film & reality

Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Fri, 17 Dec 1999 09:27:22 +0000 

    I find it quite hard to remember very much at all 
    about Saving Private Ryan.

    The opening sequence had been so grossly oversold 
    beforehand that, on the night, it seemed anticlimactic.  
    The premiss on which it was all based - no matter 
    if some of that was 'factual' - felt altogether contrived.  
    And the rest of the story seemed to me to be perfectly 
    straightforward Hollywood: the same old token group 
    of chaps, each representing one of the standard subtypes 
    - & the rest of us left to spend the next couple of hours 
    figuring which one is going for the chop now & which 
    one in the course of the next 'incident'.  Guess the survivors 
    & win a small prize.

    When the film first came out it was discussed on the Hemingway 
    list.  One of my chums on that list is now a reserve colonel 
    of the Bundeswehr, recently with the peace keepers in Yugoslavia, 
    but who, in his youth, served two tours of duty in Viet Nam 
    with the (101st ? 82nd ?) American airborne division.  
    He was absolutely scathing about it, suggesting it offered 
    spurious thrills quite unrelated to the actual experience of war.  
    But of course, he said, it gratified the folks back home 
    who could not hope to understand what it was truly like 
    & who had - in his embittered view - betrayed him & 
    his dead comrades with what he called their 'f...ing, facile, 
    liberal consciences'.

    Those veterans I've know personally were quite extraordinarily 
    taciturn about their experiences & conveyed the hopelessness 
    of trying to do so - certainly in so blatantly artificial 
    a construct as a film.  Another man who was all through 
    Normandy & whom I've long regarded as probably my closest 
    male friend outside of my immediate family has, eventually 
    over the years, shared something of those days with me.  
    Although a graphic artist by profession, he would say 
    that only in a properly written book could you hope 
    to convey 'the way it was'.

    It's hardly surprising.  Isn't this true of any experience?  
    If you were to try to recreate for a stranger your first 
    schoolroom, would you reach for your pen or your camera?  
    If you wanted to convey how it felt to be walking down 
    a street in the evening in Paris in September 1923, 
    would you ask Jean Renoir or Ernest Hemingway?

    Film is a wonderful, exciting, moving medium.  But 'reality' 
    it doesn't do.

    Scottie B.