Let's talk about the transition now between the book and the film. There's part of me that really just wants to say: "I really, really like Clint Eastwood and his films. It's a really really good film. Go and watch it." However I think Coursera will be unhappy about that level of content going out. So let's talk a little bit more about what goes on. Steven Spielberg had acquired the rights to Flags of Our Father, a project which Clint Eastwood had expressed an interest in being involved with, and again, this comes from some of the interviews you'll find on the web, some on the DVD, et cetera, et cetera. Steven Spielberg has a long and honorable tradition of making Second World War movies or producing them. So there is a continuity there and a respect about his consideration for war went on and how it's put as entertainment considering the traumatic nature of events during the Second World War. Clint Eastwood, forget Clint Eastwood the actor, great actor though he is, and I'm not talking purely in terms of the more stereotypical role you might associate Clint with, but Clint Eastwood the director has produced some of the best American films of recent years and in fact even though I am an enormous fan of Martin Scorsese there was an argument to say that Clint Eastwood is America's greatest living director at this point in time. If we take entertainments like Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, the consideration of the film, the pacing, the care about the way the script is put to the screen shows a man who is in his element but he's also considerate of the collaborative role and responsibility that he has in putting a story to the screen. But we have other parts of Clint Eastwood's output which has a more directed historical element to them: Invictus, looking at the 1995 Rugby Union World Cup in South Africa; Changeling, which does have the line above the title based on a true story except in this case it really was dealing with an incident in the 1930s; or in this case, Flags of Our Fathers and it's partner film Letters of Iwo Jima which I'll deal with as I said briefly in the next section. Last film that Clint Eastwood directed, J. Edgar, dealt with another very controversial member of the American administration J Edgar Hoover. I'm not a film critic in that regard but it carries across his consideration for retelling of American History and others history with concern and to show, as I said, respect and deal with the material with relevance. Now, it wasn't possible to convey the absolute horror of that conflict although parallels with the beach landing of Iwo Jima in the film and Saving Private Ryan for the D-Day landings are quite marked and obvious, and also valid in their own rights. Secondly, there is a great deal of intercutting between James Bradley's discovery of his father's role and the events themselves which I think parallel quite well parts of the structure of the book and part of the journey that Bradley goes through to understand his father's input in that role. The core of the film is around the flag-raising and the period afterwards. And these were six men who were serving their country as I said but to say they were ordinary men I think is a little bit disingenuous. They were men who were performing their roles for their country and were perhaps unprepared for what followed afterwards. Tragically, three of them died before the end of the battle. Now while that is quite a stylized portrayal in the film and there are one or two points of time which I mentioned where I feel like the point is over re-iterated about how important raising money was, it shows how fame can actually distort people's perception of the individuals but also can have quite a profound effect on their lives and, to a certain degree, John Bradley, by not living the life. of an Iwo Jima hero, also had something like a normal life compared to the other two survivors who portrayed in the book. Now, it is a two-hour entertainment. Conceptually, if you have access to the films and can watch them, it is probably worth doing it back-to-back, that is, if you can stomach four hours of reasonably graphic portrayal of warfare. Graphic is another overused word but the nature of the violence is not sensationalized. It is what it is. It is in the nature of warfare in the latter part of the Second World War but there are one or two points where the two films cross-referenced each other; they can be watched together, they can be watched individually, but there are a couple of points we should like you get the handshake between something that happens in Flags of the Father and what happens in Letters from Iwo Jima. So in constructing this view of the battle of Iwo Jima from both sides, from the American side and as we'll talk about a little bit in the next topic, from the Japanese side, you get a rounded and quite a sobering view about what the nature of modern warfare in the middle of the 20th century actually was for the infantrymen per se. Clint Eastwood deals, I think, very well with the "controversial points" that we discussed a little bit earlier, talking about the replanting of the flag, the military orders behind that, and also the way that that image was used in a post Iwo Jima context. Even with the caveat that I'm not a film critic, this is a very good film but I think if you are looking at comparing the two, the challenges that Eastwood faced filming Letters from Iwo Jima were greater and to a certain degree, that film is the better of the two. And again, that might be a little bit disingenuous. I think they are better shown as a pair. But a four hour movie, half of which is entirely in Japanese, might not have been something that the cinematic audience would tolerate. And get back to my points that this is an entertainment. It is not intended purely to be educational. In fact, it might not. It could be argued that it's not even the main reason the films made. I think to a certain degree you can see that there is a wish and a desire to maintain authenticity, a point I've made before and to show due consideration of the book that the film is based on. Now, I'm going to leave the discussion around this now, specifically on the film not least of which as I mentioned earlier on there is a work of critical appraisal coming out about the two films back-to-back, what we learn differently. So in the context of the Coursera course, I propose to write something up and mount that as a sort of review of that book once published. But the consideration I've put here is taking both the book and the film. Members of the public, academics, have a more rounded view of the events partly because it personalized the events, and partly because it does show the nature of the warfare at the time.
