In an interview in 1973, the great French director Francois Truffaut told Gene Siskel that he “didn’t think [he’d] really seen an anti-war film … every film about war ends up being pro-war.” Before becoming a filmmaker, Truffaut had shaped his perceptions—and those of an extremely influential generation of readers—as a film critic; his comments, while obviously provocative, get at something troubling about the genre. Obviously, Truffaut had, at that point, seen a great many ostensible “anti-war films,” starting with Lewis Milestone’s Oscar-winning, paradigm-shifting World War I parable All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)—a film that 1917 pays homage to—and also including his countryman Jean Renoir’s powerful POW drama La Grande Illusion (1937). He’d have understood those movies’ scripts and sentiments as being angled against war, either in retrospect or contextualized as a preventive gesture (Renoir’s plangent plea for pan-European decency was released on the eve of World War II). But Truffaut’s awareness of the movies’ effective power led him to believe that simply showing war onscreen was tantamount to a kind of glorification. You can have characters give speeches about the horror and futility of combat, or tug at audiences’ heartstrings by killing off beloved actors, or deliberately emphasize pain and brutality, but you can never truly drain such material of its basic fascination, so that even the most skillful and poetic attempts to use the medium as a form of protest become weaponized against themselves.
This paradox aligns with the fact that throughout movie history, many of the filmmakers considered most widely to be masters of the form have made war movies, and that regardless of their personal or political agendas in doing so, they’ve used the opportunity to flex their muscles. Take, for instance, Stanley Kubrick, whose 1953 debut, Fear and Desire, is, in theory and execution, a war movie that Truffaut might admire—one that shies away from showing combat in favor of a psychological approach. Its characters are a platoon of soldiers trapped behind enemy lines in what the opening narration refers to as a “country of the mind,” suggesting that they are less individuals than archetypes of enlisted men; as the film goes on, they do battle primarily with the enemy within. Equal measures ingenious and pretentious, Fear and Desire hinted at a filmmaker not yet grown into his talent, but by 1957’s Paths of Glory—a studio-backed World War I epic starring Kirk Douglas as a French colonel defending his men against charges of cowardice from a military establishment determined to execute them as scapegoats—he’d seized the opportunity to show off his chops.