In this book, I will be exploring the differing ways that feature films have dealt with the inter-related themes of guerrilla insurgency, terrorism and special operations, forms of conflict that can be termed unconventional war (UW). Film producers have usually been wary of filming this kind of war, though there are several notable films that stand out as giving absorbing representations of unconventional kinds of conflict such as Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), Costa Gavras’s State of Siege (1972) or Uli Edel’s Baader Meinhof Complex (2008).
Unconventional warfare has also often been poorly understood within western militaries. Unconventional warfare consists of terrorist attacks, retaliation by counter-insurgent forces, the blowing up of cars and buildings and draconian police and military controls over civilian populations. Transferring unconventional warfare of this kind to the cinema screen involves controversial ethical and political issues, with the risk of films being banned if they offend cinema audiences or confront too abrasively a society’s dominant historical mythology of its past wars. This has not prevented some important films from being released; but they have tended to be made by a relatively small coterie of directors creating what Michalczuk terms ‘political fiction films’ attempting to inform, document or mobilize public opinion.1
Unconventional warfare has become, in the decades since the Second World War, an increasingly important part of modern military conflict. The post-war period certainly saw several conflicts of the inter-state conventional type; the Arab–Israeli wars of 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, for instance, as well as the 1965 and 1971 wars between India and Pakistan and the Falklands War between Britain and Argentina in 1982. Film producers, significantly, have largely avoided these wars which have never formed the basis of a major feature film. It is still the case that conventional war cinema continues to pivot around military myths anchored in the First and Second World Wars or military conflicts stretching further back in time such as the American Civil War or the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century.
The aversion to unconventional war derives from a longstanding dislike of this type of conflict by professional military hierarchies and their accompanying military intellectuals. It is, after all, a form of war that great powers have often not been very good at fighting, given that these powers are also in the business of maintaining large conventional militaries to contain as far as possible threats from rival great powers. Unconventional wars and conflicts have frequently been viewed as annoying forms of ‘small war’ on the fringes of empire that threatened to divert resources and manpower from potentially serious arenas close to home. Despite immensely superior firepower the imperial great power has frequently been dogged by a simple inability to match the sort of commitment and resourcefulness of the smaller enemies it finds itself up against; enemies fighting, very often, for their very survival or at least the protection of core values and ways of life. ‘Asymmetric’ wars of this kind constantly pose a problem for great powers since they are difficult to win, short of the diversion of massive manpower and military resources that might lead less to complete victory but simply the containment of enemies who can live to fight another day.2 The historical record is littered with instances of this problem, with the ruins of Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England standing as one major defensive remedy to contain incursions from warrior Scottish tribes as well as avoiding needless losses by Roman legions in misty Highland wastes.
What, though, do we exactly mean by unconventional war? This is a type of warfare involving relatively small groups of mobile fighters operating across a wide and sometimes vague battle space, where the conflict might be viewed considerably differently by the opposing parties. It is also a form of war fought not only by sub-state groupings and small nations and tribal societies but also by specialized sections of conventional militaries in the form of ‘special operations’. Unconventional warriors have a range of tactics, including sabotage, raiding, kidnapping, propaganda and assassination; tactics that in turn can lead to draconian political and military responses, rationalized very often in more recent times through various doctrines of ‘counter-insurgency’. Some unconventional formations act as auxiliaries to full-scale armies, such as those operating behind enemy lines in the Second World War, like the SAS, LRDG and US Rangers. Others form part of a wider guerrilla strategy that may eventually escalate into full-scale conventional conflict, as occurred in the case of the wars of ‘national liberation’ in China and Vietnam. Unconventional war forms a major component in the historiography of war, even if it runs contrary to ‘conventional’ precepts of warfare centred on hierarchical chains of command, battlefield honour and large-scale conflict by rival professional militaries.
It is a form of war that has often been poorly understood within mainstream militaries. David Maxwell has argued that UW is complex and time-consuming to fight, based as it is on popular political engagement.3 It does not fit easily into the conventional western military ethos, especially in the United States, of full-frontal assault on the enemy of the kind familiar from more conventional conflicts like the Second World War and Korea. UW, Maxwell suggests, is really about revolution, resistance and insurgency, a highly political form of war that is ‘complex, violent, messy and difficult to control’.4 It is the latter theme of lack of control that is particularly disconcerting for military high commands since it implies a disconcerting level of unpredictability that can be made up only by effective training, coordinated planning and reliable intelligence. As I shall seek to show in this book, this is a problem that has often confronted film producers too, who often prefer to avoid depicting this form of warfare through fear of upsetting audiences, angering governments and upsetting military establishments, who in all likelihood will refuse to cooperate anyway in making any serious and realistic film about operations threatening to undermine widely held military myths.
The term ‘unconventional’ implies, of course, that this is not a ‘normal’ or ‘conventional’ form of war, defining it negatively in terms of what it is not. Some scholars and military analysts have adopted several other terms over the years to pin down this form of warfare, such as ‘irregular war’, ‘internal war’, ‘low intensity conflict’ and ‘small war’. Some of these have fallen out of fashion with ‘small war’ tending to be linked to conflicts on the borders of European empires in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many contemporary counter-insurgent or counter-terrorist operations are anything but ‘small’ since they can involve the huge mobilization of military power, such as the national mobilization of troops and ‘states of siege’ in response to modern terrorist attacks or the protracted and bitter battles currently being fought by Iraqi forces against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. The advantage of ‘unconventional war’, though, is that it is an established term that is widely known and encapsulates a variety of different operations.5
One of the questions for film producers when dealing with unconventional war narratives was how far could they go in the direction of historical realism? There is always a high degree of myth-making in any sort of war movie, though the American director Sam Fuller, who had fought in the Second World War as a GI, was highly critical of the constant tendency of Hollywood producers to create images of heroism when the reality was that most soldiers were thinking only of survival of themselves and their mates. ‘Heroes,’ he later angrily wrote, ‘were anointed by brain trust boys, generals, or newspaper editors behind desks far from death and destruction’.6 It would take decades for the contrived and invented nature of much modern war heroism to be brought to screen in the form of Clint Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers (2006) showing the media manipulation of the myth of the Marines erecting the flagpole on Iwo Jima in the Second World War. All wars depend on myth, but unconventional wars often run against the grain of much war-time mythology that cinema audiences usually come expecting to see.
History and cinematic mythologies
Most films embrace myths in one form or another, defined as stories that help explain the origins of population groups or lessons from the past involving heroes. Even modern societies with a developed written history and a sophisticated sense of the past fall back on myths, especially in times of crisis such as war. Cinematic myths have become an arena of considerable debate among film studies scholars; some films can reflect several myths at the same time, while others, as I shall try to show in this book, can create cinematic myths of their own.7 Cinema has emerged as a media industry capable of creating its own moral universe. In their heyday, huge cinemas almost rivalled churches in the way they could secure weekly gatherings of the faithful, though this tradition has obviously been eclipsed by the rise of other media forms such as television, networked films and, more recently, amateur movies released on social networking sites.8 Some critics have viewed these trends as representing alarming threats to traditional cultural forms and Karen Armstrong has argued that cinema and modern mass media have undermined ‘traditional’ myths rooted in folk stories and poetry, creating only a shallow set of mythological constructs linked to the world of celebrity.9
This dismissal of modern cinematic and media-generated myths is, I would argue, over-stated. It is important to distinguish between mythological constructs or grand narratives at the heart of any society and more ephemeral or time-bound ‘public myths’ serving as temporary consensual statements behind public actions of one kind or another.10 All societies have mythological grand narratives, especially foundational myths for how the society came into existence, such as the Romulus and Remus myth of Ancient Rome or the myth of the Founding Fathers in the United States. The myths may not seem all that important until periods of crisis loom, such as war or an acute polarization over national identity and purpose, as is currently the case in the America of Donald Trump.
