Abstract
This article analyses the function of opening sequences in war films. With reference to Erll’s studies on film and memory, the author suggests that, besides initiating processes of framing film worlds, opening sequences also activate a certain memory-making rhetoric that enables potential impacts on historical discourse and memory politics. He subdivides this last function into three rhetorical modes of cultural memory – an objectifying, subjective and reflexive approach. Subsequently, the author provides close readings of the opening sequences of various contemporary war films to exemplify and illustrate each function and rhetorical mode. In conclusion, the author connects a recent surge in films employing a subjective and reflexive rhetoric to changes in imaging technologies.
Introduction
Said (1985) reminds us that beginnings are not origins. While a ‘beginning … is the first step in the intentional production of meaning’ (p. 5), origins are ‘divine’ (p. xvii). According to Said, origins resemble an ultimately elusive background of meaning, whereas beginnings set up structuring frames that make communication possible. Therefore, in ‘isolat[ing] a beginning analytically’ (p. 5, emphasis in original) much can be said about the potentials for meaning unfolding in the encounter between a narrative and its audience.
This article is about beginnings in films. Drawing on examples from contemporary British and American war films, it interrogates the ways in which opening sequences in historical reenactments frame audience engagement and assert relevance for historical discourse and memory politics. I introduce a typology of three memory-making rhetorical modes deployed in film – an objectifying, subjective and reflexive way of framing the past. Finally, I speculate about possible connections between specific rhetorical modes and recent changes in imaging technologies.
Opening sequences in war films
Opening sequences have a transitional character. They connect the world of the film with the world of the spectator. As such, they function as ‘a hinge between [a film’s] interior and exterior’ (Böhnke, 2007: 95), 1 and constitute ‘a passage-way between our world … and the world of the film’ (Odin, 2006: 34). According to Hartmann (1995: 102), this hinge or passage-way has a framing function: it orients the spectator, deploys generic markers and establishes ‘forms, themes and motifs of a film’. 2
Stanitzek (2005: 34) and Böhnke (2007: 33–34) assert a proximity between opening sequences in film and the Derridean concepts of supplement and parergon; opening sequences may participate in establishing wholes without, however, belonging to them. Their precarious location at the beginning of a film makes them more than ornamental attire. They are volatile transitory zones between film-world and actual world, where the diegetic universe is discursively framed, spectator–text interactions are negotiated and conditions for potential memory-effects are established.
Opening sequences frame the process of reception through textual means. In this way, they become conceivable as inherently liminal zones that divide and bring into contact the world of the film and the actual world. This interconnection is achieved through the spectator who is positioned by diegetic and extra-diegetic discourses simultaneously, and therefore able to reinforce or subvert one framework with reference to the other. Through their framing function, opening sequences enable an overdetermination of the spectator–subject in, and through, textual frames that might account for films’ potential socio-political impacts. 3
I distinguish between opening sequences and title sequences, or main credits. Opening sequences include, but are not limited to, a film’s main credits. While the title sequence ‘tells the story of the film as product’ (Gardies, 2006: 21) 4 and, for instance, acknowledges legal titles or particular individuals’ participation, the opening sequence provides crucial cues and reading instructions and tacitly predisposes audiences’ engagements with the filmic text. 5 As such, opening sequences correspond to the functions that Branigan (1992: 17–18) assigns, in his narrative schema, to the components of extended abstract (or prologue) and orientation.
Not least with reference to Branigan (1992), it seems a questionable methodological move to exclusively direct analytical attention to beginnings without attending to the filmic text as a whole. In many instances, the reading strategy proposed throughout a film’s opening sequence is subsequently questioned, undermined, or reversed. Even though such tendencies would be interesting to study, this article limits itself to an analysis of the textual features through which rhetorical frames are established at the beginning of films, and leaves aside questions regarding the continued relevance of these frames throughout the filmic narratives as a whole. In other words, I exclusively direct focus on the textual basis through which the viewer’s way into the filmic universe is endowed with a particular spin and direction without suggesting the ultimate success or failure of this rhetorical strategy.
Why direct attention to war films? Due to the immense sufferings inflicted on individuals and collectives in times of violent conflict, representations of war are emotionally charged and often entail heated discursive exchange about the nature of the historical event and the accuracy and truthfulness of its depiction. War films affect collective imaginations of a shared past in particularly sensitive areas. They might promote a certain understanding of a particular war which has an inherent power of producing political effects regarding, for instance, the perceived legitimacy of military endeavours or the responsibility for possible failures. Due to their emotional charge, easy accessibility and widespread consumption by large parts of the population, war films possess a memory-making potential (Erll, 2008: 389) – a ‘potential to generate and mold images of the past which will be retained by whole generations’. A study of the textual means through which war films create such potentialities might yield important insights into the mechanisms through which audio–visual media position the spectator and build up possibilities for specific discursive impacts.
