| | |  Entertainment | October 2009 
The Man Is Steel, the Tank Is Only Iron
 Matteo Fracassi - Inter Press Service
go to original
October 21, 2009
New York - "War is not made by heroes or Hollywood studs," says director Samuel Maoz. "War is mostly made by young and inexperienced guys. Children that are sent to go after and kill the ones they used to play with. That's what this really is about."
Maoz should know. He was just 20 when he was conscripted into the Israeli army and wounded in the 1982 war with Lebanon – the subject of his first feature film, which recently won the Golden Lion, the highest cinematic honor of the 66th Venice Film Festival.
A gunner who hesitates at shooting enemies (Shmuel), a driver who doesn't want to lead the way (Yigal), a commander who is unable to control anybody (Assi), and a soldier with only two weeks of service left who can't wait to be home (Herzl) - these are the four characters through which the audience experiences the futility of war within the claustrophobic confines of a tank stranded in a Syrian village.
"This is not a documentary. This movie is a story about emotions, all the emotions a soldier who is at war has to go through," Maoz told IPS. "The episode portrayed in the movie is not the main thing, it's just the scenario which gives these soldiers' feelings the chance to step out."
"Lebanon" is the powerful story of four Israeli paratroopers whose tank, dubbed "Rhino" and bearing the ironic motto "Man is Steel, the Tank is Only Iron", gets stuck in an enemy village.
Asked about the graphic violence in the film, including the shelling of unarmed civilians, the director responded that, "In war there are no bad guys and no good guys. The war is the bad guy and everyone is its victims."
"I experienced the thing first-person," he said. "Shmuel – the main character's name - is the Israeli nickname for Samuel. The facts in my movie may be a bit romanticised, but the emotions I put in it are all realistic."
These emotions arrive straight away to viewers thanks to the director's technique of setting almost all of the action inside the tank, with the outside seen only through its gunsight.
On Jun. 6, 1982, the Israeli Defence Forces invaded Lebanon following an assassination attempt against Israel's ambassador to Britain by a militant Palestinian group, although their real intent was to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organisation (which had no role in the attempt).
Israel occupied southern Lebanon and started bombing Beirut. After lengthy U.N.-brokered negotiations, the Israeli army retreated later that year. An estimated 17,825 Lebanese and 675 Israeli soldiers were killed during the war.
IPS met with Maoz at a recent New York Film Festival screening of "Lebanon", where he said he wanted to dedicate the movie to all those who "like me, came back from the war with no physical injuries. People who'll live, will get married, will have kids, but at the same time, will always have their souls wounded, wounded by a horrible memory that no one can delete and that they have got to live with."
"I started thinking about doing this movie in 1986-'87, at the end of my service in the army, but all I managed to remember was the smell of burned human flesh. If you have spent a lot of time in the darkness of a tank, you learn to recognise this smell," he said.
"In 2006, during the Second Lebanon War, I was watching the reports on TV, like they were the best reality shows ever made," Maoz explained. "Then I realised that the documentary was not my thing, I had to go with the smell, with my emotions, and I wrote the script in just four weeks. As soon as I started writing, the smell was gone."
Asked if he had experienced any pressure by Israeli authorities during or after the process, the director said that "the army didn't cooperate at all, so I couldn't ask them for the tank - but in Israel, if you know where to look, it's pretty easy to find one".
"The movie didn't premiere yet in Israel so I don't know about the political authorities, but the test screenings went really well with overwhelming reactions from the audience," he added.
Maoz said one audience member "came to me and told me that up until that moment she was all focused on herself and her safety, but having watched my movie, she started to think about her nieces, who had to attend the military service which is obligatory in Israel, both for men and women."
"I knew that I couldn't achieve any result trying to talk to people's heads, but if I managed to reach their hearts and stomachs I could do something important," he said. |
|
| |
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us