Foreign cinema often has a hard time catching on in the United States, thanks to audiences’ difficulty with subtitles. The world of foreign cinema often features ideas and execution far different from the experiences native to the US. When dealing with global conflicts, it’s so important that audiences get a global perspective.
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Come and See
This 1985 Soviet war film depicts in stark terms the Nazi invasion of Belarus. It regularly descends into a surreal dreamlike tone poem, but even that offers no escape from the oppressive atmosphere. Like All Quiet on the Western Front, the film’s anti-war message would be genuinely impossible to miss. It underwent almost a decade of censorship from the Soviet state before its release. The point-of-view character is Flyora, a partisan teenager who runs away from home to join the resistance against the monsters occupying his home. This film is not for the faint of heart. Many have noted its DNA in both Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List. Not only is the violence on display positively haunting, but the film as a whole is also operating on a level of apocalyptic dread. It’s the kind of feature that a viewer will be thinking about a decade after they see it, but, for those who can stomach it, it’s a transcendent experience.
Downfall
Remember that slightly distasteful meme that started going around over a decade ago? The one in which Hitler rants and raves and slams his fist with comical subtitles underneath. The film that originated that film is one of the most controversial World War II dramas ever put to screen. Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 film Downfall depicts the final days of Adolf Hitler from the perspective of his final secretary, Traudl Junge. It’s based on the real-life accounts of Junge, and it seeks to do the impossible, humanize Hitler. Many bristle at the idea of depicting a monster as anything else, but in and out of the film, Hirschbiegel argues that part of what made Hitler so threatening is his humanity. Special commendations must go to the late great Bruno Ganz, who turned in a stellar performance as the rapidly decaying Hitler. It’s a difficult film to watch for several reasons, but Downfall finds the human drama in the worst humans who ever lived.
Das Boot
Like Downfall, Wolfgang Peterson’s adaptation of Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s account of his life aboard a German submarine finds the human aspects of the enemy. Few other films capture the experience of war in terms of tone and tension. Soldiers are depicted as quintessentially human, simply trying to do what they can for their country. War is depicted as alternating between pulse-pounding excitement and brutal boredom. Known as The Boat in English, this film is recognized today as one of the best German films of all time. It is still one of the most expensive film productions ever to come out of the country. The ensemble cast has brilliant and carefully-considered interplay, the battle scenes are tense and powerful, and the ending is jaw-dropping in its scale. It can be hard to watch the war from the other side, but Das Boot is one of the most powerful explorations of the moment-to-moment struggle on the battlefield and the open sea.
The Battle of Algiers
Many of the best war movies are about World War II, but a film about a lesser-known conflict can be just as engaging. This 1966 Italian film depicted the Algerian War of Independence against France, a conflict that had only come to an end four years earlier. The film is shot in black-and-white, on-location, with a cast of almost exclusively Algerian citizens who were not actors at the time of production. Director and co-writer Gilberto Pontecorvo picked his cast at random, based on appearance. It’s designed to look like the newsreel documentaries of the time, and the style is infectious. The only element that really gives away its cinematic status is the stellar score by Pontecorvo and Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western mainstay Ennio Morricone. The Battle of Algiers is a near-perfect recreation of a lesser-known conflict.
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
Nagisa Ōshima’s brilliant life-affirming 1983 war drama is technically only half in Japanese, but its foreign language status is extremely important. Based loosely on Sir Laurens van der Post’s 1963 novel The Seed and the Sower, the film depicts the struggle of English prisoners of war in Imperial Japan. The guards and commanding officers work tirelessly to break the spirits of their prisoners until they encounter a man who shines too bright to be snuffed out. As romance forms, the disparate worlds of these two enemies are thrown into question. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is unquestionably as challenging as the other epic war films, but it’s also inspirational in a way that few other pieces of art can achieve.
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