What, then, qualifies as a war film? War films are about violent conflicts – incidents that involve the intentional deployment of military force against opponents to achieve certain objectives. I will here direct focus to a subcategory of the war genre – narrative feature films that play out in a realistic setting, i.e. the narrative content of which can be measured against actual historical incidents. As such, this definition includes feature films about present or past interstate wars, civil wars, clandestine military operations, or humanitarian interventions but excludes films such as, for instance, James Bond films (largely non-military force), or the Star Wars series (non-realistic settings).
As always, a definition creates problems of boundary maintenance. For example, in spite of its overtly implausible treatment of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, would Peter McDonald’s Rambo III (1988) qualify as an object of analysis for this inquiry? Why exclude Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997) in spite of the fact that its narrative, set in outer space in a fictitious future, provides an intriguing allegory on actual practices of warfare and their inherent, media-fuelled processes of de-humanization and othering?
These considerations lead to the question of what a ‘realistic setting’ implies. Even though terminological problems seem unavoidable, given the inbuilt incapacity of any definition to provide an ultimate account of its subject, the question raised here highlights a crucial issue in the filmic representation of historical events – the perceived realism of the filmic image. 6 A ‘realistic setting’ implies that the presented images invite audiences to treat the material as if it referred to the historical world in an authentic manner. In this respect, Rambo III would qualify as an object for this study, while Starship Troopers would not.
Nichols (1991: 111) introduces a distinction between diegesis as an ‘imaginary world of fiction’ and rhetorical fiction as the ‘propositional world of a documentary’. In his view, ‘documentaries do not differ from fictions in their constructedness as texts, but in the representations they make. At the heart of a documentary is less a story and its imaginary world than an argument about the historical world’ (emphasis in original). This alleged dichotomy becomes problematic in war films: they are fictionalized feature films that nevertheless present an argument about the historical world, 7 an argument that is usually presented through the opening sequences.
The ambivalent relationship of the war film to its historical object is illustrated by the recurrent assertions made in opening sequences that this film is ‘based on an actual event’ or ‘on a true story’. These statements have the double function of claiming the documentary truthfulness of the presented material while at the same time enabling a solemn dismissal of any critique questioning historical accuracy. ‘Based on’ thus functions as a disclaimer repudiating possible scholarly critique with reference to the fictitious character of the historical reenactment, while ‘actual event/true story’ effectively reasserts significance and constructs an inherent connection to an outside world, implying the possible relevance of the depicted material for historical discourse and memory politics. This makes war films genre hybrids which combine elements of documentary and drama without entirely succumbing to the conventions of one or the other.
In historical reenactments in general, and war films in particular, opening sequences factually frame imaginary story worlds and invite the viewer to treat the presented images, persons and events as more than mere products of the imagination. This is achieved through various techniques of asserting the authenticity of the presented material. 8 Skare (2012: 6) states that ‘authenticity is not necessarily an objective category … but as much a subjective feeling that something has been represented in correspondence with individual experiences’. 9 This means the statements made in opening sequences do not necessarily convince because they correspond to available historical fact, but because they draw on techniques that invite audiences to treat the presented material as if it provided access to actual experiences of the past. Instead of an ontological realism of the filmic image, a perceived realism of the constructed narrative becomes the basis for memory-making impacts of the depicted material. In this pragmatic view, the political effects of war films are only partly due to a verifiable historical accuracy of ‘propositions about the historical world’, but equally rely upon textual strategies of rendering authentic what exceeds or even challenges available documentation.
The filmic text influences spectators, yet does not necessarily change their opinions. Film can only present arguments within textual frames to subjects who have their own preconceived notions regarding its discourse. For instance, Hall (1980) has shown how cultural texts exhibit various sets of codes that enable different and often competing readings. This led Kellner (1995: 5) to describe contemporary media culture as ‘contested terrains’, where various readerships constantly struggle over the meaning of key foundational texts; every text can be read in competing ways. However, as Barthes (1974: 3–9) argues with reference to the novel, cultural texts entail various degrees of closure. Through their formal structure, they either invite creative involvement from their readers (writerly texts) or they attempt to restrict independent interpretations (readerly texts). What Barthes asserts for the novel has validity also for the filmic text. Therefore, a study of the formal means through which contemporary war films posit themselves as readerly, in Barthes’ view, highlights their political relevance. A focus on textual strategies of closure through which opening sequences restrict the interpretative freedoms of receiving audiences and support one particular perspective on a historical incident of high cultural significance becomes a relevant object of inquiry. Such studies might increase our understanding of the socio-cultural processes behind the emergence of intersubjectively accepted foundational truths about a shared past.
In the following, I introduce three functions of opening sequences. The first two are valid for all fiction films, while the third is of specific relevance to historical dramas, including war films. Firstly, opening sequences provide generic markers and facilitate the transition of the spectator into the filmic universe. Secondly, they frame audience engagements through the establishment of discursive subject positions. Thirdly, in genre hybrids such as war films, opening sequences stage the transition from documentary factuality to fictitious drama and activate a particular memory-making rhetoric (Erll, 2008) – a rhetoric that, in asserting authenticity, creates the potential for a film’s impact. I introduce a typology of three different rhetorical modes of representing historical reality in film: an objectifying, 10 subjective and reflexive rhetoric. The examples in the following sections will serve to highlight each of the three functions and exemplify the modus operandi of each rhetorical type.
