Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.
I think I’ve mentioned before that there was a time in my life when my favorite genre of film was war films. When I was a kid, I liked the adventurous nature of films showing combat, something true in the main because the war films I had access to tended to be from the 1940s and ‘50s, and tended to be of the more jingoistic variety. The good guys always completed their mission and stopped the Nazis in their tracks. Much of the time, this came down to American ingenuity and determination. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve changed just as the genre has changed. War films now are not about plucky Americans overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds. No, these days, filmmakers have the correct idea in most cases of showing war for what it is: something awful, confusing, and terrifying. So it is with Amos Gitai’s Kippur.
I’ve seen plenty of war movies of the last few years. It’s really no surprise; after all, war is a common event in the world and has been for millennia. I’ve seen war films from the point of view of the combatants, films that show the combatants on both sides, modern war, ancient war, war as seen by children, war from the point of view of the bystanders, and war seen through the eyes of the prisoners. But Kippur gives us something different—war through the eyes of the men who go to the battlefield and pick up the bodies of the dead and dying, transferring them back to the hospital. We don’t see the shooting war; we see the terrible and tragic aftermath.