Public myths are far more visible than deeper foundational myths. They come and go quite frequently as they are used to explain a relatively short time span, even a decade: hence the myth of ‘Roaring Twenties’ in the United States or ‘Swinging Britain’ in the 1960s. Such myths may be basically cultural or be associated with certain styles of governance, such as the myth of the New Deal era and ‘big government’ in the United States; or of ‘Cool Britannia’ of the early years of the Labour government under Tony Blair. These public myths are often forged by the media but acquire a life of their own and shape popular conceptions of the past, ones that professional historians often end up challenging through more ‘solid’ forms of evidence.
This becomes particularly true in the case of feature films. Cinema tends to pander to popular myths about the past, especially in times of crisis. Even the most apparently accurate of historical films are viewed by many historians as a highly dubious way to understanding the past. Robert Rosenstone has suggested, though, that film is no more a ‘fiction’ than written history, which is also selective in the sources used and the narrative structure employed to recount past events. Film, he argues, has the advantage of being able to collapse into one integrated whole a range of different perspectives that are normally separated, in the conventions of written history, into categories like ‘economic’, ‘social’ or ‘political’. While film can obviously falsify history, it can also dramatize it and bring emotion into the study of the past, a dimension often lacking in the work of historians sifting through piles of documents and written records.11 More recently, McCrisken and Pepper have amplified this by suggesting that Hollywood films are ‘complex cultural documents which speak either implicitly or explicitly to the concerns and preoccupations of their own moment of production’.12
Film directors confront a range of issues in making historical features. Historical accuracy might be desirable but hardly guarantees a good film. Too much detail can overload a film to the point, as Bernard F. Dick has suggested in the case of the film Tora Tora Tora, that the movie ends up being a rather dry history lesson.13 A good feature film requires a narrative involving some human drama to take place to sustain audience interest; and this will involve a range of additional issues such as lighting, characterization and cinematography. Overloading an historical war movie with several big-name actors can also be a bad strategy, exemplified by The Longest Day (1962) that ended up confusing audiences over who the main hero really was. This is also true for many of the films that I examine in this book that portray terrorist or insurgent movements, counter-insurgency or special operations. They all tend to have a limited hierarchy of military command and are very often better using lesser-known actors with just one or two main characters having star status.
Unconventional wars are ‘dirty’ wars involving operations such as sabotage, assassination, kidnapping and disinformation. It is a form of war that is controversial politically, especially for the generation of military professionals that came through the First and Second World Wars. This outlook began to change slowly after 1945 with the emergence of various insurgencies in the era of European decolonization and the upsurge of terrorism in regions like the Middle East. Many unconventional war features have entered popular debate, while traditional concepts of heroism associated with conventional combat in ‘clean’ wars have tended to be side-lined in favour of anti-heroes in recent popular cinema.
The discussion on the cinema of unconventional war also leads to the question of cinematic boundaries and genres and subgenres. I will argue in this study that the war genre needs to be rethought, given its capacity for internal evolution and innovation over time. In contrast to the genre’s functioning from the 1940s to at least the late 1960s centred on inter-state war, the war genre encompassed a range of subgenres. These can be categorized as counter-insurgency (COIN), counter-terrorism and special operations as well as narratives centred on mercenaries and soldiers of fortune examined in Chapter 5. The relative importance of these subgenres reflects the different kinds of conflicts that various countries have been involved in over the post-1945 period and will change over time.
The evolution of the war genre
Genres are a major category in understanding different types of films as well as locating them in a longer tradition of film making. There are a variety of reasons shaping the way genres have emerged. In the early days of sound cinema, genres emerged as useful marketing tool to fickle, unpredictable and often rather unsophisticated audiences. There were also other factors at stake, such as the cultural and political influences on directors and film producers together with the shifting demands of audiences, whose interests might change like those of women’s fashions.14 Genres were closely linked to the Hollywood studio system, certainly until these began to break up in the 1950s, ensuring the studios could parcel out among themselves musicals, romances, westerns, comedies and crime thrillers. In the early period of cinema, the war genre remained weak, given the horrors of the First World War, though the western often served as a kind of war movie genre by default.
War films as a distinct genre really emerged during the late 1930s, at a time when they faced stiff competition from gangster movies, romantic comedies and musicals in the years of the Depression. They came into their own with the US entry into the Second World War and, by 1945, were associated with such themes as national pride, collaboration between civilians and the military and the defence of core national values against enemy aggression. These would over time consolidate the war film as a major cinema genre until a crisis set in during rising tensions over the Vietnam War in the 1960s.15
Studying film genres can be tricky as they are often inconsistent and hard to pin down. Clichéd writing about genres pervades a lot of film criticism and studying genres historically requires an examination of their internal dynamics, and the role of auteurs in addition to marketing considerations and changing audience tastes.16 Subgenres can drive the main genre forward, providing, for a period at least, new approaches and fresh impetus. Movies made in a subgenre are less tied to the conventions of the mainstream genre. They can provide space for greater experimentation and cross-over with other film genres. If they are low-budget movies, they can serve as a good opportunity for experimentation with cinematography, characterization or narrative construction as well as the incorporation of features from other film genres. But subgenres can also be quite short-lived: even when there are signs that a new subgenre emerging it may, in the end, never take off, given political, commercial or marketing considerations.
The storyline in the war movie genre in its heyday was both predictable and simple, with romantic themes minimized to avoid too much digression from the main narrative. On occasions, the movie might start with real combat footage and be embellished by a discussion of military tactics, aided with maps and the odd military briefing. Action and combat scenes would constantly intrude, though interspersed with quieter periods; if violent action is relegated to the latter part of the movie, it usually requires a strong cast and storyline to sustain the previous narrative involving escalating tension towards the inevitable climactic battle scenes. These, too, are usually accompanied by death scenes of one or more of the heroes with suitable background music.
War films were usually set in the past in some form or another, and this historical framing tended to reinforce popular mythologies of war. Over time, it would be possible for directors to re-employ some of the war movie tropes into other genres, for instance science fiction movies set in a dystopian future such as Universal Soldier (1992) or Starship Troopers (1997). The archetypal war film was concerned with what Kathryn McMahon has termed ‘retroactive productions of meaning’ and the reinterpretation of past events, sometimes with only minimal attention to historical truth.17 To this extent, the war movie broadly continued previous mythological reinterpretations of past wars of the Elizabethan theatre or historical novelists such as Stendhal, Thackeray and Tolstoy.
Most of war cinema was concerned with celebrating, as well as occasionally questioning, wars fought by nation states. War movies were mainly focused on inter-state wars, especially those of the First and Second World Wars and Korea, which for Hollywood was the last great epic war fought by rival armies on a clear battle space until the brief 100-hour Gulf War One in 1991. Relatively few films paid much attention to unconventional war including terrorist and guerrilla insurgencies, though several embraced special operations behind enemy lines, themes that became the subject of several British movies in the 1950s and 1960s, as I shall show in Chapter 1. It is probably fair to say that, for the average cinema-goer, any mention of a war film conjures up a range of classic films fought between rival national armies, navies or air forces.18 The North African desert? Think of the battle-hardened Australian soldiers led by Richard Burton at Tobruk in The Desert Rats (1953) or the more cynical British squad led by a drunken John Mills and their German prisoner in Ice Cold in Alex (1958). War in Northern Europe? Consider The Longest Day (1962) or A Bridge Too Far (1977). The list of course can go on, but the essential point is that a good many of the war and combat films released since the early 1940s have dealt, in one form or another, with large-scale inter-state war.
The classic war movie tended to feed off established images of ‘conventional’ war closely linked to the rise of the nation state embodied in patriotic symbols such as uniforms, flags, national and regimental anthems and battle honours, whether these be the US Marines, the US 1st Infantry Division (Sam Fuller’s The Big Red) or the British Commandos. Insofar as we can talk of a specific genre of war films, we tend to associate it with tropes of battlefield honour, comradeship among bands of brothers and the authority of established military chains of command. There was relatively little space here for ‘dirty’ forms of war involving flattened combat units under no fixed hierarchy of command and observing little obedience to conventional forms of military combat.
