#Letters from iwo jima movie watch how to#
Flags is about how to remember the war, giving a new view on an incident everyone knows Letters is about listening to those who fought it, trying to create a memory tableau of something most people, including Japanese, know little about. It, like Flags, begins decades after the war is over, but tells its story not through the traumatic flashbacks of the survivors, but effectively through the letters of soldiers unearthed from an island cave. The Japanese edition, Letters from Iwo Jima, could-and perhaps should-have been about similar issues, but Eastwood changes his approach to history itself with this film. Against the constructed nature of public heroism, Eastwood poses the private real bonds between men against public memory he focuses on personal trauma. Instead of giving the national narrative of bravery in capturing Iwo Jima, the film shows how such stories are manufactured by media and governments to further the aims of the country, whatever may be the truth or the feelings of the individual soldiers. But by dividing these perspectives in different films directed at Japanese and international audiences, Eastwood makes history not merely an issue of which side you are on, but of how to look at history itself.įlags of Our Fathers, the American version, is less about the battle than the memory of war, focusing in particular on how nations compulsively create heroes when they need them (like with the soldiers who raised the flag on Iwo Jima) and forget them later when they don’t. That’s why Clint Eastwood’s decision to narrate the Battle of Iwo Jima from both the American and the Japanese point of view is not really new it had been done before in Tora Tora Tora (1970), for instance.
History, like the cinema, can often be a matter of perspective. From Flags of Our Fathers to Letters From Iwo Jima: Clint Eastwood’s Balancing of Japanese and American Perspectives
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