My Top Ten Anti-War Films
These are films, a mixture of feature films and documentaries (though the feature films, with the exception of Dr. Strangelove, hue closely to the historical record), which expose the crime of wars and/or genocides in a way that I believe highlights how war itself is a crime against humanity. I'm not saying all these film-makers are necessarily pacifists. I'm saying that these films provide insight into the war-making process that those of us who work for the abolition of war and structural violence might learn from.
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- DirectorBruce BeresfordStarsEdward WoodwardJack ThompsonJohn WatersThree Australian lieutenants are court martialed for executing prisoners as a way of deflecting attention from war crimes committed by their superior officers.My favorite anti-war film. It exposes the horrors of war by depicting the anatomy of a unit committing war crimes, while showing that everyone, even the chain of command, has their reasons and is trapped into the war system. Plus, while overtly about a real historical incident involving Australian soldiers fighting for the British during the Boer War in South Africa, it also manages to draw critically implicit parallels to the Australian role fighting in Vietnam on behalf of the US war against the Vietnamese people. Unfortunately, while set in South Africa, it, astonishingly, barely touches on issues of racism. Still, overall, a superb film, superbly made. By the way, I've heard some people describe this movie as one of the best courtroom dramas on film as well.
- DirectorOliver StoneStarsTom CruiseBryan LarkinRaymond J. BarryThe biography of Ron Kovic. Paralyzed in the Vietnam war, he becomes an anti-war and pro-human rights political activist after feeling betrayed by the country for which he fought.Based on the fantastic memoir by Ron Kovic, it wonderfully depicts the evolution of a soldier into an anti-war activist.
- 19641h 35mPG8.3 (520K)97MetascoreDirectorStanley KubrickStarsPeter SellersGeorge C. ScottSterling HaydenAn unhinged American general orders a bombing attack on the Soviet Union, triggering a path to nuclear holocaust that a war room full of politicians and generals frantically tries to stop.Kubrick somehow managed a powerful anti-war satire that is both horrifying and quite funny. That's skill.
- DirectorRithy PanhStarsKhieu 'Poev' ChesYeay CheuNhem EnA unique documentary on the notorious S-21 prison, today the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, with testimony by the only surviving prisoners and former Khmer Rouge guards.Astonishing interviews with guards who committed crimes against humanity in one of the most notorious of the Cambodian prison camps under the Khmer Rouge -- and confrontations between them and some of the handful of survivors of the place.
- DirectorSatyajit RayStarsSoumitra ChatterjeeBobitaSandhya RoyAs food shortages reach catastrophic proportions, Gangacharan attempts to preserve his privileged situation while his generous wife Ananga conversely tries to help and support the community.A gorgeous film, essentially a love story set in the context of the intensifying Bengali famine of 1943, induced by the British as it exported the grain to feed soldiers during WWII. A Brahmin man, believably in love but unconscious of the injustice of his privilege, grows to increasingly appreciate the woman he shares a marriage with as he begins to realize the crime of the caste system. It also features an implicit indictment of patriarchal violence (as it metaphorically links men's interpersonal violence to men's war-making violence), and so, like many of Satyajit Ray's films, is a pro-feminist film landmark.
- DirectorHal AshbyStarsJane FondaJon VoightBruce DernIn 1968 California, a woman whose husband is a Marine officer fighting in Vietnam falls in love with a former high school classmate who suffered a paralyzing combat injury in the war.The growing consciousness of a woman married to a Marine in 1968, as she grows to become a friend and more to a returned, paralyzed, now anti-war veteran. It manages to be a powerful anti-war film and a moving romance.
- DirectorAgnieszka HollandStarsSolomon PerelMarco HofschneiderRené HofschneiderA boy in Nazi Germany, trying to conceal that he is Jewish, joins the Hitler Youth.The story of a Jewish boy trapped between Hitler's and Stalin's armies during World War II.
- DirectorWolfgang PetersenStarsJürgen ProchnowHerbert GrönemeyerKlaus WennemannA German U-boat stalks the frigid waters of the North Atlantic as its young crew experience the sheer terror and claustrophobic life of a submariner in World War II.Unfortunately, unlike the first four of the movies on this list, Das Boot is not really about the horror of killing, but certainly conveys the terror of being the target of people trying to kill you. And, by focusing on the terror experienced by people trapped in a German submarine, it humanizes people that most of us would consider the "enemy," thus implicitly critiquing war itself.
- DirectorRoland JofféStarsSam WaterstonHaing S. NgorJohn MalkovichA journalist is trapped in Cambodia during tyrant Pol Pot's bloody 'Year Zero' cleansing campaign, which claimed the lives of two million 'undesirable' civilians.While part of this movie falls into the trap of focusing on the white protagonist, it focuses enough on his Cambodian colleague, Dith Pran, caught in the Cambodian auto-genocide, to be indelible.
- DirectorJean RenoirStarsJean GabinDita ParloPierre FresnayDuring WWI, two French soldiers are captured and imprisoned in a German P.O.W. camp. Several escape attempts follow until they are eventually sent to a seemingly inescapable fortress.Renoir fulfills his desire to make movies in which "everyone has their reasons" as the world of the European protagonists disintegrates during World War I.