By the 1960s, the tropes of the conventional war movie were beginning to come under attack in a climate of anti-war political activism and an end to the post-war era of victory culture in the United States.19 The conventional war movie genre still proved to be remarkably durable and adaptive; by the 1990s, it began to make a come-back, aided by an increasingly graphic cinematic realism such as exploding squibs to replicate gunshot wounds, slow motion photography and the use of sound to indicate the impact of bullets and explosions on the human body. Stephen Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) was a milestone in this regard with its opening scenes of graphic conflict on Omaha Beach in June 1944. Despite predictions of its demise, the war film appears to be here to stay. The Second World War continues to grip film makers’ imaginations for its apparent lack of moral ambivalence compared to later wars. While the First World War has led to some 130 feature films, it is estimated that the Second World War has produced to date over 1300. Its popularity was well exemplified by the film Fury (2014), which follows an American tank moving across war-torn Germany in the last stage of the war in April 1945.20 More recently, Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017) has returned to the disaster of Dunkirk in 1940, but through a prism of popular heroism that perhaps chimes with a more isolationist mood in Brexit Britain.
The relatively simple moral framework of the mainstream war genre went through a period of crisis in the late 1960s and 1970s and has, arguably, never been completely reconstructed. The shift can be partly explained in terms of the emergence of a younger (baby boomer) cinema audience no longer sharing the values of its parents and driven to questioning the very nature of war at a time of the American involvement in South East Asia. A lot of the moral anguish surrounding the war was driven by the fact that this was a counter-insurgent war the United States proved unable to win. Several successful Hollywood films abandoned any serious attempt to justify an apparently unjust war and in the case of Rambo: First Blood, that I examine in Chapter 3, emulated some of the methods of Vietnamese guerrillas.21 The late 1970s and 1980s were a watershed in the evolution of the war genre. The new moral compass within the genre veered away from uncritical commitment to duty and nation and began to address issues of atonement for misconduct in war and the futility of sacrifice for an end that was at best only vaguely understood.
The cinema of unconventional warfare is more diffuse and eclectic than the tropes of the mainstream war film. Wars of an unconventional type are largely disconnected from the world of national myths anchored in large-scale inter-state conflict. The cinema of unconventional war has, in effect, been the harbinger of what some analysts by the 1990s, in the aftermath of the Cold War, have termed a post-heroic ‘new war’ that are no longer attached to any clear Ideological cause. This became evident with the rise of warlord movements in West Africa depicted in films such as Blood Diamond, Johnny Mad Dog and Beasts of No Nation that I examine in Chapter 5.22
More recent conflicts in the aftermath of 9/11 suggest an increasingly complicated picture of multiple conflicts going on side by side, as in the current Syrian civil war. Jihadist insurgencies fought by movements such as the Taliban in Afghanistan, Al Nusra (now renamed Jabhat Fateh as-Sham) and Islamic State or Daesh in Iraq and Syria have exhibited remarkably traditional forms of macho heroism as well as a commitment to ideological interpretations of Islam justifying violent jihad against the west. The western powers involved in conflict in the Middle East, as well as anti-terrorism operations against jihadist terrorist cells in Europe, have attempted to define the core values for which they fight as well as commemorating both military and civilian personnel lost in military operations and terrorist attacks. There is some uncertainty over how far core myths are at stake in these newer forms of conflict and film producers have not been under anything like the pressure to produce films celebrating western moral ‘resolve’ as they were in the Second World War.
The war film has become the terrain to investigate themes of civilian courage and sacrifice in an era of mounting disaffection with traditional forms of military honour among western cinema audiences. While action films have become the key generic form for more traditional images of masculine combat and heroics, the war film evolved by the 1990s to the point where the traditional imagery of military sacrifice became widened to include the civilian population. Traditional male heroism in war performing superhuman deeds as well as, like Ulysses or Beowulf, saving the society they defend has become unfashionable in the modern western world. As the film United 93 suggested, heroes can be found in ordinary non-military people in situations of disaster and terrorist attack.23 It is also hard to see military heroes emerging on the modern hi-tech battlefield of drone warfare.
The emerging cinema of unconventional war has provided a rather different set of images and tropes to those of conventional inter-state war. Counter-terror operations usually lead to highly professionalized elite forms of war, with only limited forms of citizen participation. For some analysts, this has amounted to a new form of ‘war without the people’, suggesting that earlier forms of ‘peoples’ war’ have been marginalized in the modern conflicts.24 The high degree of professionalization of the special forces teams sent in to fight terrorist gunmen and suicide bombers ensures that they are rather unlike the earlier combat heroes of the Second World War, who often achieved fame during the war itself and or in newspaper obituaries decades afterwards. The modern elite anti-terrorist warriors are heavily armoured squads in black uniforms and helmets with visors or face masks: their robotic imagery is exacerbated by the use of drones or robots in combat with an enemy who is also faceless. These new warriors look as though they might well have come off the set of a dystopian science fiction movie. They are hardly modern war heroes, a role that has increasingly been taken over by the civilian victims of the terror attacks, with stories, often narrated through social media, of courage in the face of merciless gunmen.
I shall now examine the three strands of unconventional warfare – guerrilla warfare, terrorism and special operations – in the context of the mythologies surrounding them and the problems they present for film producers.
Guerrilla myths
The first of the three components of UW, guerrilla war, is one of the hardest to fight as well as being surrounded by numerous myths. While ancient in origins, it is also dogged by controversy over its military effectiveness. Exactly what sort of tactics are to be employed in a guerrilla war and how far can a guerrilla band be self-supporting? What is its relationship to other forms of military action. Is it to be just an auxiliary of a conventional army, as was the case with T.E. Lawrence’s Arab guerrillas in the First World War, or is it part of a wider strategy of Maoist ‘protracted war’ which means that the conflict is destined at some point to evolve onto a conventional level? How far, too, are the political aims of the guerrillas understood and supported by those fighting the insurgency?
Before the twentieth century, many rural insurgencies were backward-looking and politically reactionary; it was only by the 1930s and 1940s that they became firmly linked to concepts of national liberation and social justice.25 For American film audiences, guerrilla wars in China, Malaya or Algeria were remote and to be taken far less seriously than myths of frontier conquest of Indian communities such as Sioux and Apaches in North America that often featured in Hollywood westerns.26
In Europe, similar mythologies emerged alongside romantic images of rural bandits standing outside the norms of polite, urban middle-class society, though this would on occasions be taken up by Hollywood. Popular ‘bandit’ novels across Europe fostered the idea of the bandit as the embodiment of national and social and personal liberation.27 These myths grew out of various insurgencies in the nineteenth century, starting with the Peninsula War of 1808–1814 and continuing in Italy, Eastern Europe and eventually Spain, where they would be perpetuated by Ernest Hemingway in the Spanish Civil War novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), a novel turned into a rather apolitical movie by Hollywood in 1943 starring Gary Cooper.28 Throughout this period, guerrilla war was viewed negatively in professional military circles as a degenerate form of conflict on the fringes of empire. The image would be perpetuated in the US military well into the 1960s, as Green Beret counterinsurgent professionals mobilized stone-age ‘Montagnard’ peoples to fight against the NLF and NVA in South Vietnam.29
By the end of the nineteenth century, the bandit/guerrilla had become quite an appealing figure for left-wing and liberal urban opinion critical of jingoist imperialism, as well as those concerned about vanishing folk cultures and declining peasantries. Some of this became evident in ‘pro Boer’ opinion in Britain during the South African War of 1899–1902, shocked at the widespread incarceration of the Boer civilian population into concentration camps to isolate them from the guerrillas fighting on the veld.30 The Boer guerrillas were viewed by some anti-imperial critics as fighters for national liberation, even if they did seek to entrench a state based on the segregation of the black African majority.
The South African War was one of the twentieth century’s first major colonial insurgencies as well as being a guerrilla war that was largely ignored by early cinema. It occurred a few years prior to the development of the Hollywood cinema, which quickly became fascinated by events closer to home in the form of the Mexican Revolution that broke out in 1910. The South African War failed to produce any serious cinema guerrilla heroes and the Boer guerrillas who fought in it remained stranded in the past, exemplified by some of the photographs of the period. With slouch hats, rifles and bandoleers these are rural fighters clearly several notches up from traditional peasant bandits and would sustain a myth that would evolve over the following few decades into the global image of the guerrilla Che Guevara, staring out under beret and star, symbolizing both youthful revolt and an apparent ability to survive in rural and jungle wildernesses against technologically advanced western military machines.
