Film lets audience look at past, present

[thedrifter]

Film lets audience look at past, present
Iraq war provides different context for reading `Letters'
Andrew Edwards, Staff Writer
San Bernardino County Sun
Article Launched:02/26/2007 12:00:00 AM PST

Although "Letters From Iwo Jima" was not selected as the Best Picture of 2006 when the Academy Awards were handed out on Sunday, director Clint Eastwood's effort to dramatize the tragedies of World War II through Japanese eyes has a unique spot in film history as one of the few American movies to portray combat from an enemy's perspective.

Like 1930's "All Quiet on the Western Front," which showed the nightmare of trench warfare through German eyes, "Letters" focuses on a young soldier on the side of a losing cause and under the command of a government that thinks little of sacrificing his blood to achieve unfulfilled dreams of empire. The movie is one-half of Eastwood's interpretation of Iwo Jima. The American side of the story - "Flags of Our Fathers" - was also released in 2006.

"Letters" - which won an Oscar for Best Sound Editing and was nominated for three more - is not sympathetic to the militarists who ruled from Tokyo but presents the deaths of Japanese soldiers as a tragedy on par with the loss of American Marines who died in the Pacific.

Set in the final months of World War II, "Flags" and "Letters" dramatize a historical conflict at a time when an ongoing war is on the mind of many Americans. One question the films raise is obvious: Did Eastwood use Iwo Jima to tell a story about Iraq?

A simple "yes" is too simplistic an answer to that question. Professor Toby Miller, director of UC Riverside's Film and Visual Culture Program, noted that both films are about the hardships that soldiers face in any war.

The movies, Miller said, are "a message for all time. Not a message for 1945 or 2006."

San Francisco State cinema professor Joseph McBride compared "Letters" to "Das Boot," Wolfgang Petersen's film that portrayed a sympathetic German U-Boat crew during World War II as decent men trapped in terrible events.

"It was hard to hate them. You had to remember that they were fighting for Hitler," McBride said.

Eastwood - whose Best Director Oscar nomination for "Letters" was his fourth - said he wanted the films to make an anti-war statement when he appeared on "The Charlie Rose Show" in December. According to a transcript of his interview, the filmmaker observed that he wanted to depict war without glamorizing violence.

"It's hard to make any war picture and make it a pro-war statement," Eastwood said in December. "It's just not - you always wish that mankind would reach the level of intelligence that they could avoid it. But history doesn't prove out that at the present time."

Whereas "Letters" is almost entirely set on Iwo Jima, much of "Flags" takes place in the United States. That movie follows the experiences of two Marines and a Navy corpsman who appeared in the famous photograph of the flag-raising on top of Mount Suribachi.

The three servicemen return home and are treated as celebrities while they become the public face of a 1945 campaign to sell war bonds to finance the final battles of the war. Much of the drama in "Flags" comes from the men's reluctance to accept the mantle of heroism based on their appearance in a famous photograph. They do not believe they are more significant - or heroic - than those with whom they fought.

"The story is really about what happens to men after war," said Robin Larsen, a communications studies professor at Cal State San Bernardino who teaches classes on film. "Maybe not so much anti-war, but just saying, `This is the cost of war."'

In his appearance on "The Charlie Rose Show," Eastwood also said he wanted the Iwo Jima films to be a way for younger moviegoers to learn about World War II.

Norman Weibel, a veteran of the Korean War and a member of American Legion Post 14 in San Bernardino said war movies do have value as a way to learn about history. But as is often the case with written works, he noted that the content of war films are often affected by the political views of filmmakers.

For example, Weibel considers Oliver Stone's "Born on the Fourth of July" a movie that is more a vehicle for the director's political views than an attempt to tell the full story of Vietnam.

"It bothers me, but it bothers me in a good way," Weibel said. "It bothers me that he has an idiot mind, but we have freedom of speech."

Weibel's war - the Korean War - has been somewhat ignored by filmmakers, and he expects it will take some time before Hollywood's interpretation of Iraq becomes a regular attraction at movie theaters.

There was at least one Iraq-themed movie released in 2006. However, that film, "Home of the Brave," received mixed reviews and little publicity compared to Eastwood's films. "Home of the Brave" was advertised as a film about the lives of today's soldiers returning home from the Iraq war.

