Following Mark’s lead, obliquely, I recalled a film celebrated in Z Channel that I’d always meant to see. I dutifully stuck Stuart Cooper’s Overlord onto my queue, and with equal diligence forgot entirely about it, ’til Mark’s recent post … and dug it out, moved it up–and here we are.
It’s worth seeing. In brief, Cooper tells the story of one soldier off to boot camp in preparation for the D-Day invasion, but he tells it in and out of time, with dreamlike flashforwards and -backs, sequences that seem half-dream or disconnected memory, interwoven with archival footage–particularly many stunning sequences of planes strafing, bombing, or just ominously dragging a shadow over bucolic landscapes. It’s a compact Thin Red Line, as dreamily philosophical as Malick with half the gas, at a third the length; its impact on Spielberg seems evident, as well, as at a fraction of the cost Cooper captures the terrifying moments before and at landfall in Normandy. Maybe that’s unfair, but since aside from Z I’d never heard of the film, and it only recently got the Criterion treatment, it seems crucial to trace its impact on those later acclaimed films.
And like those films, Cooper’s war is gorgeous. Here’s the thing that got me posting– Continue reading Art (of) War