Page 593 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| World C nema

In 1989, French director Bertrand Tavernier’s Life and Nothing But told a
classic story of war and the social unraveling that occurs in its aftermath. Set
in the year 1920, two women must wait to find the remains of their loved ones
who have been listed as missing in action in World War I; only then can each
attempt to create a new future. Almost a century later, another French director
interprets the incredible loss that was the Great War. In Joyeux Noel, director
and writer Christian Carion tells the story of the Christmas truce of 1914 when
soldiers crossed the line into no-man’s-land between the trenches in at least
a dozen spots along the Western Front. For a few hours it becomes common
ground as they eat, sing, smoke, and celebrate mass together. Nominated for
a Golden Globe and an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film of 2006, the film
won the 2005 Audience Award at the Leeds International Film Festival. In an
interesting international reference that demonstrates the shared nature of global
film language, in the opening battle scenes some of the tracking shots through
the trenches are styled in a similar fashion to Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 film Paths
of Glory.
In other cases, a director’s personal history has been shaped by war and expe-
riences that are brought to bear on their films. Raised in France, Karim Dridi is
both an insider and outsider. Dridi’s father was a Tunisia military officer when
he met Dridi’s mother, a French nurse, on the battlefield during the Algerian-
Tunisian war. Through an intimate portrait of family life, in Bye Bye (1996), his
second feature film, the director seeks a cultural common ground that reaffirms
our shared humanity regardless of race, religion, or nationality.

ausTraLian FiLm
When Peter Weir brought the Australian landscape to life in the atmospheric
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), it was a pivotal moment in the country’s film
history. The stunning landscapes of Australia’s desert outback had been featured
in Walkabout, the 1971 British production by Nicolas Roeg in which two aban-
doned English children encounter an Aborigine on a ritual quest, and the three
unlikely companions start their odyssey across the desert. But Peter Weir was
born and educated in Australia, having made short films and Australian televi-
sion programs and documentaries. Two years after Picnic, Weir would continue
to explore the ambivalent interrelationships between native Aboriginal culture,
Australian landscapes, and European modernity, in the film The Last Wave,
themes that became iconic in Australian film.
Weir’s 1981 film Gallipoli, scripted by prominent Australian playwright David
Williamson, is regarded as classic Australian cinema, and the film was instru-
mental in giving Mel Gibson his long run as a major international film star.
Weir would go on to make movies in the United States, with the wildly popular
Witness (1985), a thriller set in Amish country, and the less accessible, Mosquito
Coast (1986), both staring Harrison Ford.
By 1998, Peter Weir made the self-referential satire about the excesses of
media power, control, and money, in the satirical “reality” film The Truman Show,
which demonstrated his international significance as a major media figure.