WEDNESDAYS, OCTOBER 1-29, 2014 at 1:00 PM - Library Auditorium
In choosing a theme for my fall film series, my thoughts
turned to movies about World War II—but not those set on the battlefields. We
all recognize and honor those who fought on the front line during World War II,
the sacrifices made, the lives given so that the world could be restored to
peace and order.
But I thought that it might be interesting to look at other kinds of battles fought during the
war. Collateral damage is a term used in the military to describe
“unintentional or incidental damage to persons or objects that would not be
lawful military targets in the circumstances ruling at the time” (Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms,
US Department of Defense, 2005). I think of the term in a broader sense, to
include damage that is not necessarily suffered in combat, but which manifests
itself as a result of war. No one who lived through the war remained untouched
by it.
Think of the adjustments to civilian life that needed to be
made on the home front during the war. Never was this more acutely felt than by
the English during the time of the Blitz, the strategic bombing campaign
conducted by the Germans against London and other cities of England from
September 1940 through May 1941. Here were a people who steadfastly refused to
“lie down and die.” The courage that it took for the British to endure these
aerial raids is explored through the lives of one upper-middle class family in
the first film in the series, Mrs.
Miniver.
Consider as well the plight of Anne Frank, a young Jewish
girl who, together with her family and some friends, hid in an Amsterdam attic
for two years to escape Nazi persecution. Unlike Mrs. Miniver, Anne was a real-life
individual—a girl on the verge of adolescence, whose resolute belief in the
basic goodness of people, even as she hoped to escape the horrors of Hitler’s
“final solution,” found its expression in the written word. Whether as a
physical artifact, a play, or the film that’s part of my series, The Diary of Anne Frank lives on as a testament
to the tenacity of the human spirit.
Battle did not necessarily end when surrender came. The
aftermath of war lived on long afterward, as those who survived returned to a
world that was not the same as the one that they had left behind. And neither were they the same. How was that
possible? After all that they had
experienced in combat, did the mundane trials back home even matter? Some came
home with physical changes as well, whether it was a hearing impairment or the
loss of an appendage. Both kinds of
adjustments, both psychological and corporal, are explored in The Best Years of Our Lives, the third
movie in my series.
Children were also a part of the collateral damage of the
war. Its horrors prematurely robbed them of their innocence. If they didn’t
die, they were often separated from their families, displaced little beings who
might then face a world alone once the war ended. In The Search, Montgomery Clift plays an American private who tries to
help a young Czech boy find his mother. Complicating the search is the fact
that the boy has suppressed many of his memories—including those of his parent.
My series concludes with a very recent film, The Railway Man, in which Colin Firth
plays a veteran who was a prisoner in a Japanese labor camp during the war.
When he learns, some 35 years later, that the Japanese military policeman who
mistreated him at the camp is still alive, he vows to exact revenge.
Please join me, Wednesdays in October at 1:00 PM, as we
look at collateral damage, the ways that the war spilled into so many lives in
so many different ways, as depicted on film.
As always, I look forward to your taking this journey with
me.
Librarian & Film Enthusiast
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Here's the series schedule:
Oct. 1st - Mrs. Miniver (1942 - black & white - 134 min. - not rated)
Oct. 8th - The Diary of Anne Frank (1959 - black & white - 180 min, - not rated)
Oct. 15th - The Best Years of Our Lives (1946 - black & white - 172 min. - not rated)
Oct. 22nd - The Search (1948 - black & white - 104 min. - not rated)
Oct. 29th - The Railway Man (2013 - color - 116 min. - rated R for prisoner of war scenes)