I limit my approach to an analysis of British and American war films made in the period between 1979 and today. This narrowing down to a geographical and temporal scale allows for the establishment of a connection between exhibited textual features and technological and socio-political developments. For example, does the deployment of an increasingly subjective and reflexive rhetoric in post-2004 war films reflect political or technological changes framing the production process? Does the increased availability of digital war footage taken on the spot with mobile phones or hand-held cameras facilitate a particular memory-making rhetoric?
Initiating diegetization
Like other film genres, war films facilitate a transition into the filmic universe through their opening sequences. The spectator is guided over a dividing threshold between a story world conjured up through the active combination of intentionally deployed indices into one of a variety of possible coherent wholes. The technical means applied in war films to initiate diegetization – the construction of a story universe by audiences – are no different from those applied in other genres. Recurrent elements are cuts or fades to intervening black screens displaying a quotation, line of text or the title of the film, often combined with a sudden musical climax, or a change from extra-diegetic to diegetic sounds or speech.
In war films, a classical marker providing precise reading instructions to an implied spectator are lines of written text, which concretize the time and place of the narrative. These lines are usually superimposed over long-distance or aerial shots setting the scene. Usually deployed at the end of opening sequences, these scenes mark the distinction between a historico-political background or frame, and a dramatized story universe. At the same time, these scenes maintain a close connection between dramatization and actual events and topographies.
In some instances, war films apply more sophisticated devices to realize a connective transition from historico-political background to dramatized reenactment. For instance, in Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) – a film about the Second World War battle for the Japanese island of Iwo Jima – the camera’s zoom into a spade used by an archaeologist in the framing storyline set in the 1990s is followed by a zoom out revealing the spade’s transformation into the tool of a Japanese soldier digging a trench on the same island in 1944. This implies a connection of the story world to historical facts gathered through archaeological research and establishes a link to the unsent letters by the Japanese commander that were discovered on Iwo Jima and on which Eastwood’s film is based. 11 John Irvin’s Hamburger Hill (1987) – a film about US soldiers’ costly attempts to capture a hill during the Vietnam War – employs a close-up of the names of fallen US soldiers carved into the black marble of the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC. As the camera pans along the list of names at a growing pace, the increasingly blurred letters transform into high grass on a battlefield. Keeping speed and direction, the camera then catches up with two US soldiers carrying a wounded comrade under heavy fire, thus establishing a connection between fictionalized reenactment and actual sites of memory. Again, in Stephen Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) – a film about the rescue of a US soldier during the invasion of Normandy – a brief sequence taking place in a diegetic present initiates the narrative. It shows a Second World War veteran visiting the grave of a fallen comrade. To achieve a transition from present day commemorative practices into the story-world, the camera zooms in on the old man’s face and suddenly, upon an ensuing zoom out, casts the spectator into the events introduced by small written titles as D-Day, Normandy 1944.
In all three cases, opening sequences connect the extra-diegetic present of the spectator to dramatizations of a shared past. Archaeological excavation sites, war memorials and the presence of veterans as direct witnesses endow the narrative with an aura of authenticity and serve as links between the world of the spectator and the world of the text. Audiences are tacitly guided over a dividing threshold into the filmic narration. As will be shown in the following sections, this transition into diegesis also implies the adoption of particular subject positions within diegetic frames, as well as the activation of certain strategies for the assertion of discursive relevance of the depicted material.
Limiting the discourse
Using Laclau and Mouffe’s (2001) terminology, film worlds can be conceptualized as discourses – as partial and temporary stabilizations of signifying practices in contingent configurations around particular privileged signs, or nodal points. Entering a film-world implies being positioned by the respective dominant discourse, or dominant discourses, evoked in and through the filmic text. Therefore, the transition of the spectator into the diegetic universe entails the adoption of particular subject positions.
Even though filmic discourses determine audience–subject positions, the spectator is not just a helpless victim of ideological interpellation by a cinematic apparatus. Being positioned by several (both filmic and extra-filmic) discourses at the same time, the overdetermined subject gains the limited ability to oscillate between different interpellative frames, opening a space for active engagements with the presented text. The spectator ‘is constructed, and him or herself constructs, within a kind of constrained or situated freedom’ as Robert Stam (2000: 244) puts it.
The proposed view of the cinematic text as constraining interpretative freedoms through various contexts of reception allows for an assessment of potentials of meaning vested in the formal structure of the text. This enables a generalized perspective on possible discursive effects of film, while at the same time maintaining the idea of an active audience, multiple codes and multi-vocal texts in the sense of, for instance, Hall (1980), Kellner (1995), and Barthes (1974). Every text is inherently open for misreading, oppositional decoding, or recontextualization. However, some texts exhibit more open structures than others. Formal analysis can reveal patterns of support and restraint deployed to predispose the reception process and push the discourse of the film in a dominant direction, as well as showing the potential impacts of such texts.
