1941.
Experimental war cinema is a field that remains overlooked. Popular cinema has produced a large number of movies like Born on the Fourth of July (1989) that employ drama to express an anti-war sentiment. Yet, there is another kind of films that espouse a pacifist stance or that are critical of a militarist attitude. These works have been made within the tradition of experimental film — some of them also fit within the narrower category of avant-garde film. As such, they often forgo character definition and narrative structures. They tend to deal with this subject matter more obliquely.
Francis Lee’s abstract yet intense rendering of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 (1941), Jean-Luc Godard’s moral fable about greed and warfare in Les Carabiniers (1963), Norman McLaren’s vibrant and politically subversive animations in Hell Unlimited (1936, with Helen Biggar) and Neighbours (1952), John Korty’s documentary on a group of Quakers peacefully protesting against nuclear weapons in The Language of Faces (1961), Franciszka and Stefan Themerson’s elegiac visual poem on the destruction of Polish culture by the Nazis in Calling Mr. Smith (1943), among others, demonstrate the diverse ways in which experimental films have tackled critically, which is to say ethically and aesthetically, the motivations and consequences of armed conflict.
Each of these examples shows that anti-war experimental cinema is not necessary more vital than its popular counterpart, but it is often intentionally more radical. That is, it is a cinema connected with political modernism and informed by Marxist thought that frequently tries to face the reality of bloodshed and to go the root of the issue of war by raising ideological questions.
