Long-term Effects of Violent Media on Aggression in Children and Adults. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 160(4), 348. doi:10.1001/archpedi.160.4.348

Erle, T. M., & Topolinski, S. (2017). The grounded nature of psychological perspective-taking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 112(5), 683-695. http://dx.doi.org.libproxy.uoregon.edu/10.1037/pspa0000081

Mrug, S., Madan, A., Cook, E. W., & Wright, R. A. (2014). Emotional and Physiological Desensitization to Real-Life and Movie Violence. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 44(5), 1092-1108. doi:10.1007/s10964-014-0202-z

Oatley, K. (2013). How Cues on the Screen Prompt Emotions in the Mind. Psychocinematics, 269-284. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199862139.003.0014

Plantinga, C. (2013). The Affective Power of Movies. Psychocinematics, 94-112. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199862139.003.0005

Rothermel, D. (2010). Anti-War War Films. 75-109. Retrieved from http://www.academia.edu/281326/Anti-War_War_Films

Sun, Y., Wang, Y., Wang, J., & Luo, F. (2015). Emotional mimicry signals pain empathy as evidenced by facial electromyography. Scientific Reports, 5(1). doi:10.1038/srep16988