Guerra e Pace (Massimo d'Anolfi & Martina Parenti, 2020) - Extended Thoughts

Guerra e Pace's a film that felt such a timely viewing for me as someone who consumes a lot of media. Showing how extensive it is to counteract any act - how the defined image does more than just shape our thoughts - it's subtle in trying to indoctrinate our thoughts even at it's most subtlest that we barely pay attention to them. A case in point is the media studies section are looking at lighting in photography and it shows a picture of an American soldier where you notice the shine on the cap and subliminally it shows that whoever is the Army General/Sergeant etc. they are not really the most important part - it's the uniform. The person is the placeholder - the uniform is what matters. But it was a beautiful to watch them going through with the light metres as it made me nostalgic for the time that I did film and media studies. messing around with light metre as I said, making sure that the shading is right for the test subject so that there is no harsh shadows. 

The object of the image itself also plays large - the broken pieces of a glass canvas becoming a delicate jigsaw puzzle for those to gently and carefully rearrange. It reminds the viewer that film, photography and the nature of the image are fragile things. Even in the digital age there is enough improvements in technology that means they need to be rescaled on a constant basis. The early war films that are shown reveal so much of humanity with so little. Of course some of it was staged but the idea was that it was there to entertain, educate and not much else was thought about. It's amazing to think how easy they would discard reams of film roll without a second thought. Such was the way of the world.

Seeing a type of diplomacy at play in the event of rolling 24 hour news cycles meant it was also a new aspect even if it at times you see a harrowing news cycle image and said person would get up off their chair to enquire to their secretary if they've sent a WhatsApp message or something to that effect. There was one encounter over the phone as to help an Italian stuck there and highlighted certain difficulties in how they would work. It's nice to see diplomacy at work even if it seems removed at some points.

After the whole trauma at seeing French Foreign Legion army men in training t-shirts and very short shorts (Daisy Duke would definitely get a kick out of seeing tattooed men wearing her clothes!), there is the ending which leaves on the idealistic hope that with these images, testaments of the past will live on so that people know what was but there's been an increasing feeling in watching a cleaning lady wipe every square inch that we're heading for an antiseptic, sanitised view that we cannibalise the images we see with our own eyes and destroy the fabric of them not materially but mentally. This isn't something I can elaborate on fully but given how we can manipulate so much at the click of a mouse, this then creates confusion and ultimately as we've seen in the world around us, an apathy that can garner a couple of guffaws along the way. What entails could be that we end up making the same mistakes again only in an entirely new pattern. I know this can be seen as a dourly cynical outlook but what we see is that this is a new beginning of something that could potentially end up being terrible. And I dearly hope I'm wrong but only time will tell.

All in all it was a film that left me with a lot of differing emotions and something that is clearly close to my heart given it deals with the fragility of the image and political intentions and manipulations of the masses. It delivers these with a degree of delicacy and intelligence. The shadows that play off cameras looking like armed weapons which in the hands of the army, it definitely is. If only I could see this kind of intelligence more in films in general, my feeling is that the medium would be in a better place than it is.