With the Boers largely excluded from any major feature film, it was Mexico that largely fed the early twentieth-century cinematic myth of the guerrilla, centred on insurgent leaders such as Pancho Villa and Emilio Zapata.31 Mexican guerrillas suffered from being constantly likened to stereotyped bandits, while Villa and others like him were usually represented in Hollywood movies as villainous anti-heroes or comic buffoons. This was far less true with Asian guerrilla leaders such as Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap but the problem here was the general indifference of cinema. Neither Mao, Giap nor Ho has ever featured in any major Hollywood feature, though Giap’s victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 eventually reached the screen in the film Dien Bien Phu by French director Pierre Schoendoerffer in 1992 (see Chapter 6). This is less a case of orientalist stereotyping but simple occidentalist indifference, since the imagery of the guerrilla exponents of national liberation failed to accord with Hollywood’s post-war mood of American triumphalism and the building of benign and colourful images of US power in the Asia Pacific region, starkly exemplified by the musical South Pacific.32
The omission of Mao Zedong is especially amazing. Hollywood’s silence can be explained when Mao’s historical role is evaluated in the context of war against the invading Japanese in the late 1930s and early 1940s, culminating in the communist victory in the civil war in 1949. The defeat of the KMT shattered certain deeply held American myths about the sort of society China was and the relationship the United States had with it. The revolution ended the long tradition of American missionary involvement in China that did much to shape the popular image in the United States of China as a society highly responsive to western-style modernization, a myth popularized by Pearl Buck (the daughter of American missionaries) in novels such as The Green Earth. This novel was successfully brought to the screen in 1937 as a Chinese version of American frontier myths of hard work and family solidarity over backward-looking European feudal ideas of social hierarchy. Over the next few years Hollywood aligned itself behind this frontier myth centred on Chiang’s KMT regime, aided by the explosion in public support for Buck’s East and West Association campaigning for mutual understanding between peoples of Asia, the United States and Australasia.33 In the process, alternative narratives centred on guerrilla war being fought in the Chinese interior by Mao’s Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) were almost completely marginalized.
Perhaps it is too much to have expected US film producers to have recognized the significance of what was usually seen as a remote guerrilla movement. Well into the 1940s, Mao’s own ideas on guerrilla warfare were largely unknown in the west; even if they had been, it is not clear they would have been taken all that seriously. It was the mobilization of peasant nationalism by Mao’s communist cadres that was so poorly understood even by informed opinion before 1949. Indeed, it would not be recognized in scholarly circles until the early 1960s with the publication of Chalmers Johnson’s path-breaking study Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power in 1962.34 In the 1930s and 1940s, there was little serious theory of how nationalism develops in a society like China. In so far as there was one, it was assumed that this would be largely achieved under the auspices of a westernized and educated elite. This would be especially true of cinema from the late 1930s onwards, as a considerable number of films focused on the efforts of both Chinese leaders and ordinary Chinese traders and businessmen to modernize Chinese society on western lines.
Well into the late 1940s, China remained the focal point of the US commitment to the ‘upliftment’ and ‘modernization’ in Asia, despite some warnings to the contrary by the small number of observers who knew the society more closely.35 There were few serious critics of the modernization thesis, and almost none in Hollywood. One prominent critic was the writer and journalist Edgar Snow, who had visited Mao in the caves of North West China after his Long March in the mid-1930s. Snow’s book Red Star Over China came out the same time as The Green Earth in 1937 and went on to sell 12,000 copies. It tried to develop an alternative idea of the Chinese political future recognizing the reality of peasant revolutionary mobilization, though the book failed to make much headway in transforming the dominant American view of China. Later vilified as a communist or communist sympathiser, Snow was part of a group of ‘new China hands’ who had a less patrician view of China compared to the ‘older China hands’ of the missionaries, traders and exponents of the ‘Open Door’ policy and were deeply critical of the corrupt KMT regime.36
Snow’s views failed to achieve the same degree of circulation as Pearl Buck’s, partly due to the fact that he did not write novels or film scripts that might just possibly have been taken up by Hollywood. Chiang-kai Shek, by contrast, was highly successful in cultivating American opinion through his American-educated wife, Soong Mei-Ling. She tried to represent some aspects of the ‘New China’ already exemplified in Hollywood by the Chinese-American actress Anna Mae Wong, though Anna May disliked Soong Mei’s extreme puritanism. After a successful visit to the United States in 1943, Soong-Mei helped ensure that the films released by Hollywood on the war in China were largely favourable to the KMT and did little or nothing to reveal the scope of support for Mao’s communist guerrillas. The 1943 film Gung Ho, based on a Marine Ranger Battalion raid on the island of Makin in August 1942, features a Lieutenant Colonel Thorwald (Randolph Scott, based on the real-life figure Major Evans Carlson). The raid was a diversionary guerrilla-type action during the battle at Guadalcanal when the US army was still fighting from a defensive standpoint before the victory at Midway. Carlson, significantly, had been in China before the war and he was a strong admirer of Mao’s guerrillas. The film managed to relay some of this when Thorwald tries to inspire his men with the achievements of the Chinese 8th Route Army led by General Chu De, which, he stresses, outmanoeuvred the Japanese using mobile guerrilla tactics that could not be learnt simply from textbooks.37
The film was not entirely accurate since the raid did not lead to a complete victory; thirty men were lost and only a few Japanese installations destroyed. But the fact that there was any reference at all to the Chinese guerrillas was unusual and would be impossible after the war was over. Carlson was a bitter critic of Chiang Kai Shek, describing him as a ‘betrayer and compromiser’. After his death in 1947 Carlson was posthumously blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), even though he was buried in Arlington Cemetery. The blacklisting was due as much for his support for the Committee to Win the Peace with Paul Robeson as for his support for Chinese communist guerrillas, but the case underlined how difficult it was by the late 1940s to come out publicly and stress the importance of Maoist guerrilla warfare.38
It is hardly surprising Chinese guerrillas remained shadowy figures in most Hollywood films released during the war years. Many blurred into bandit figures or illiterate peasants with no serious political ideals or military organization. They formed a backdrop for the main action performed almost always by white American actors with just a few Chinese or oriental-looking stand-ins. This was true in the case of Anna Mae Wong’s cheaply made ‘Poverty Row’ B films shot for Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), never costing more than $100,000 each. The 1942 PRC film Bombs Over Burma (dir. Joseph H. Lewis) had Anna Mae playing a Chinese school teacher Lin Ying. For the first 10 minutes, the film is entirely in Mandarin as she teaches a class of school children. Japanese bombers then come and bomb the school, which stands as a symbol of modernization. The film portrayed Chinese guerrillas (of uncertain ideological orientation) helping with the construction of a supply road to Burma. The villain of the film turns out not to be an ‘oriental’ at all but an English aristocrat, Sir Roger Howe (Leslie Dennison), who is a German agent in disguise. Howe is helping to coordinate the Japanese bomb attacks on the road by transmitting messages to them via his electric shaver – a sort of early James Bond–style gadget – but his cover is eventually blown. Lin Ying whistles to produce out of the undergrowth a group of rural guerrillas who cut Howe down with farm implements. The imagery of Asian peasants murdering an English aristocrat was a novel trope for the time, and indicated just how far some film producers were prepared to go to support the Chinese republic in the aftermath of the Japanese invasion.
