It is an American movie about an “American war” told through the eyes of the “enemy.” As such we see the Battle of Iwo Jima without first filtering the images through the dulling lenses of nationalism and jingoism. Letters is striking precisely because it disregards Hollywood’s grammatical rules and, as a result, achieves a level of intellectual and emotional honesty about war rarely seen. The rules of any grammar constrain what can and cannot be communicated. Thus, it is not surprising that most Hollywood war films possess a common grammar: war is war as experienced by American soldiers victories are American victories and losses American losses. Can one imagine a Hollywood blockbuster made today that ends with the Klan gloriously “saving” Southern women from freed slaves like the 1915 classic Birth of a Nation? War movies, as both historical artifact and cinema, are even more constrained by the societies that produce them than other genres of films. As Fredric Jameson has emphasized, the production of any cultural product - and I include both movies and histories in this category - is subject to underlying economic, political, and cultural realities of the society that produces them. Movies are not made in a social vacuum - much like writing history, movie-making is a partisan project.

In doing so, it imparts new perspective on our own lives. Letters illustrates cinema’s power to convey the truth of the other - in this case the Japanese soldier. Squarely in the tradition of great war writing like Orwell‘s essay “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” and Catch 22, these scenes serve both to humanize the soldiers and to communicate to the viewer the “essential horror of army life.” In the words of Orwell: “Orders have to be obeyed and enforced by punishment if necessary, the relationship between officer and man has to be the relationship of superior and inferior.” The beginning of the movie focuses on the minutiae that dominate the lives of all soldiers - bad food, dysentery outbreaks, and digging ditches. This film is political art at its best, it clandestinely transforms human perceptions and forces the viewer to think anew. The movie is based on recently discovered letters by Japanese soldiers on the island and is told through the eyes of two of the letter writers, a poor conscripted baker, Saigo ( Kazunari Ninomiya), and Lieutenant General Tadamichi Kuribayashi ( Ken Watanabe), the Japanese general in charge of defending the island. Relying on a well crafted script by Iris Yamashita and superb acting, the movie tells the story of a group of Japanese soldiers as they prepare for and eventually fight the Battle of Iwo Jima. Clint Eastwood‘s new movie Letters from Iwo Jima is a sobering and deeply humanist perspective on the horrors of war. All the lofty ideals - be they revolutionary or reactionary - cannot change this. By its very nature, it forces a coarse division between us and the other.

Letters from iwo jima movie online