Combat Cinema
Film in War X War in Film
May 20 to 24, 2005
The "inter-being" of film in war and war in film reveals itself to be a problem per se. Films in wartime are not only an instrument of information or a medium used to create images of the enemy. They can also make visible, despite all the inevitable propaganda, the very unheroic vulnerability of soldiers (as in early films from World War I) or the contingency of social order in the mundane aspects of war (as in Humphrey Jennings' battle essays from 1940 to 1945). By contrast, war can hardly ever be shown in films without creating a sense of displacement and a crisis of orientation and memory. One of the earliest examples for this is John Ford's The Lost Patrol (1934), where the enemy becomes invisible; in later films by Sam Fuller or Kon Ichikawa the military mission turns into a matter of survival at all costs. War experiences get lost in self-serving technology (as in films on atomic warfare) or in the insistence of arbitrary spaces, as with Konrad Wolf and Amos Gitai.
Gitai's intense Kippur (2000) and the recent reconstruction of Sam Fuller's The Big Red One (1980) will receive their Austrian premieres in the framework of this show.
60 years after the end of World War II in Europe, 30 years after the end of the Vietnam War and concurrently with wars for which there are hardly any filmic images (yet), the project "Combat Cinema" explores the enmeshment of film and war. It attempts to reveal the ways in which culture, politics, aesthetics and ethics are always a part of war, and how these elements are rendered precarious. War, according to Clausewitz, is always a "half-thing": "sometimes more, sometimes less of war".
The five-day programme has been curated by Drehli Robnik and organized in partnership with SYNEMA. It consists of numerous rare films from all genres as well as twelve lectures by such renowned historians and film theorists as Hermann Kappelhoff, Robin Curtis, Elisabeth Büttner, Frank Stern, Siegfried Mattl, Michael Palm, Vrääth Öhner and many others.
