Subject: Band of Brothers
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Mon Oct 08 2001 - 14:38:53 GMT
'... the HBO series ... Band of Brothers? ... This realistic WW2
series gives a partial glimpse ...'
I don’t know, Paul. Our television reviewers here echoed these
same reactions – all as enthusiastic as your own. Yet as I watched
I felt an increasing impatience that this was almost certainly NOT
‘the way it was’: that film & television are no more suited to
the recreation of ‘reality’ than ballet or opera. They require
the same kind of acceptance of conventions as any Noh theatre
& we’ve all absorbed them long ago without realising it.
I haven’t experienced official war as such - but perhaps a couple
of remotely comparable situations during air force service.
And there was simply no way these could be reproduced convincingly
in a darkened theater with thin shadows on a wall & a lot of
Surround-Sound bangings, or watching a brightly lit box in the corner
of a cosy room while trying to ignore copulating family friends
& dysfunctional pets.
We’ve had a terrible but vivid illustration of this in the last month.
A common response to the World Trade atrocity was that it was
‘like watching a disaster movie’. But that was almost exactly what it
was NOT like. A truer response was that it had the unreal quality
of a dream. A disaster film maker would surely have had the aeroplane
explode with spectacular pyrotechnics ON IMPACT with the side
of the building. In the event, though, it didn’t. That second plane
glided in & disappeared as effortlessly & smoothly as a something
slipping into water. Only from the emerging wound was there
an explosion of violence & flame.
Reality combines both the familiar & the unexpected. When you’re
running for your life across a ploughed field with your head down
under a stream of Spandau fire, what you find surprising is that you
have only two, maybe three, more breaths to take in the whole
of this mortal life – a thought that is new, shocking & decidedly
unexpected. But the taste of copper pennies in the mouth is familiar
– from the first time when, as a child, you had to run a little beyond
your capacity. This is the combination the realist artist has to try
to capture. All the cinema can do is confusion & noise. But reality
is slow – preternaturally so; & crystal clear – diabolically so.
If you asked Salinger ‘what it was like’ in the Hurtgen Forest I suspect
he would give you the same wry, impotent smile that old soldiers
have given me when I asked them the same question & they explained
gently that ‘you probably had to be there.’
Scottie B.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Mon Nov 12 2001 - 17:22:38 GMT