Went yesterday to see a presentation of propraganda films made by the National Film Board during world war ii. Some of the lines of narration ... some of the scenes ... some of the dodos in the audience ... any and all of them could just about break your heart.
One of the films dealt with the children of Britain who were sent here to Canada to escape the Blitzkrieg the Germans were waging against the Brits. Such innocent little faces staring at the camera. The narrator spends the entire film emphasizing how wonderful, how safe was their sojourn here. He begins by telling the audience that their first step to safety was to "sail away" to Canada, but as you watch a whole flock of the little ones boarding a vessel, you are told that some of them "sailed away to their death". That's all, just that one line, and your imagination can fill in, if you caught that line, or if you know about the ships being sunk in the Atlantic. The horrors of war...
In another film, you are spoken to by a skull, whose eyesockets are intermittently filled with swastikas that glow red, and flash on and off at you. The skull is thanking the Canadian audience for any line of info inadvertently dropped by a casual speaker, to not-so-innocent listeners. You listen to the supposed dialogue in a bar somewhere and you hear a man saying that his son's battalion is not going to be posted where they first thought, but is going instead to an unnamed town. Then you see a clip of archival film showing soldiers on the receiving end of a deadly salvo. The implication is clear as to the "intelligence" and the skull appears again to thank the father. I sit there thinkging about the atmosphere of general mistrust, and "neighbour turning on neighbour" that could result, while several audience members laugh. Although we were told beforehand to keep in mind the times in which these films would have been viewed, the laughers must have been in vacant-brain-space mode at that moment. Perhaps they are viewing the film with a 'critical eye' as to its special effects and finding it lacking for their sophisticated tastes. Perhaps they are just insensitive to everyone but themselves.
One after another scene flashes in front of us, scenes from the archives, scenes that resulted in death feasting on the results of humankind's inhumanity to its own. So much death should have bloated the grim spectre, but you know that its skeletal form can never be filled, that no amount of gore could ever stop up the gaping holes between the ribs.
The last film shown exhorts the audience to unification in their fight against the fascists. It calls on them, each and every one of them. to search within themselves for the courage to fight on, and the heart to remember those who are suffering on and near the front lines. Thye narrator tells the audience that the human spirit is a weapon against which the fascists will sooner or later find themselves powerless. It all ends with a final scene showing a crowd of people in some asian locale, pushing forward to an unknown site, on the far side of some railroad tracks. The crowd is made up of all ages and both genders, all walking with varying degrees of ability, but the crowd is flowing around one of its members who struggles on alone. Not a soul reaches down to help her. She is an indeterminate age, perhaps older, but also perhaps a younger woman beaten down and rendered old before her time by the horrors she must have seen. She is crawling painfully forward on her knees. By now, the whole audience, even the former snickerers, are silent, and when the lights flash on, we all file out, in silence. The horrors of war ...