Letters in Films: Letters from Iwo Jima

I can't say I have enjoyed Clint Eastwood's bold two-part tribute to the fallen warriors (both American and Japanese) at the Battle of Iwo Jima in the Second World War. I had to split the viewing of both films in about seven seatings, it was a bit too much for me - maybe I'm too faint of heart. Flags of Our Fathers (2006) focuses on the American side and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) takes place entirely within Japanese ranks.

The first film ranges from the field of battle to the manipulative political scene on the home front. Letters from Iwo Jima, however, sticks mostly to the action on the island, summoned from the poignant unsent letters unearthed by 21st-century researchers years later.

For a second at the beginning of Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima, you may think that you are gazing overhead at a field of stars. In fact, you are looking straight down into the ground, at waves of black sand on the volcanic island where, over the course of five weeks in February and March, 1945, an invasion force of 100,000 Americans (two thirds of them U.S. Marines) fought 22,000 entrenched Japanese infantrymen. Only 1,083 Japanese survived the battle, while 6,821 Americans were killed and 20,000 wounded.

Both in Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, Eastwood ironises and calls into question civilian beliefs both in the Japanese and American war culture. He makes us empathize with the soldiers, ordinary people who have never come anywhere near a battlefield, who are mere pawns in a war conceived by generals and politicians. Eastwood trivializes the raising of the American flag, a routine, off-hand task in Flags of Our Fathers, only obliquely glimpsed in Letters from Iwo Jima.  In the latter, there is a horrible sequence in which a group of Japanese soldiers commit suicide with a scream of "Banzai!" which is devastating. Equally heart-wrenching is the finding of the letter on a dead GI from his mom, read by Kuribayashi's men who suddenly realize she is no different from their mothers.

Eastwood manages to show us the flesh-and-blood individuality of the combatants, the human face of both sides, because as Walter Scott said, "War is the only game in which both sides lose."

Source: http://www.historicalconsulting.com/returned_iwojima_letters.html