War has been an integral part of human civilisation since its very beginning. The founding text of Western culture, Homer’s Ulysses, deals with war (and a great many other things). So do Herodotus’ Histories and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Another icon of Western culture, William Shakespeare, frequently dealt with war in his plays. The bard’s plays and especially his history plays remain some of the most intelligent and insightful explorations of war – certainly in the Western canon. Many Shakespeare plays take place against the backdrop of important military conflicts or military encounters such as the Battle of Actium (Anthony and Cleopatra), the Battle of Philippi (Julius Caesar), Agincourt (Henry V), the Battle of Bosworth (Richard III), which ended the war between the Lancastrians and the Yorkists, more commonly known as the War of the Roses. Inter-state war and civil strife also form the backdrop of much of Henry IV and Henry VI. As Ben Johnson observed: “Shakespeare is not of an era, but for all ages”. And so he is. Every generation discovers “its” Shakespeare. Just compare Lawrence Olivier’s patriotic 1944 film version of Henry V with Kenneth Branagh’s far more ambivalent post-Falklands 1989 cinematic rendering of the same text.
I was going to write about literature, cinema and war. But I quickly realised that I am not a literary or a film critic. So here is simply a list of idiosyncratic literary and cinematic work related to war that is worth being acquainted with.
Literary Work
War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy, 1865)
Stahlgewitter (Ernst Jünger, 1920)
The Good Soldier Schweik (Jaroslav Hašek, 1921)
Im Westen Nichts Neues (Erich Maria Remarque, 1929)
A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemmingway, 1929)
The Quiet American (Graham Greene, 1955)
Blechtrommel (Günther Grass, 1959)
Naked and the Dead (Normal Mailer, 1948)
Catch-22 (Joseph Heller, 1961)
Man in the High Castle (PKD, 1962)
Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut, 1969)
Gravity’s Rainbow (Tom Pynchon, 1973)
Adolf Hitler: My part in his downfall (Spike Milligan, 1971)
Dispatches (Michael Herr, 1977)
A Rumor of War (Philip Caputo, 1977)
The Things We Carried (Tim O’Brien, 1990)
Indignation (Philip Roth, 2008)
War (Sebastian Junger, 2010)
On War and Writing (Samuel Hynes, 2018)
Cinematic Work
Napoleon (Abel Gance, 1927)
La Grande Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937)
To Be or Not to Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942)
Ivan the Terrible I (Sergei Eisenstein, 1947)
Steel Helmet (Samuel Fuller, 1951)
Paths of Glory (Stanley Kubrick, 1957)
Die Brücke (Bernhard Wicki, 1959)
Human Condition (Masaka Kobayashi, 1959-61)
Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962)
Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962)
Dr Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
317th Platoon (Pierre Schoendorfer, 1965)
Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)
Dad’s Army (BBC, 1968-77)
MASH (Robert Altman, 1970)
Tora, Tora, Tora (Fleischer, Fukasaku & Masuda, 1970)
The Pity and the Sorrow (Marcel Ophuls, 1972)
Deer Hunter (Michael Cimino, 1978)
Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)
Das Boot (Wolfgang Petersen, 1981)
Allô, Allô (BBC, 1982-92)
Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence (Oshima, 1983)
Come and See (Elem Klimov, 1985)
Full Metal Jacket (Stanley Kubrick, 1987)
Blackadder Goes Forth (Richard Curits & Ben Elton, 1989)
Land and Freedom (Ken Loach, 1995)
Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998)
Downfall (Oliver Hirschbeigel, 2004)
Inglorious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
Hurtlocker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2009)
Restrepo (Tin Hetherington & Sebastian Junger, 2010)
Korengal (Sebastian Junger, 2014)
The Vietnam War (Ken Burns, 2017)
Dunkirk (Christopher Nolan, 2017)
Five Came Back (Laurent Bouzereau, 2017)
They shall not grow old (Peter Jackson, 2018)