The defeat of Japan in August 1945 led to a decline of interest in Hollywood in Chinese themes, even though General Marshall had concluded by the end of 1946 that any sort of political coalition between the KMT and the communists was going to be impossible.39 There was a general war weariness among much of the American cinema-going public and a big demand for escapist films such as musicals, spy thrillers and films noirs. The 1947 film Intrigue, released by United Artists and directed by Edwin L Marin, was indicative of the new trend. The story focused on the black market in post-war China and the exploits of cashiered ex-pilot Brad Dunham (George Raft). Dunham sends in goods for people in desperate need, though he was less a missionary than a benevolent mercenary, perhaps a fitting role for an actor closely linked in real life to the mob. At no point in the film is there any real indication that China was in an escalating civil war.
The failure of Hollywood to portray any of the real political battle lines in China contributed to the general sense of shock and malaise in the United States at Mao’s political victory in 1949. It led to a stab-in-the-back myth in the form that US policy had been betrayed by communist spies in government, especially the State Department, leading to the ‘loss’ of China. Even before the 1949 revolution a strong anti-communist consensus had been established in the United States as the Cold War led to frozen lines across Europe.40 The hysteria of the HUAC did much to ensure that the films made on China would have a markedly hostile tone compared to the early 1940s.
There is not the space here to deal in detail with Hollywood’s shift in focus from China to Vietnam during the 1950s.41 The shift can be partly explained by China’s retreat into isolation and economic disaster with the ‘Great Leap Forward’ in the late 1950s, while the guerrilla baton was passed onto the Vietnamese by the time of the resumption of the guerrilla war in South Vietnam in the late 1950s. The Vietnamese now gained much of the devious and untrustworthy imagery previously projected onto Communist China, though over the next couple of decades it would not be Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh or Vo Nguyen Giap who would appear as the subject for a major feature film but the bearded figure of Che Guevara, dressed in olive battle fatigues, who formed a major part of the guerrilla myth in the 1960s.
Che emerged as an iconic figure for a campus-educated younger generation in the United States and Europe in the mid- to late 1960s. His image as a guerrilla appeared to epitomize simple rural people standing up and fighting for themselves against a superior enemy. The image only vaguely influenced the wave of urban insurgency around the world over the next few decades. It was also one that Che helped to create after the Cuban Revolution. As I have suggested elsewhere, Che embraced Castro’s revolutionary movement in Mexico in 1955 after years spent travelling round South America as a kind of revolutionary tourist. He viewed the Indian societies in South and Central America societies as largely static and standing outside history and avoided any detailed ethnological analysis for a simplistic Marxism. Revolution was thus an all-embracing answer to the continent’s problems, since it would apparently lead to the millstone of American imperialism being thrown off. Encountering widespread popular adulation in Cuba as a revolutionary internationalist, Che cultivated this image through both written propaganda and revolutionary Cuban cinema.42
The 1969 Hollywood film Che (dir. Richard Fleischer) tried unsuccessfully to tackle this mythology. The film was released two years after Guevara’s death in Bolivia and was panned by critics for its wooden characterization; it even gained inclusion in The Fifty Worst Films of All Time.43 The movie was no cut-price affair with a budget of over $5 million but proved to be a desperate bid by Hollywood to try and explain Guevara’s global cult status.44 Che proved to be an expensive ‘youth movie’, though one considerably undermined by its appearing at the same time as Easy Rider. Unlike John Wayne’s The Green Berets (1968), it was a box office failure that was also disliked by film critics.
Che tries to examine Guevara’s image by adopting a documentary style involving ‘interviews’ with people who had known Che during his life. Fleischer adopts an apparently balanced approach with a New York taxi driver predictably dismissing Che as a murderer who can ‘burn in hell’, while a Cuban school teacher declares that he was taught to read and write by Che fighting as a guerrilla. Fleischer attempts to interrogate whether Che’s activities match up to the myth generated about him. None of this overcomes the film’s poor understanding of the relationship between Guevara and Castro. It appears from the film that Fidel was easily influenced by the ideas of the apparently stronger intellectual figure of Che, while the reality was more complex.45 In the Sierra Maestra, Castro repeats word for word Che’s ideas on guerrilla warfare and is apparently an uncritical follower of the Argentinian revolutionary committed to the liberation of the whole South American continent.
Given this background, it is evident that Castro was not anything like the novice portrayed in Fleischer’s film. Castro had a rather more strategic vision of leading the guerrillas in separate columns westwards towards the capital Havana while Che appears as a messiah figure leading a long column of guerrillas and civilians through the sugarcane fields. The film cuts to brief battle scenes at Santa Clara before Batista flees the country. The film avoided looking at how Che’s column recruited its supporters or even how his tiny guerrilla army of some 340 men and women succeeded against vastly superior opponents.
Largely avoiding the politics behind the guerrilla struggle, Che depicts the revolution as some form of natural event outside the compass of individual decision-making or group mobilization. At best, this is a rather crude film showing the crowd of Cuba sweeping up Castro into victory celebrations in Havana while at the same time cutting to scenes of Che, now a commander of the La Cabana fortress in Havana, busy arranging the execution of political enemies. We see a ruthless side to Che coming to the fore when he shows no compunction in shooting a traitor discovered among the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra. Che starts to turn into a gangster film where a young would-be mobster takes charge and succumbs to the corruptions of power. This would not be due to women, drugs or booze, but the allure of a purified ideological vision ensuring that, in time, the revolutionary messiah feels forced to leave Cuba after Fidel’s apparently spineless acceptance of the Soviet withdrawal of nuclear missiles from the island after the Missile Crisis of October 1962. Che now takes his leave of a bespectacled, boozy Castro searching for another bottle in a drinks cooler. There is no effort to track his movements around the globe as the film shifts to the mountains of Bolivia, where the disastrous guerrilla campaign was fought against the US-trained Bolivian army.
The last part of Fleischer’s Che shows how Guevara’s vision of a continental guerrilla-based revolution ended with the dramatic failure in Bolivia in 1967. Che is interrogated by a Bolivian army captain who has read his book on guerrilla warfare; the captain dismisses the guerrilla venture for its ‘arrogance’ and failure to understand the mood of the ordinary people. He brings in an old peasant man who has walked all morning to come and see him. The old man expresses his wish for all the forces to leave his region as the fighting has upset his goats. Che’s revolutionary vision, the captain declares, has basically ‘failed’; we see a moment of self-doubt in Sharif’s face, suggesting (with no evidence to support it) that Guevara went to his death believing that his life had been a failure.
Che attempted to challenge the myth that emerged around Che Guevara following his death, though the movie failed to generate any serious counter-myth. Indeed, at points it seems almost to confirm it with shots of the helicopter flying Che’s dead body lying on a stretcher attached in a Christ-like posture. Che ended up as a fumbling and uncertain attempt by Hollywood to understand one of the mythological figures behind the radical anti-war opposition in the late 1960s.
It was nearly forty years before another Hollywood film on Guevara was released in Hollywood, Stephen Soderbergh’s Che in 2008. This is a more-wide ranging and ambitious project than Fleischer’s film as it encompasses the revolution in Cuba and the Bolivian debacle, though it overlooks Guevara’s brief guerrilla foray into the Congo. Despite its length of 257 minutes, Che was received far more positively than Fleischer’s film, though it failed to recover its costs grossing only $40.9 million at the box office along with receipts from the two-disc version released on DVD. Significantly, the broad bulk of these receipts have come from outside North America, where the film is estimated to have grossed a mere $1.4 million, compared to $29.8 worldwide, suggesting that Guevara remains a figure of minimal interest for US film audiences. Nevertheless, Che stands out as one of the major cinematic works of guerrilla warfare, though the movie also fails to address the reasons why the guerrilla strategy was chosen in the first place while Che was in Mexico, as opposed, say, to an FLN-style campaign of urban terrorism or a more broadly based strategy of mass strikes and urban insurrection championed at the time by the urban-based Cuban llano.
Soderbergh used a handheld digital camera to make the film that resembles a 35mm film in quality. The purpose of this was to attempt to get the viewer to peer over the shoulder of Che in something that resembled a ‘guerrilla film’ in the way that it adopted an agile perspective close to the ground level of actual combat.46 This ground-level approach did not mean that the film was interested in the strategy and tactics of guerrilla warfare, and there is little real effort to deal with Guevara’s political ideals. The film preferred to dwell on Guevara’s commitment to improving the lives of the poor rather than the violent process of revolution, which Soderbergh termed an ‘analogue revolution’ based on committing works and ideas to paper compared to the modern world of electronic communications. Che’s struggle, Soderbergh has suggested, was part of a world very different to our own, though critics have pointed out that we use as much, if not more, paper for communicating information and ideas compared to the 1950s.