In applying privileged signs such as ‘war’, ‘enemy’, or ‘soldier’ to particular meanings, opening sequences in war films fix discursive nodal points. These nodal points structure the emergent discourse and establish dominant subject positions which reduce the paradigm of possible readings. This is usually achieved through the deployment of text or quotations, or the dramatization of crucial performances by key protagonists deployed at the start of the films. For instance, in the opening sequence of Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001) – a film about the US intervention in Somalia in 1992–1993 – after indicating that the film is ‘Based on an actual event’, a quotation is used to set up a dominant discursive frame. In simple white letters, the statement ‘Only the dead have seen the end of war’ appears on a black screen, and is subsequently attributed to the Greek philosopher Plato. Here, reference to the implied authority of a classical thinker is applied to fix the nodal point ‘war’ and prestructure the evolving discourse of the film. The spectator’s crossing of the threshold into the film world is framed by the notion of war as a timeless necessity, a natural phenomenon, rather than a rationally planned, socially approved – and therefore debatable – political activity. In thus fixing the meaning of ‘war’ as being beyond human control, a whole configuration of consequences is tacitly asserted as a conceptual pretext for the film world – a systemic pattern of support and restraint not determining, yet limiting processes of diegetization.
Similarily, Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (2009) – a film about a US bomb disposal unit in present-day Iraq – employs an epigraph to discursively fix the nodal point ‘war’. This time, the theme ‘war is a drug’ ties audiences to a particular discursive frame. In a similar way, Sam Mendes’ Jarhead (2005) – dealing with the experiences of a US soldier during the Iraq war in 1991 – uses the voice-over of the main protagonist and focalizer Swofford to discursively stabilize the nodal point ‘soldier’ in the opening sequence. Reference to ‘the hands unable to forget the rifle’ effectively establishes soldiers in general as psychologically scarred individuals, thus limiting audiences’ decoding activities in relation to the indices presented throughout the film.
Randall Wallace’s We Were Soldiers (2002) – a film about the first major battle of the Vietnam War that involved US forces – employs a diegetic sequence that presents the crucial performance of an important protagonist to prestructure the evolving discourse of the film. Here the fate of French forces, who had ventured into the same valley in Vietnam (where the main story is due to take place) is dramatized. After having overrun the French platoon, the leader of the attacking Vietnamese force enters the scene. His arrival is accompanied by an eerie musical tune and he is depicted in a mid-shot filmed from below, implying the perspective of one of the wounded Frenchmen lying on the ground. He then remorselessly orders every survivor to be shot on the spot. A gun is filmed pointing downwards directly at the camera. As the screen turns black, the firing of shots and intense screaming is heard before military music initiates the main credits. Here, throughout a distinct part of the opening sequence. a discursive chain of equivalence is drawn that connects the Vietnamese enemy to war crimes, merciless disregard of life, cruelty and callousness, framing the spectator’s engagement accordingly.
In all these examples, the spectator is positioned by dominant film discourses. A pattern of support and restraint is established that reduces the creative freedom of active audiences in the production of meaning. Of course, the spectator is able to read beyond the frame and produce meanings in dissonance with, or as a creative challenge to, the proposed cues. The formal properties of these opening sequences, however, make such subversive readings more difficult as they present a coherent discursive framework that renders the presented performances and events intelligible.
Between fact and fiction
As has been established above, war films are genre hybrids. They exhibit characteristics of film of fact and film of fiction. Particular textual strategies invite audiences to treat the depicted material as authentic and, therefore, relevant for historical discourse and memory politics. Opening sequences of war films are the liminal transitory locations where this relevance is negotiated and where certain rhetorics of memory-making are put in place. I suggest the following typology of rhetorical modes: objectifying, subjective, and reflexive modes of framing commemoration. Each of the suggested types influences the perceived authority and validity of the presented content. I will describe the basic features and discursive effects of each rhetorical type in turn. 12
(a) The objectifying rhetoric
In war films, an objectifying rhetoric is the most common one. In establishing a privileged locus of enunciation for the assertion of allegedly unambiguous historical facts, it positions the spectator within the frames of a dominant filmic discourse, reducing the availability of alternative codes and competing reading strategies accordingly. The ensuing narration serves as a mere illustration of a pre-established factual background positing itself as the truth about a historical event. The objectifying strategy aims at evoking an aura of detached objectivity and impartiality; clear and matter-of-fact lines of text on a black screen, distanced voice-over commentators or witness accounts and recourse to news footage, historical documents, or original locations characterize this particular mode.
The opening sequence of Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down (2001), for instance, combines lines of text asserting historical facts in a neutral, detached language with plain, seemingly documentary images illustrating the assertions. The lines of text are written in a typographic style reminiscent of a typewriter, connoting the truth-value still associated with investigative newspaper journalism, while the desaturated images invoke similar connotations in relation to TV documentaries. The detached, objectifying gaze of the camera and unambiguous and assertive written texts are accompanied by a sad African tune that serves as a cultural marker. An aerial establishing shot and written indication of exact date, time and place finally release the spectator into the diegesis.