In McBride's view, moviemakers are not ignoring stories surrounding the war in Iraq, and he does see the World War II- themed "Letters" and "Flags" as having something to say about the nation's current troubles.

"I think the Eastwood films are very definitely pointed in that direction," he said. "My theory on period films is that they are made about the present. Otherwise, why make them?"

Ellie

[thedrifter]

"Iwo Jima" Shows The Other Side Of WWII
The Clint Eastwood-Directed Movie Is Sympathetic To Japan's Plight

(CBS) Iwo Jima was one of America's hardest-fought victories in World War II and was one of Japan's bitterest defeats.

Japanese General Tadamichi Kuribayashi expected none of his men to survive. Sixty years later his family cherishes the letters he wrote his wife before the battle began.

"I hope you are doing well," he wrote. "It is the coldest time of year and I am concerned that you might have caught a cold." Such brief words from the General and his men inspired "Letters from Iwo Jima."

"I believe he was simply a human being, who sometimes felt anger, sometimes suffered and sometimes hesitated," Ken Watanabe, who played the general, told Sunday Morning correspondent Barry Peterson. "I would rather call the 20,000 soldiers who died the heroes of a tragedy."

Clint Eastwood directed "Flags of Our Fathers" about Americans fighting in Iwo Jima, and then went to work on telling the other side — what the Japanese went through. It is a huge hit in Japan, taking in more than $36 million. But it is doing more than making big money; it is causing soul searching about a war this country has worked generations to forget.

Tsuruji Akikusa is one of just a handful who came home from Iwo Jima. He had a severely wounded hand.

"Japanese soldiers died an honorable death on Iwo Jima, but people wiped it from their memory and wouldn't talk about it," he said.

For decades, he kept quiet. People assumed his wound was from a factory accident.

"My stories were so cruel," Akikusa said. "My parents would have been shocked."

The defeated soldiers came home to a country that wanted to forget them and the war and focus on rebuilding cities flattened by bombing. So this nation almost as one made a U-turn from militarism to pacifism. And, perhaps out of shame, taught their young almost nothing of that war.

As a result the Japanese actors knew little about Iwo Jima. Watanabe took it on himself to study the general who would not tolerate cruelty to his troops. Kuribayshi studied at Harvard and knew America from his many friends, and was considered by the high command an American sympathizer.

"I was surprised," Watanabe said, "that he had commanded the war in a top position having such an international point of view in that era."

Better than most, he knew he had neither men nor resources to beat the Americans. But despite liking America, despite the prospect of certain death on Iwo Jima, he made a plan and hid his men in caves so they could kill as many Americans as possible.

In the end, both sides paid a ghastly price, 7,000 Marines died in the battle — nearly one-third of all the Marines killed in World War II. And 20,000 Japanese, including Kuribayashi himself, whose body was never found. Many of the Japanese soldiers died by their own hand — preferring suicide to the dishonor of surrender.

Just 1,000 survived. Tsuruji Akikusa was among them. He was captured.

"I feel no guilty for surviving," he said. "No parent wants a son to come home in a coffin."

Akikusa was a radio-man fighting with other soldiers who believed the war had become a hopeless cause and accepted that no matter how brave, they would die — forgotten. If we had won this battle, those who survived would have been sent somewhere else and would have been killed.

The American-made movie tells this story in a human, sympathetic way, but that is not how the rest of Asia portrays Japan's occupying army. In other countries, they remember the massacres and rapes. And they accuse Japan of conveniently forgetting the atrocities and of being unrepentant to this day. Which may be why it took an American to tell this story, said historian John Dower.

"Had this film been made by a Japanese director, the outcry of protest from China and Korea would have been enormous," he said. "It would have been seen as a kind of glorification of people who fought to the bitter end, put country above self, and so on. So there are very strong political constraints against pushing that from the Japanese side."

Eastwood said he started simply wanting to tell the other side of a 60-year-old battle and wound up with a movie that has resonance in today's world.

"When you get various people who are at war because their God's better than your God, nobody can come to any logical, sensible conclusion to that," he said.

Kuribayashi's daughter in law still keeps his letters.

"I seldom get a bath," his last letter said. "I need vegetables so I'm planting a small garden."

