The way of seeing things
by Paolo Valassi
In 2006, Clint Eastwood shot two films about Iwo Jima at the same time. The first, Flags of Our Fathers, revolves around the famous (and fake) photograph by Associated Press reporter Joe Rosenthal of a group of six Marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi.
The other film, which tells the story of the same battle but seen from the perspective of the Japanese sent to repel the invasion of the American army, is based on letters sent by Japanese soldiers to their families and is titled Letters from Iwo Jima.
As Eastwood himself says: "These films both tell the story of Iwo Jima through two different points of view, the American one and the Japanese one. I grew up watching war films where – in most cases – the protagonists were divided between good and bad. Life and war are not like that."
But it is possible to appreciate, on a deeper level, a different "way of seeing things" also by recalling a great film from the past.
In fact, regarding Flags of our Fathers, some critics have seen an obvious reference to one of John Ford's most famous (and pessimistic) western films: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
In 1962, a bitter and melancholic John Ford questioned the truth and its mythification, with John Wayne and James Stewart (the "killers" of Liberty Valance, the first true and the second legendary) representing two successive historical moments of America: the first a pioneer and heroic old-school man of action with brusque manners, the second an idealistic servant of the community and a dutiful observer of the law.
In 2006, Clint Eastwood, with Flags of Our Fathers, tells not so much about the battle to conquer the island of Iwo Jima as the symbolic value that was attributed to Rosenthal's photograph. Every American saw in it the pride for their country and the hope of an imminent victory. And the Government cleverly used it for advertising purposes to sell Treasury bonds involving, while the fighting was still going on, the three survivors of that enterprise, oppressed by the sense of guilt of having escaped but forced to play out the grotesque script.
As Mereghetti rightly says, "... Eastwood is interested in the media mechanism that transforms an image into a myth, even if the facts happened in a very different way."
The true heart of the film, as in Ford's, is right here, in the dualism between "legend" and "reality." Where Eastwood differs from Ford is in his attitude towards the legend. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford claims that "... if the legend becomes reality, the legend wins", that is, the legend wins if it is more beautiful and reassuring than the historical truth.
Eastwood instead expresses all the bitterness and disillusionment of a world that has learned to distrust legends.
