War seen from below

No headquarters and no maps: these books and films stay at the height of a trench, a platoon, a patrol, where nothing of the whole can be understood. Remarque and Barbusse wrote the mud and the waiting of 1914, Grossman fitted Stalingrad into a scattered family, Céline began his crossing of the century with an absurd war. Cinema pushed the device further: a training camp filmed as a machine for making soldiers, a journey up a river in Vietnam, a Belarusian adolescent in an encircled village.

works 11

• NovelUnder FireLe FeuHenri Barbusse · 1916The war seen from below and without anything heroic: the mud, the waiting, the hunger and the assault, from the side of those who endure them.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelA Farewell to ArmsErnest Hemingway · 1929War is still written in the language of proclamations, with its sacred and glorious words. This novel holds that abstract words are obscene beside the names of villages.Literature
• NovelAll Quiet on the Western FrontIm Westen nichts NeuesErich Maria Remarque · 1929The First World War seen from the trenches by a young German volunteer, who left with his entire class.Literature
• CinemaAll Quiet on the Western FrontLewis Milestone · 1930Hollywood tells the story of the 1914 war from the German side, through a class of schoolboys, based on Erich Maria Remarque's book published the previous year.Cinema
• NovelJourney to the End of the NightVoyage au bout de la nuitLouis-Ferdinand Céline · 1932A crossing of an era, from the war to Africa and from Detroit to the suburbs, by a man who believes in nothing, in a spoken language.Literature
• NovelThe Naked and the DeadNorman Mailer · 1948The novel follows a patrol and shows that hierarchy, fear and class contempt weigh there as heavily as the enemy.Literature
• CinemaFires on the Plain野火Kon Ichikawa · 1959Film of 1959 based on a novel of 1951, about a sick soldier whom his army abandons on an island in the Philippines.Cinema
• NovelLife and FateЖизнь и судьбаVasily Grossman · 1960A novel about Stalingrad at war and the two totalitarianisms, seized by the political police and published abroad after its author's death.Literature
• CinemaApocalypse NowFrancis Ford Coppola · 1979The narrative follows, from stopover to stopover, the journey up an imaginary river, the Nùng, in the midst of the American war in Vietnam.Cinema
• CinemaCome and SeeИди и смотриElem Klimov · 1985A war film from 1985 about a Belarusian teenager who joins the partisans during the German occupation.Cinema
• CinemaFull Metal JacketStanley Kubrick · 1987A training camp where the whole platoon pays for the fault of one man.Cinema