war movie

“One Gun Between Five”: Presenting Past Trauma in a New Light “Film is that beam of light, the nearest thing we have to dreaming.” Cat Villiers of the Sarajevo Film Festival

by John O’Leary (CD-News Program Coordinator)

The well-established genre of the war movie is not short of landmark entries. A slew of Vietnam movies in the late seventies and eighties brought the harrowing topic to the point of exhaustion, and the Second World War has been so vastly oversubscribed that the all possible thematic avenues have been explored numerous times over. Cinema as a cultural tool is a powerful healing device, helping society come to terms with the brutality of fighting and dying. In the years before “Apocalypse Now”, for example Vietnam was a taboo subject for the American media, by presenting the insanity of war in such a visceral fashion; the US began to speak openly the catastrophic event. Continue reading →