Volume 25, Issue 1 / January 2021

About War

The first issue of 2021 (Ok we are a few weeks late…) features the theme of war. The single exception to this theme of war and the issue starter is Peter Rist’s usually iconoclastic ‘best of’ list, taking us back not to 2020 but a little farther, 1920, and the best films of the decade known as the ‘roaring twenties’ (even if the specter of World War 1 hangs over many of the films Rist mentions). Our issue’s theme of ‘war’ takes over with the next four articles. Daniel Garrett and myself both look at Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (2019), which looks at World War 2 from a German/Austrian perspective. Daniel Garrett’s review also discusses Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998), which is also concerned with the Second World War, but from an American perspective. Douglas Buck reviews one of the most harrowing films about the infantry experience, Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985), which has recently received a full 2K digital restoration. The last article by Pablo Garcia Conde “The Caucasian Volcano: Should the Wind Drop” takes a political view at a film, Should the Wind Drop (Nora Martirosyan, 2020) which has as its backdrop a war which Conde notes took place “between September and November 2020, for 45 days….[and] has … gone quite unnoticed in the world, but of great significance for two nations: Armenia and Azerbaijan.” The war in question was fought over the “de facto although unrecognized nation: Nagorno Karabakh.” (Donato Totaro)