The objectifying strategy adopted in Black Hawk Down of employing plain assertions of historical facts and a visual style reminiscent of news media to invoke impressions of authenticity and accuracy are typical for a particular variant of the war film genre. John Moore’s Behind Enemy Lines (2001), for example, employs a voice-over news report concerning recent incidents in Yugoslavia to historically situate its narrative, while Antoine Fuqua’s Tears of the Sun (2003) begins with an entirely fictitious global TV news channel item featuring riots after a military coup in Nigeria. Fuqua employs low-resolution images made with a fast-moving, quivering, hand-held camera that seems to be part of the reported events. The fragmentary and frequently disrupted images document acts of extreme police violence and gross assaults on civilians, while a disaffected voice-over commentary delivers the factual background to the story. Here, again, news reporting is assigned a detached, objectifying quality effectively implying authenticity of the presented narrative beyond the opening sequence.
We Were Soldiers (2002) employs a complex rhetorical strategy that imbues a personal witness account with an aura of objectivity. At the beginning of the opening sequence, a dusty road becomes visible as a voice-over states that ‘these are the true events of November 1965’, clearly asserting the historico-political relevance of Wallace’s film. While the words are being spoken, the sound of a typewriter is heard in the background and the sentence appears on screen in simple typewritten letters. This indicates the implicit presence of someone writing, or having written down, the story to be told, and can be read as an implied reference to Harold G Moore’s autobiographical novel (Moore and Galloway, 1992), on which the film is based. Thus, an aged veteran, Harold Moore, situated in the present recounting the story becomes the likely source of the voice-over narration. The implied authority of the remembering subject is employed to construct a univocal historical master narrative with the pretence of providing the truth about what happened. This version of the events remains uncontested throughout the opening chapters and subsequent narration.
Also, the HBO (Home Box Office) series Band of Brothers (2001) and The Pacific (2010) employ an objectifying rhetoric created through the accounts of veterans. 13 However, in contrast to We Were Soldiers, where the story of one witness is established as the basis for a determinant frame, this TV series employs a variety of witnesses to situate the ensuing dramatization. Each episode is framed by several brief interviews with veterans commenting on their memories pertaining to the event to be reenacted. Even though such a variety of voices seems to invite subjective or reflexive strategies, the fact that the soldiers do not contradict but consistently support each other’s versions of particular incidents, leads to a de facto objectification of their accounts and, subsequently, to the formation of a historical master narrative.
(b) The subjective rhetoric
Having addressed the ways in which opening sequences of war films deploy objectifying frames, I will now turn my attention to a subjective rhetoric. This type enables an overdetermination of the spectator as it allows for multiple subject-positions within the discursive frames of the film. The subjective mode has a strong psychological component and is heavily reliant on accounts by direct witnesses. In contrast to the objectifying mode, however, these witness accounts are not employed to invoke a dominant historical master narrative pertaining to a certain event, but constitute a claim to a merely partial truth vested in personal (and often traumatic) experience. Therefore, the subjective mode entails a certain unreliability of the narrative voice and raises the question of whether there is even one authoritative image of war that can be represented accurately.
A classic example for a subjective mode of framing the remembrance of past wars is the opening sequence from Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now (1979). This film focalizes the events through its main protagonist, Willard, who is depicted in a hallucinatory state of mind, where traumatic flashbacks, memories, dreams, fantasies and sensual experiences blend and merge, weakening his authority as the narrator–focalizer of the events. As a consequence, a possible claim to blunt factuality, or objectivity, of the narration that he provides is undermined from the outset. The opening sequence seems to assert that representing war is as difficult as representing dreams or states of madness. The jumpy, incoherent and deeply disturbing nature of war experiences precludes straightforward reenactments of historical events. Instead, claims to authenticity are tied to the presentation of war’s inherently traumatic effect on the human psyche.
Sam Mendes’ Jarhead (2005) is another example of subjective rhetoric. The opening sequence focalizes through the main protagonist Swofford and briefly tells the story of his basic training to become a US Marine. As in We Were Soldiers, in Jarhead, the author of an autobiographical novel on which the film is based emerges as a diegetic narrator (see Swofford, 2003). The often ironic, retrospective comments of an older Swofford located in the present accompany the whole opening sequences as a voice-over. However, in contrast to Harold Moore in We Were Soldiers, who adopts the position of an omniscient narrator telling ‘the truth’ about a particular event, Anthony Swofford in Jarhead is constituted as an inherently unreliable narrator. His voice becomes the source of merely one version of the events. As such, the claim to authenticity in Jarhead is detached from an implied notion of historical truth. The lack of a determinant historical frame makes subjective personal experience, rather than implied objectivity, the source of Jarhead’s claim to discursive relevance.