Che certainly has some sense of history, tracking as it does some of the high points of the career of a figure who, by the time the movie was made in 2008, had become a global icon of youthful revolution.47 The movie, to some degree, played upon this global mythology, ignoring in the process the actual revolution in Cuba after 1959 and its own rather sad trajectory into growing state control and censorship. While Che has a documentary quality, it ignores several key parts of Che’s life and his rather delusionary view of revolution; focusing more closely on this, such as the disastrous entry into the Congo in 1965, would have helped audiences understand the reasons for the failure in Bolivia. By juxtaposing in the early scenes of the film Che’s visit to New York in 1964 (filmed in black and white) with the earlier scenes in Mexico and Cuba, Soderbergh framed Guevara’s Cuban venture within a pattern of wider events. But there is no serious opposition in the film to Che’s ideas, exemplified for instance by his discussions with Gamel Abdul Nasser in Egypt in 1965, and the film fails to engage with a man who became a victim of the myth that had been forged around him.48
Cinema and terrorism
If film producers found guerrilla insurgencies difficult to bring to the screen, it has been a different matter with terrorism. This has supplied a range of tropes that have embellished film genres ranging from war cinema and action movies to crime, horror, science fiction and even westerns and comedies. Compared to many guerrillas, the terrorist has often been projected as a deracinated figure fighting for no homeland, often wandering the world deprived of social or cultural roots and employing violence in an apparently random manner. This is an image that was often promoted by some terrorism analysts in the 1970s and 1980s, though it clearly does not apply to all terrorist movements or leaders.
For some analysts, the actual differences between guerrilla warfare and terrorism are not that significant. Linguistic terminology has often added to the confusion since many governments label the insurgents they fight as ‘terrorists’ rather than ‘guerrillas’ on the assumption that the word carries more pejorative connotations. We also need to distinguish between ‘terror’ from ‘terrorism’ since ‘terror’ is an abstract noun used to describe the emotional state of people who experience fear, whether this be real victims of violent crime and terrorist attacks as well as cinema audiences. ‘Terror’ in this sense is not so different to ‘horror’, though, strictly speaking, ‘terror’ is the anticipation of something ghastly or horrible that is about to happen while ‘horror’ is the emotional state felt in the aftermath of some atrocity, whether this be a single event like a bloody fight, a murder or the mass killing of innocent victims.
Film producers have never seriously observed the distinction and what has often been terror in cinema has been classified as different to the horror genre centred on narratives that frighten audiences with a build-up of suspense and anticipation of some ghastly event about to unfold. Most horror films before the 1990s were quite muted when depicting the actual ‘horror’ of the bloody deed – whether this be blood and guts everywhere, limbs being cut off or eye balls spliced out. These were usually shown sparingly by film directors before the increasingly violent spate of horror movies that emerged in the 1980s such as Cannibal Holocaust (1980) and The Evil Dead (1982) and continuing into recent features such as Hostel (2005) and the Saw franchise (starting in 2004).
‘Terror’ has been far more diverse in cinema compared to ‘terrorism’. It not only formed the base of the horror genre from the earliest days of silent cinema but also of many crime and detective features, making it a far more wide-ranging phenomenon than ‘terrorism’. Anthony Shaw’s recent study of ‘cinematic terror’ tends to confuse this distinction by examining less ‘terror’ in cinema but ‘cinematic terrorism’, a rather more accurate title for the book. Terrorism is essentially a tactic of psychological warfare involving, in Bard O’Neill words, the ‘threat or use of physical coercion, primarily against non-combatants, especially civilians, to create fear to achieve political objectives’.49 Though ancient in origins (it was used, for example, by Jewish insurgents against Romans in first-century Palestine), it has been a form of warfare that came into its own in the modern world of mass media. Mounting terrorist attacks in the heart of modern cities have, since at least the 1880s, been a relatively low-cost and attractive means for underground insurgent movements to gain wider political recognition and support.50
‘Terrorism’ is basically a tactic and a means to a political end. Shaw’s study is important for showing that terrorism in cinema has not been a recent phenomenon, since it is possible to see images of ‘terrorists’ from the era of silent cinema such as the 16-minute feature The Voice of the Violin by D.W. Griffith in 1909. Set in New York, the film depicts a music teacher who decides to join a group of anarchists after being spurned by one of his female students. The film defined all political violence as effectively immoral and establishing the trope of terrorism being essentially the preserve of unhinged and mad losers, though this trope rather contradicts Griffith’s own more positive imagery for the terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan in his later film Birth of a Nation (1915).51
It is hard to pinpoint The Voice of the Violin as part of a distinctive subgenre of early terrorism movies. While it might be an important film for scholars seeking to establish an aetiology for later terrorism movies in the 1980s and 1990, it needs to be set in the context of a large number of shorts made by Griffith and other directors at this early stage in American film history. As often occurs with this sort of scholarly quest, there is the danger of erecting a Whiggish theory of history. The Voice of the Violin was but one of a huge number of short films often only lasting 10 or 15 minutes. Griffith alone produced some 450 between 1908 and 1913, many of which are lost. ‘Terrorism’ was a marginal theme in most of the films that reached cinema audiences and would be largely subsumed, by the inter-war years, by crime and horror genres. Only a few directorial auteurs such as Alfred Hitchcock and John Ford managed to rise above this general cinematic indifference to terror and terrorist movements, releasing films such as The Secret Agent, Sabotage and The Informer that portrayed underground terrorist movements such as Russian nihilists or the IRA.
But even then, there were problems in tackling the political motives of terrorist movements. Contrary to what many critics over the years have assumed to be apparently mindless and psychopathic acts of aggression, terrorism usually has some political rationale, involving short-term as well as long-term tactical and strategic goals.52 As one study by Frederick J. Hacker pointed out years ago, we should avoid the assumption that terrorists are necessarily insane psychopaths; undoubtedly some have been over the years, like the 9/11 plane hijacker Mohammed Atta, but they only form one small category of ‘crazy’ terrorist recruits who also include what Hacker terms ‘crusaders’ and ‘criminals’.53 Most terrorist groupings prove to be highly resistant to political dialogue and negotiation, ensuring that the negotiated end to a terrorist campaign can be protracted, as proved to be the case in Northern Ireland.
But we should not assume from this that terrorist movements are bereft of strategic purpose. As Neumann and Smith have pointed out, this mistake has often been made by terrorism analysts who have never seriously looked at the strategic rationales behind many terrorist operations. Most terrorist movements do broadly pursue a strategy aimed at disorienting their enemy, forcing them to respond on terms favourable to the movement and, thirdly, gaining political legitimacy by publicizing their cause. Such a strategy can reach a finite stage beyond which it cannot easily develop, at which point a terrorist movement undergoes a major (and often internally divisive) rethink of the strategic utility of the strategy.54
Terrorism remains, though, a rather slippery concept analytically. From the late nineteenth century, the rise of terrorist movements across Europe and in the United States focused attention on terror at the sub-state level rather than states using terror to consolidate power and maintain control over subject populations. The terror propelled by these sub-state movements never matched what Hannah Arendt called the ‘total terror’ practised by the totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia (as well as later Maoist China).55 Precisely because it was often hidden behind the wall of secrecy created by an all-pervasive secret police and physical barriers of entry (especially in the Soviet Union) this form of ‘total terror’ that killed huge numbers of people remained far less visible, and even now is approached through dark comedy rather than serious cinematic realism, exemplified by the recent 2017 film The Death of Stalin (dir. Armando Iannucci).
