Research/Inspiration:
Letters from Iwo Jima/Flags of our Fathers
Directed by Clint Eastwood
The Battle of Iwo Jima was one of the bloodiest battles fought in the Pacific theatre of WWII. It is also the source of one of the most well-known and endearing photographs of the time, "Raising the Flag" by Joe Rosenthal. In Clint Eastwood's film, Flags of our Fathers, follows the lives of the frontline soldiers who participated in the event, and how it shaped their lives afterwards. An interesting premise, but one hardly different from other war films such as Saving Private Ryan, etc.
What truly makes Flags of Our Fathers truly different, however, is its companion sister-film, Letters from Iwo Jima. Told from the perspective of the hopelessly outgunned Japanese defenders, the film offers a poignant, tragic discourse on the topics of heroism, honor, bravery, and humanity. What is truly worth noting about these two films, however, is that one gets an incomplete view of the battle if one only watches one film. Flags of Our Fathers is told from the American perspective, while Letters from Iwo Jima is almost completely spoken in Japanese (with a few untitled lines in English). The two films complete each other and offers something greater than the mere sum of its parts. An ingenious decision made by Eastwood was to reuse the same shots and scenarios in both films.
Both films pay particular focus on the beach landings and the clearing out of "pillbox" fortifications--the shot of the wall of fire engulfing the defenders is the same in both films, but one observes two strongly divergent arrays of emotion between the two films. In Flags of our Fathers, the audience thinks little of it as the young private squirts the napalm in--in Letters from Iwo Jima, the same scenario brings only shock, horror, and a mixed sense of disgust and brutality.
Another focus is the fate of the US private Iggy Ignatowski. Flags of Our Fathers never truly disclosed the actual fate of the young soldier, only that he suffered greatly at the hands of his Japanese captors. Iggy's ordeal, however, is more explicitly shown in Letters from Iwo Jima, where he is brutally savaged and repeatedly bayoneted by frustrated Japanese troops. The decision to include the ordeal into both films not only strengthens the connections (by creating points of correlation) between the two films, but it also offers more insight (and explanation) for the seemingly senseless injustices committed during the battle (the shelling of the island by US warships is shown to have strongly affected the Japanese soldiers' morale and nerves). This, along with the depiction of American war crimes and rare instances of Japanese hospitality, offers a sliver of ambiguity between friend and foe.
This idea, that one must watch both films in order to understand a greater truth, is what makes Letters from Iwo Jima so special. My ISP film project will attempt to do something similar, as it is the "bridge piece" between my other works.
CLOUD ATLAS
Directed by Andy and Lana Wachowski
It is difficult to describe Cloud Atlas in a single sentence. Based off the 2004 award-winning novel by David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas consists of six different storylines in different time eras and locations, yet somehow manages to present them together equally and cohesively, under the tagline, "Everything is Connected." The scale of ambition in this film is unprecedented in modern cinema as the film jumps rapidly from a Pacific voyage in the 1860s to a 1970s journalist in San Francisco to a rebellious Korean clone in the distant future. In this sense, Cloud Atlas is a microcosm of the effects described above, as it engenders broad and overarching themes that are visible only from a generational level. Due to the extensive use of montage, time and space melt away and become insignificant, with the seemingly separate storylines held together by a new fabric dictated not by characters, place, or time, but by resonant themes and ideologies.
The deconstruction of time and space is what I want to achieve in my ISP. My film alternates between different times in the main character's life and reconstructs them according to theme, rather than time and space. For example, the climatic montage connects Agnes' emotional anguish with her decision to leave and the consequences of her actions simultaneously.