Another example of subjective rhetoric is David O Russell’s Three Kings (1999) also situated in Iraq in 1991. The diegetic opening sequence of this film features a group of US soldiers staggering purposelessly through the Iraqi desert. After shooting a potentially hostile Iraqi soldier, the young men eagerly gather around the body. One of the men turns away in disgust, while others want their picture taken with the corpse. As the title of the film appears, the clicking sound of the camera’s release trigger turns into the opening note of the film’s main musical theme. Also in this example, the activated mode is subjective. The different reactions of the involved soldiers are juxtaposed to one another and the clicking of the camera, signifying an external mediated dimension of the incident. In this way, the emergence of a privileged enunciatory position is denied and claims to authenticity are tied to disparate subjective experiences. At the same time, the clicking of the camera makes audiences aware of the necessarily partial nature of mediated war images and narratives. This last element brings the opening sequence of Three Kings close to the reflexive mode discussed later.
The opening sequence of Kimberley Peirce’s Stop-Loss (2008) – a film about US soldiers returning home from their tour of duty in Iraq in 2006 – also employs a subjective mode of asserting authenticity. This is achieved through recourse to digital footage allegedly produced by the soldiers themselves. The opening sequence starts with a blank screen. Occasional shooting and intercom communication can be heard, indicating an incomplete deletion of an older sound track, before an invisible voice is heard asking for help in using the camera. Then the title ‘Episode 312’ appears and text in simple white letters scrolls in from the left: ‘The men of Shadow 3 go the fuck home’. Then, a quivering hand-held digital camera footage shows soldiers in their camp obviously celebrating their imminent journey home. As they start singing a patriotic song, filmed impressions and still photographs of their lives as soldiers in Iraq are presented in quick succession. The entire sequence is composed of digital images allegedly produced by the soldiers themselves and lacks any form of coherence or objectifying perspective. There is no establishing shot and no indications of date, time or place to help orient the spectator. Stop-Loss asserts authenticity with reference to disparate and disorganized digital self-representations of the involved soldiers, which are open to mutual contradictions and various inconsistencies.
(c) Combining an objectifying and subjective rhetoric
The distinction just outlined between an objectifying and subjective mode of collective memorizing in the war film does not resemble a clear-cut division. Rather, the adherence of particular films to one or the other must be perceived as locations on a scale that reveals tendencies rather than unequivocal properties. Some films blend the two strategies throughout their opening sequences or negotiate their discursive potentials, without however activating a reflexive mode by critically playing them out against each other. Before I turn to the reflexive mode, I will briefly outline how some war films combine an objectifying rhetoric with a subjective one.
Nick Broomfield’s Battle for Haditha (2007) – a film about the shooting of 26 civilians by US forces in the Iraqi town of Haditha in November 2005 – opens in documentary fashion with a series of interviews conducted with American soldiers previously stationed in Iraq. The men are former Marines playing protagonists in the film – veterans of the very conflict they are now set to reenact. Filmed in long, uninterrupted mid-shots, the men express their frustration and their inability to grasp their immediate surroundings or the wider historical picture. Unlike the interviews conducted with Second World War veterans in Band of Brothers and The Pacific, the accounts of the Iraq veterans remain fragmented and disparate, and are hard to combine into a concise, authoritative narrative of the Iraq war. As such, they activate a subjective rhetoric of memory-making. However, the interview sequence is followed by an objectifying rhetoric as plain text on a black screen asserts a number of historical facts concerning the incidents in Haditha. Through this combination of objectifying and subjective strategies, Broomfield effectively establishes a factual frame within which disparate subjective accounts are situated. The reasons for the incidents are made to appear varied and even contradictory; the factuality of the killings, however, emerges as unquestionable.
Also Marc Munden’s The Mark of Cain (2007) – a film about atrocities committed by British soldiers in the present occupation of Iraq – combines a subjective and objectifying rhetoric throughout its opening sequence, without adopting a reflexive mode. The sequence is divided into two distinct parts. The first part activates a subjective mode and consists of extreme close-ups in quick succession on parts of a naked male body and on hands obviously attempting in vain to wash off some invisible stain. The camera briefly captures the man’s nametag identifying him as a soldier. The desperate and increasingly uncontrolled movements of the soldier’s hands reveal a state of psychological distress, which the biblical connotations of the film’s title, once it appears, delineate as some form of indelible, individual guilt. The second part of the opening sequence draws upon an objectifying strategy. Employing, among other things, original news footage featuring the then UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, it briefly anticipates key events and asserts the factual basis of the ensuing reenactment: the torture of Iraqi prisoners by British soldiers as well as the subsequent trial against the perpetrators and an attempted whitewash by the military authorities.
In The Mark of Cain, Munden does not merely juxtapose an objectifying with a subjective rhetoric in order for them to challenge, dislodge and subvert each other. Rather, he combines these strategies so that they depict the traumatic individual as well as the historical and political dimensions of a past incident, thus constructing a multi-faceted, yet authoritative account of what happened.
(d) The reflexive rhetoric
The reflexive rhetoric dislodges established frames of meaning with reference to an ultimate contingency of discursive identities and structures. This rhetoric opens a meta-perspective that does not direct focus on past events as such, but invites audiences to reflect upon the ways in which medial representations select, structure and create the past. For example, the reflexive rhetoric is characterized by a conscious play with, and manipulation of, the other two modes discussed above. The audience is constantly alerted to discursive practices of constructing authoritative centres – objective or subjective – from which claims to authenticity and historico-political relevance might emanate. This happens, for instance, through a repeated introduction of subject-positions, followed by their subsequent explicit subversion. In drawing attention to the techniques behind such processes, in making explicit what usually remains implicit, a reflexive rhetoric provokes reflection about established codes and generic conventions, and the ways in which accepted images of the past are formed and moulded in and through medial representation.
Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006) opens with the recurrent nightmare of a traumatized war veteran, who is depicted stumbling through a barren volcanic landscape attempting in vain to locate his comrades who are screaming for help. This initial traumatic vision activates a subjective mode, but is immediately juxtaposed with the objectifying account of a war veteran situated in a diegetic present and commenting upon the events of the battle in an interview. Only the third component of the opening sequence, however, leads Eastwood’s film from a mere combination of subjective and objectifying modes to a reflexive strategy of dealing with the past. This third element consists of the reenactment of a reenactment that draws attention to political appropriations of individual war experiences. Set in the US in the aftermath of the Iwo Jima battle, the sequence features a public event to raise war bonds in the course of which the main protagonists – three decorated veterans of the battle – are made to climb a paper-maché mountain constructed to resemble the infamous Mt Suribachi on the Japanese island. During the climb, sudden flashbacks bring the protagonists back to their individual traumatic experiences on the island, which stand in gross contrast to the heroic reenactment conducted in the stadium. Eastwood here adopts a reflexive rhetoric interrogating the arbitrary selection processes behind the constitution of cultural forms of memory. This strategy undermines established historical master narratives pertaining to the battle of Iwo Jima and to war in general. In constantly jumping between different timelines and different rhetorical modes, without privileging one or the other, Flags of Our Fathers consistently points to the necessary discrepancies between individual experiences and ‘objective’ history and alerts audiences to the general difficulties of accurately representing inherently traumatic war experiences. In casting a light on the processes behind the constitution of memory politics, Eastwood’s film facilitates a critical engagement of the spectator with the issue of representing war and past sufferings. 14
Also, Brian de Palma’s Redacted (2008) – a film about the murder and rape of Iraqi civilians by US soldiers in the town of Samarra in 2006 – activates a reflexive mode in, last but not least, denying the spectator any form of certainty as to when the opening sequence ends and the diegesis begins, as well as with respect to the genre to which the film belongs. De Palma’s film starts with the appearance of a lengthy text stating that the film is fictional but inspired by an incident reported to have occurred in Iraq. The text is long, awkwardly written and deliberately difficult to grasp. It asserts representational realism with reference to an actual incident, but instantly subverts the claim by stating its own fictionality. By these means, the opening text of Redacted draws attention to the precariousness of the distinction between fact and fiction in the war film. Subsequently, more and more words are erased from the statement with a thick, black felt-tip pen – reminiscent of an act of censoring an official document – until only a few letters remain. These start to move, increase in size and gather in the middle of the screen to form the title of the film – Redacted – a term that refers to a process of editing a representation to inconspicuously alter its content. Then, a cursor familiar from computer screens appears under the title. The sound of someone using a keyboard is heard and the cursor moves to form the words: ‘visually documents imagined events before, during, and after a 2006 rape and murder in Samarra’.
Up to this point, De Palma’s film has deliberately played with an objectifying rhetorical strategy. However, Redacted problematizes this strategy and raises awareness of the processes of revising and editing that are inevitably connected to any form of representation.
After the letters indicating the title of the film have disappeared, a shot into a cloudy sky with a thin row of numbers indicating the date of the diegesis serves as a background for a new title ‘Tell Me No Lies’. The camera angle is lowered and captures an establishing shot of a US base as the subtitle ‘A War Diary by PFC Angel Salazar’ appears on screen. The hand-held video camera then zooms in on a group of soldiers, obviously from the same company as the filming Salazar, followed by a series of sequences featuring soldiers’ lives in the camp. As one soldier asserts that the first casualty in war is truth, Salazar points the camera at himself and warns audiences ‘not to expect any Hollywood action flick’.
This second part of the opening sequence of Redacted thus activates a subjective mode of memory-making. With recourse to digital material allegedly produced by a soldier directly involved in the events to be shown, immediate access to an individual bottom-up perspective on a preceding reality is suggested. The statement by Salazar not to expect ‘a Hollywood action flick’ strengthens this act of distancing from the established war genre. However, De Palma’s film does not stop there. Instead of releasing the audience into a diegetic universe meticulously recorded by and focalized through PFC Salazar, Redacted moves on to yet another opening sequence, this time activating an objectifying, documentary mode to assert discursive relevance.