Terrorist movements from below, on the other hand, have been far easier to transfer to the cinema screen. By the early twentieth century, a mythology of terrorism had spread across Europe centred on images of apocalyptic anarchist terrorism seeking the downfall of western civilization, themes captured in such novels as Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed (1871–1872) and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). By the inter-war years, the anarchist wave was spent, though the mythology lived on in a few releases of the era such as Alfred Hitchcock’s film Sabotage (1936). The rise of state terror in the form of Soviet Union under Stalin and Nazi Germany largely eclipsed the earlier demonic image of sub-state terrorism that only re-surfaced at the end of the Second World War in the form of terrorist movements such as the Irgun in Palestine.56
IRA and other anarchist terrorism continued in fits and starts throughout this period, and formed the basis for the narratives of such films The Secret Agent (1936), Sabotage (1936) and The Informer (1936) and other British post-war films such as Odd Man Out (1947) and The Gentle Gunman (1952).57 The Irish terrorist model of underground urban cell groupings launching sporadic attacks on industrial, military or symbolic targets formed one of the templates of post-war terrorism before it became bypassed by alternative narratives of targeted urban terrorism in pursuit of national liberation, exemplified especially starkly by the ‘Battle’ of Algiers in 1957, examined in Chapter 4. One major dimension in the growing adoption of increasingly brutal terrorist tactics in the post-war years was the war itself, a link that is hard, though not impossible, for film producers to bring to the cinema screen. As Matthew Carr has noted, much of the savagery of post-1945 terrorism was a result of the collapse in standards of warfare during the Second World War ‘in which the rules that supposedly governed conventional warfare were routinely disregarded through new military innovations such as the introduction of strategic bombing’.58 A further dimension was the growth in state support for sabotage and quasi-terrorist tactics by specially trained formations such as the SOE, the LRDG and the SAS, examined in Chapter 2.
Terrorism after 1945 continued to be viewed, in many circles on both sides of the Atlantic, as the abnormal sub-state activity of sociopaths, nihilists and exemplars of cultural despair. The outlook pervaded a lot of the early research work on terrorism in the social sciences in the 1970s: ‘not all … political terrorists are insane or mentally disturbed,’ wrote one American expert in 1976, ‘but most are.’59 This was one of the shibboleths of the pseudo-science of ‘terrorology’ that emerged at this time, fuelled by a wave of publications that tended to examine terrorism as a weapon employed against western governments and societies rather than in many cases by many of these governments too, especially in parts of the developing or ‘third world’.60
The outlook also shaped some feature films, leading, very often, to cinematic images of terrorism as abstract and timeless activities employed by dehumanized nemeses acting outside the norms of mainstream society. This was especially true of Hollywood, as I shall seek to show in Chapter 3, where movies from the 1970s to the 1990s consolidated the idea of evil terrorists meeting their inevitable come-uppance at the hands of action heroes such as Bruce Willis, Arnie Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagal and Chuck Norris. These features did much to reinforce the idea of ‘terror’ as a phenomenon standing outside history, a conception later embodied in the Bush administration’s indefinite ‘war on terror’ in 2001.
Almost all terrorist movements have a finite life span, which is often ended by negotiation and imaginative statecraft. This is exemplified by the eventual ending of the Troubles in Northern Ireland with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Cronin has shown how various terrorist campaigns tend to fizzle out, transition into something else or experience military defeat. There are in essence, she has suggested, six major ways this can occur: the first is through decapitation of its leaders such as the capturing of the head of the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso terrorist movement Manuel Ruben Abimael Guzman in 1992; secondly, terrorist movements might eventually transition into political parties such as occurred with Sinn Fein following the negotiations in Northern Ireland that led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement; thirdly, terrorists might actually ‘win’ and achieve their objective: this is quite rare but happed with the ‘victory’ of The Zionist terrorists with the departure of Britain from Palestine in 1947 and the creation of the state of Israel the following year; fourthly, terrorists campaigns might simply fail and provoke a popular backlash that forces them out of existence, as eventually happened with the Baader Meinhof ‘Gang’ and Red Army Factions in Germany or Red Brigades in Italy. Fifthly, the terrorist movement might be simply defeated as with the British defeat of Chinese communist guerrillas in Malaya in the 1950s or the Sri Lankan government’s defeat of the Tamil Tigers in 2009. Finally, the terrorist movement may simply transition into another type of movement, such as a guerrilla movement: this occurred in the case of the terrorist movement in Cuba after the landing of Fidel Castro’s guerrillas on the Granma in 1956 or, more recently, with the FARC in Colombia.61
Cronin’s work shows how complex terrorist movements can be as well as the tendency for cinema to oversimplify, since protracted negotiations are not usually viewed by film producers as the subject matter for exciting movies. Film producers often prefer to take the soft option in representing terrorists in simplistic and demonic terms, drawing on other genres such as horror to reinforce the image of terrorists as one-dimensional figures impervious to reason. Cronin’s first path of lopping off the terrorist head has occurred relatively infrequently in cinema, suggesting that it has rarely occurred in practice. It is the sort of narrative best suited to a James Bond movie involving the final elimination of terrorist nemeses such as Dr No or Goldfinger. One film known internationally to tell the story of the operation to capture Guzman is the American thriller The Dancer Upstairs (2002), directed by John Malkovich. As I point out in Chapter 4, this film focused on the eccentric leader of a major guerrilla movement in Peru to the exclusion of the movement’s impact at the local level in the Andes.
There has been almost no serious feature that has looked at terrorist movements transitioning into political movements. One of the closest is the British-South African film on the career of Nelson Mandela entitled Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (2013), directed by Justin Chadwick. The focus on Mandela allowed film makers to personalize South Africa’s transition from apartheid to non-racial democracy in the early 1990s. But the focus was less on Mandela’s brief period of involvement with the ANC strategy of ‘armed struggle’ by its insurgent wing known as Umkhonto we Sizwe than his arrest, trial and imprisonment on Robben Island for twenty-seven years. The personalization of the issues meant that the wider pattern of accommodation between the South African government and the exiled ANC, leading to the political transition between 1990 and 1994, was largely overlooked in a movie that elevated Mandela to heroic status and interpreted South African political change in terms of a rather old-fashioned ‘great man’ theory of history.
The third pattern of exit from terrorism cited by Cronin of terrorists achieving their objectives has also been almost totally neglected by cinema. This is not especially surprising since film producers in the west have considerable difficulties in releasing movies that show western governments failing in their battle with terrorism. The theme appeared in Otto Preminger’s film Exodus in 1960, portraying the terrorist campaign by Irgun and Haganah against British rule in Palestine after the Second World War. The movie gained a warm reception in the United States, though far less so in Britain, where there was a more critical response to what was viewed as a campaign of wanton murder. Likewise, Gillo Pontecorvo’s iconic film The Battle of Algiers depicted the FLN as ultimately succeeding with its campaign of terrorism in Algiers in 1957, though the film markedly failed to show how this terror campaign related to the eventual French decision to concede independence in 1962.
Cronin’s fourth pattern is one where terrorist movements fail through public rejection and a popular backlash. It is an area, once again, where cinema has been weak. Historically, it is possible to find a few films that have shown how a terrorist movement lacked wider public support: High Bright Sun (1964), for instance, set in Cyprus during the ‘emergency’ against the EOKA terrorist underground, led by General Grivas, shows a terrorist campaign enjoying only partial support from the Greek Cypriot population. But this is a controversial area for film makers since it assumes that terrorist movements do not always act in complete isolation but with some degree of popular support, or at least complicity. Many European governments such as France, Britain and Belgium have Muslim minority populations that have provided some degree of cover and support for terrorist groups. These are populations that are now targeted by various forms of government ‘deradicalization’ policies, and commercial feature films can often act as unwelcome interventions into delicate and complicated patterns of community relations.