"I can't help but feel sorry for him," his daughter-in-law said. "He was a nice man who had such an unpleasant duty."

To America, World War II was the "good war" fought by the Greatest Generation. To the Japanese it was a mistake that dragged on long after many realized the war was probably lost. But for the soldiers on both sides at Iwo Jima, it was about decent people forced to do unspeakable things, and men who lived to hold precious the stories of those who did not.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

'Letters from Iwo Jima' a lesson in civility

February 25, 2007
BY GEORGE WILL
''Don't cheer, boys. The poor devils are dying.''

Capt. John Philip of the USS Texas, to his crew as they watched the Spanish ship Vizcaya burn off Santiago Bay, Cuba, in 1898.

On March 9, 1945, 346 B-29s left the Marianas, bound for Tokyo, where they dropped 1,858 tons of incendiaries that destroyed one-sixth of Japan's capital, killing 83,000. Gen. Curtis LeMay, then commander of the air assault on Japan, later wrote, ''We scorched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo . . . than went up in vapor at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.''

That was inaccurate -- 80,000 died at Hiroshima alone. And in his new biography of LeMay, Barrett Tillman writes that the general was more empathetic than his rhetoric suggested: ''He could envision a 3-year-old girl screaming for her mother in a burning house.'' But LeMay was a warrior ''whose government gave him a task that required killing large numbers of enemy civilians so the war could be won.''

It has been hotly debated how much indiscriminate killing of civilians in the Asian and European theaters really was ''required.'' Even during the war there was empathy for civilian victims, at least European victims. And less than 15 years after the war, movies (e.g., ''The Young Lions,'' 195 offered sympathetic portrayals of common German soldiers swept into combat by the cyclone of a war launched by a tyrant.

But attitudes about the Japanese were especially harsh. During the war, it was acceptable for a billboard -- signed by Adm. William F. ''Bull'' Halsey -- at a U.S. Navy base in the South Pacific to exhort ''Kill Japs, Kill Japs, Kill More Japs.'' Killing America's enemies was Halsey's trade. His rhetoric, however, was symptomatic of the special ferocity, rooted in race, of the war against Japan. Halsey endorsed the Chinese proverb that the ''Jap race'' was the result of ''a mating between female apes and the worst Chinese criminals.'' In 1943, the Navy's representative on the committee considering what should be done with a defeated Japan recommended genocide -- ''the almost total elimination of the Japanese as a race.''

Stephen Hunter, movie critic for the Washington Post, says that of the more than 600 English-language movies made about World War II since 1940, only four -- most notably ''The Bridge on the River Kwai'' (1957) -- ''have even acknowledged the humanity'' of Japanese soldiers.

Perhaps empathy for the plight of the common enemy conscript is a postwar luxury; it certainly is a civilized achievement that often needs the assistance of art. That is why it is notable that Clint Eastwood's ''Letters From Iwo Jima'' was one of five films nominated for Best Picture.

It is stressful viewing. An unsparing attempt to come as close as cinema can to conveying the reality of combat, specifically the fighting that killed 6,821 Americans and all but 1,083 of the 22,000 Japanese soldiers on the small black lava island. Remember the searing first 15 minutes of ''Saving Private Ryan'' -- the carnage at Omaha Beach? In ''Letters From Iwo Jima'' it is exceeded, with harrowing permutations.

The Japanese commander on the island, Tadamichi Kuribayashi, was -- like the admiral who attacked Pearl Harbor -- a cosmopolitan warrior who had lived in, and never stopped admiring, America. In 2005, a team of Japanese archeologists scouring the island's man-made caves for artifacts of the battle found a sack of undelivered mail from Kuribayashi and other officers and soldiers. All the writers knew they faced overwhelming force and were doomed to die in accordance with the Japanese military code that forbade surrender and encouraged suicide.

Japanese forces frequently committed barbarities worse even than those of the German regular army, and it is difficult to gauge the culpability of conscripts commanded by barbarians. Be that as it may, the pathos of the letters humanizes the Japanese soldiers, whose fatalism was a reasonable response to the irrational. Viewers of this movie, while moved to pride and gratitude by the valor of the U.S. Marines, will not feel inclined to cheer. We are catching up to Capt. Philip's sensibility.

Ellie