A cut accompanied by an extra-diegetic tune leads the audience to an establishing long shot of two US soldiers guarding a roadblock at sunrise. Superimposed on this image, a title and main credits in French appear: ‘Barrage’ and ‘un film de Marc et Francois Clément’. A detached and matter-of-fact voice-over starts commenting on the scenes and describes the situation at a check point in a documentary style. The report includes disturbing facts and figures, for instance regarding the significant number of Iraqi civilians killed at checkpoints and the diminishing number of insurgents captured at such locations. The voice-over is in French with subtitles for the whole sequence translated into English, while US soldiers’ statements are subtitled in French, effectively creating the impression of dealing with a documentary made for a global media audience. However, recurrent close-ups of individual soldiers reveal these to be the same men documented on PFC Salazar’s video diary. Subsequently, the film narrative repeatedly jumps between Salazar’s footage and the French documentary. 15
In this way, rather than settling on one particular memory-making rhetoric, Redacted constantly interconnects and juxtaposes them by focusing on disparate parts of video journal and French documentary. Through this constant adjourning of a transition into a film world, the spectator is kept in a state of confusion concerning media formats and generic codes. This playing out of subjective and objectifying modes of asserting authenticity maintains a constant alertness in the audience regarding the truth-value of the depicted events and makes the spectator retain a critical distance to the universe of the film. As Tröhler (2002: 36) observes: ‘Uncertainty concerning the filmic and pragmatic locus of enunciation always induces metadiscursive readings, which facilitate a reflection over codes.’ 16 By adopting a reflexive strategy, De Palma’s film invites such metadiscursive approaches to its text.
Similar to Flags of Our Fathers, in Redacted, the actual events retreat into the background and the film invites a critical assessment of the actual processes taking place when historical incidents are represented. A notion of ‘what exactly happened’ is thus replaced by attention to how this ‘what happened’ is constructed, negotiated and framed through filmic narration.
Conclusion
In this article, I have examined the inherently liminal qualities of opening sequences that connect the film world to the actual world, and enable a repositioning of the spectator–subject through the use of diegetic frames. I have outlined a typology of rhetorical means in which these sequences frame audience engagements with the past in war films. I argue that, in purporting to tell the truth about a particular event, an objectifying rhetoric facilitates the emergence of a historical master narrative and, in the process, marginalizes alternative accounts. A subjective rhetoric, on the other hand, more carefully attends to the inherent contingency of individual stories, which break up the past into various and often competing versions of it. Finally, a reflexive rhetoric draws audience attention to the workings of the medium itself and thus raises awareness of the ways in which accepted authoritative truths are established, negotiated and subverted. While an objectifying rhetoric positions the spectator from within the frames of a dominant filmic discourse discouraging oppositional readings, a subjective rhetoric overdetermines the spectator and opens up a negotiation of competing and even mutually exclusive points of view. The reflexive rhetoric, on the other hand, draws attention to the various frames through which film positions the spectator.
On closer inspection, the suggested typology reveals a certain pattern. While almost all the opening sequences following an objectifying rhetoric are from films made up to the end of 2003, most examples of a subjective and reflexive one are from films made from 2004 onwards. 17 How can such a pattern be explained?
In his work on war and cinema, Virilio (1989: 3) interrogates the co-evolution of imaging technology, culture and warfare. ‘Alongside the “war machine’’’, he claims, ‘there has always existed an ocular (and later optical and electro-optical) “watching machine’’’. In his view, both these ‘machines’ condition each other, while their way of seeing – their logistics of perception – predisposes how wars are fought and represented.
Partly drawing on Virilio’s thought, Hoskins and O’Loughlin (2010) argue that the emergence of new participatory media ecologies and the increased availability of digital cameras and mobile phones have profoundly altered the practice and representation of warfare. New communication technologies enable unprecedented access to the realities on the ground and make it increasingly difficult for governments and military authorities to control and regulate the flow of information from and about the various battlefields. The authors coin the term ‘diffused war’ to conceptually grasp the resulting fuzziness and ambiguity of war imageries that pose new challenges to political decision makers and military planners.
Advances in digital communication technology also have an impact on the way that war is represented in film. Russell (2009: 259) refers to recent technological developments as ‘a seismic shift’ and identifies a ‘change in visual grammar’ (p. 263) in films like Redacted, Stop-Loss, or Battle for Haditha. Pisters (2010: 237) argues that the contemporary war film emulates the style of digital war footage. This enables a multiple screen aesthetics that disperses the experience of war into ‘multiple cameras, multiple screens and multiple human subjects’.
Following Pisters, it can be argued that, in the war film, the discursive logic of digital communication technologies facilitates a subjective and reflexive memory-making rhetoric. Historical master narratives that depend on a fixed point of view and an authoritative centre to issue claims regarding the reality of war are increasingly subverted by a constant flow of disconnected imageries that distort and refract this purported reality; accounts purporting to convey authentic war history are replaced by a variety of diffused war stories that resist combination into a coherent whole. The resulting constant play of competing perspectives encourages reflections about codes, points of view and medial frames. Regarding the contemporary war film, it can thus be argued that, in dispersing the experience of war into multiple channels and multiple screens, recent technological changes subtly undermine an objectifying rhetoric and facilitate a turn towards subjective and reflexive modes of framing the past in and through film.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to express my gratitude to two anonymous reviewers at Media, War & Conflict and to the participants at the CEPIN-research seminar at Tromsø University (16–17 March 2011) for their constructive criticism, insightful comments and valuable suggestions.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.