Eastwood: Flags Of Our Fathers (2006)

Clint Eastwood’s first real war film isn’t quite about the Battle of Iwo Jima – that’s more the province of the sequel, Letters From Iwo Jima - so much as the afterlife of Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph of American troops raising the flag on the top of the island. Divided into two more or less parallel narratives, it contrasts the lead-up to the photograph, and the American struggle for control of the island, with the aftermath of the photograph, as the six soldiers involved find themselves compelled to endlessly tour the United States, both during the last stages of the war and beyond. As a film about the way in which a photograph was circulated, recreated and confected into a spectacle – at one point, it’s literally remade as a dessert - it often plays as an amalgam of photographic images, or a piece of photojournalism, especially during the last sequence, which is an out-and-out visual essay. At the same time, though, Eastwood somewhat deflects the difference between photography and film into the difference between film and CGI, creating an odd, alterior medium, a fusion of photography and CGI, that frequently makes film feel displaced entirely. That’s quite clear in the afterlife of the photograph, whose parched, recycled, overcirculated images make for a palette that feels bleached by all the cameras that have flashed across it, but it’s most poetic in the assault on Iwo Jima itself, where it gives the island an otherworldy strangeness, turning it into a single uncanny valley that would perhaps feel more at home in a first-person shooter than in an Eastwood joint. It’s striking, then, how elegantly it brings back the widescreen sublimity of some of Eastwood’s earliest films, his fascination with debilitating discrepancies in scale, figures set against mystic horizons. And as in so many of those films, that synthetic vastness distends and suspends time into an interminable, unbearable waiting that’s even more oppressive than conflict, if only because it outlives it – as soon the war is over, we’re back waiting for all the ceremonies, bureaucratic meet-and-greets and jingoistic platitudes to end. Taken together, then, the two halves of the film converge on something like a spectacular front, the jingoistic coal-face of the war effort – like Yankee Doodle Dandy, released in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Eastwood’s interested in all the ways in which the stars and stripes can be turned into a spectacle, as the flag becomes a kind of sounding-board where different entertainment media rub shoulders. Except that this film’s far more sceptical, far more iconoclastic – colour’s too camouflaged here for the stars and stripes to really shine through – and, finally, far more ambitious, as Eastwood attempts nothing less than to pinpoint the exact moment at which an image seeped into the national consciousness, and to reassemble history as if it hadn’t.