“The Fatal Alliance”: When War Becomes a Film

The Trojan War? We know it thanks to Homer. The Punic Wars? They have been handed down to us only by some Roman historians, that is, by the victors. And what about the chivalric poems where the ones fighting are always brave knights in love with the fight as well as with the lady of the moment? In short, these few hints are enough to understand how the war has long been told with hindsight or by generals and leaders or even by those who were far away from the battlefields . In the last century, wars have been told to us first of all by the cinema, which has contributed enormously to building our imagination on soldiers, battles, vanquished, victors, heroes and cowards.

David Thomson, one of the most important American film critics, starting from this assumption offers us in his essay The Fatal Alliance (Jimenez Edizioni, 2024, euro 24,00, pp. 488) a lucid and caustic look at a century of battles represented on the big screen.

But The Fatal Alliance is not a critical essay on war cinema, it is not a simple chronology or a standard survey of war films. Of course, David Thomson turns his penetrating gaze to many classics of the genre and to some of his favorite films, from “All Quiet on the Western Front” to “The Bridge on the River Kwai” to “Saving Private Ryan.” But his essay is intended to be a meditation on the thorny relationship between war and cinema, an unprejudiced exploration of how war and cinema in the twentieth century are inextricably linked.

Cinema was still in its infancy when World War I began, yet in less than a century, movies transformed the civilian experience of war—and history itself—for millions of people around the world. They made violence into spectacle, emotion, pleasure… and took the pain, the blood, the fear out of war. As Thomson writes of his book: “This is a book about war, an attempt to describe the dynamics of cinematic infatuation with battle . But war and battle are not the same thing: war is an evil that resides in nature and society, the profound expression of our fear; battle, on the other hand, aspires to thrill and adventure, like going to the movies while managing fear.”

Cinema's infatuation with the event of war and its fascination with viewers is the moral conundrum at the heart of Thomson's book. War films are prestigious and often blockbusters; but there is something problematic about viewers' appreciation for large-scale depictions of violence, such as Apocalypse Now, Black Hawk Down, or even Star Wars . And what does this truth say about us, our culture, and our changing sense of war and the past? It probably tells us that we have forgotten what a battle is, truly and cruelly. What remains is the mythical aura of war "which is beautiful even if it hurts," as Francesco De Gregori sings in Generale , a mythical aura that, thanks also to cinema, has not evaporated over the course of the twentieth century, even in the face of the mass of testimonies that recount the violence perpetrated by combatants on various fronts.