It is the fifth of Cronin’s six patterns of ultimate defeat of terrorist movements that has gained the greatest support from film makers, though it is one that has only rarely occurred in the period since the Second World War. Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers can be read, at one level, as showing how repressive state counter-terrorism tactics involving torture, reprisal bombings and the penetration of underground terrorist cell networks can lead to the defeat of an urban terrorist movement, even though this strategy failed politically in the longer term. There was a similar narrative in Costa Gavras’s 1972 movie State of Siege depicting the use of death squads by the Uruguayan government to destroy the Tupamaros terrorist movement. Here a rather bleaker picture emerged as a counter-terrorist campaign by the state ended up destroying a South American democracy, a theme later tackled in the Hollywood film The Siege in 1998 where American troops are sent into a New York under siege from a Muslim terrorist campaign, leading to a zealous general initiating a state of terror in the city like the French paras in Algiers in 1957.
The last of Cronin’s six paths has also been poorly portrayed on the cinema screen. The transitioning of terrorist movements into another form of organization has often been a complex process which does not, perhaps, lend itself easily to a successful film script. One of the closest is Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins (1996) depicting the career of one of the leaders of the IRA’s war against Britain between 1919 and 1921. But the film completely ignored Collins’s role in negotiations with the British government in London, preferring to have him return from there with an agreement that is promptly denounced by diehard opponent of the Treaty led by Eamon de Valera. The film then focuses on Collins’s emergence as leader of the newly established Irish army fighting a second civil war against the anti-treaty rebels before his assassination by an anti-treaty insurgent.
For the most part, western film producers opted for a debased variant of Cronin’s fifth strategy of terrorist defeat. Movies of this kind often end up as latter-day westerns, with the good sheriff and his posse seeing off the bad guys in the final reel. Many of the terrorism films that I examine in this book ignore the complex motivations of terrorists in favour of portraying them as antiheroes who are eventually defeated by the decisive use of force (usually by white men) securing the triumph of civilized values over chaos and mayhem. Such movies became prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s and ignored the complex forces driving individuals into terrorist actions. This is a subject area that has been of growing interest to terrorism analysts. Griffin, for instance, has argued that terrorism is not necessarily driven by a vacuum of moral, religious and political belief. Terrorist movements usually have grand narratives that might appear ‘fanatical’, but have an underlying strategic rationale.62 Understanding the terrorist’s need for meaning is essential as part of a protracted process of political resolution of conflict that has given rise to terrorist violence in the first place.63
In this regard, cinema, especially Hollywood, has been as much part of the problem as providing any serious solution. The 1970s and 1980s saw the emergence of action movies frequently portraying Arabs and Palestinians in villainous terms. Many Hollywood films depicting terrorists have been anchored in a series of demonic stereotypes linking terrorism with images of ‘evil Arabs’. The same pattern occurred in the case of Ireland, with the stereotyping beginning in the inter-war years and continuing into the 1970s and 1980s before a progressive humanization began to occur in the context of negotiations ending the long war.64
The conspiratorial element in the popular perception of terrorism has ensured that the terrorism subgenre has remained closely linked to the crime genre, though many terrorism films were usually action features. The 1970s served as a watershed period as the terrorism film became increasingly mainstream in Hollywood during a period of mounting concern about the spread of ‘international terrorism’, centred on the activities of Palestinian groups such as Al Fatah and Black September. As I show in Chapter 3, Hollywood released several features involving Islamic or Palestinian terror threats in the two decades prior to the 9/11 attacks in 2001 such as Black Sunday (1977), Executive Decision (1996) and The Siege (1998). The US public was well prepared cinematically for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which unfolded like a particularly shocking disaster movie.65
Cinema and special operations
The third component of UW is special operations. In contrast to insurgency and terrorism, this appeared on film early in the post-war years based on operations by both British and American forces during the Second World War. Several war films after 1945 involved groups of highly trained men (and some women) acting behind enemy lines in operations involving intelligence gathering, sabotage, assassination, kidnapping of enemy officers and diversion. Many of these films would later fall into the genre of action films by the late 1970s and 1980s. In the period after the Second World War, they were part of a subgenre of war film that was frequently viewed as controversial given the reluctance of many senior commanders in both the United States and Britain to accept special operations. Many saw these sorts of operations as risky distractions from the ‘normal’ methods of fighting war achieving minimal results despite the large amounts of resources and manpower expended on them.
The term ‘special operations’ came into its own during the Second World War, especially in the dark period of Allied retreat in 1941–1942 in Asia, North Africa and Eastern Europe. This was a time when political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic were open to new ideas about fighting war involving the use of small groups of highly mobile forces operating clandestinely to cut enemy supply lines, mount sabotage attacks and kidnap or assassinate enemy officers. Tactically, special operations were by no means new since they were deeply embedded in the history of war, even if many military experts and military strategists viewed them as ‘unprofessional’. This hostility re-surfaced during the Second World War, as some senior commanders viewed the activities of such groups such as the Long Range Desert Group in North Africa (often closely involved with the SAS) and the Chindits in Burma under Orde Wingate achieving only limited military success.
This official disdain for special operations was partly replicated by post-war cinema. A few films were made that dealt with special operations such as They Who Dare (1954) and The Cockleshell Heroes (1956) in Britain and Objective Burma (1945) and Merrills Marauders (1962) in the United States, though they tended to be dwarfed by the many more films dealing with conventional military conflict. By the 1960s, film producers released increasingly fantastical and violent special operations films such as The Guns of Navarone (1962) and The Dirty Dozen (1967). Special operations also formed the basis of other combat subgenres such as the mercenary subgenre that I examine in Chapter 5 involving mercenaries and soldiers of fortune on missions into ‘enemy’ territory, such as Dark of the Sun (1968) and The Dogs of War (1980).
One notable feature of this story is the belated involvement by Hollywood in special operations features. As I suggest in Chapters 2 and 3, this is in part due to the resistance of senior commanders in the United States to giving special operations forces (SOF) much support when there was a more general attachment to doctrines of conventional war. Throughout a large part of the Cold War the envisaged future war was a beefed-up variant of the land battle in Europe in the Second World War, and the few occasions when the United States did seek to involve special forces, such as the disastrous attempt to free the hostages in Tehran in 1979 or the later foray into Somalia in 1993, the operations went awry, with a serious public relations blow-back. Hollywood did not seriously attempt to emulate the British spate of post-war special operations movies until much later. Indeed, it might be said that special forces finally came of age with the successful Seals raid on Abbottabad to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011, leading to two features the following year – Seal Team Six and Zero Dark Thirty.
By the time these movies were released UW had taken a major new turn with the rapid escalation in new military technology, symbolized by the expansion of drone warfare and the growing prospect of robots and artificial intelligence being used for military purposes. UW is only unconventional to the degree that it does not mean the immediate prospects of major land sea and air battles of the past, though the kinds of special operations now being mounted are increasingly intelligence-led, with the prospect that intelligence from increasingly sophisticated drones will secure near-certainty in the identification of targets (though as we are reminded in Zero Dark Thirty no intelligence ever reaches complete 100% certainty). This is the kind of war that eliminates, or at least seriously reduces, the prospects for heroes of the old sort courageously battling uncertain odds and we are left wondering where the heroes might come from in the future.
Summing up
Of the three forms of unconventional war, guerrilla war has been clearly the hardest to bring to the cinema screen. Terrorism and special operations have all been quite widely filmed; but it has been guerrilla insurgencies that have remained problematical. Guerrilla warfare during the twentieth century acquired a mystique that many terrorist movements and leaders sought to emulate, with a group of RAF guerrilla at one point travelling to Jordan in 1970 to receive training from Palestinian guerrillas.
Guerrillas and guerrilla insurgencies have certainly appeared in several films, and Steven Soderbergh’s Che remains one of the most outstanding cinematic treatments. Filming guerrilla struggles is never easy and can pose serious problems for directors attempting to answer key questions about a guerrilla campaign. Why have guerrilla tactics been chosen in the first place and what is its overall strategy? It is usually possible for cinema audiences to understand this in movies dealing with terrorist campaigns or special operations, but far harder with guerrilla war movies, where the goals may change during a long period of struggle. The sheer tedium of guerrilla operations is enough to put many film producers off, and how do you film a guerrilla war that may last several years with different commanders and involving a huge range of battle spaces and fields of operation? It is easy to confuse audiences demanding fast pace and spectacular and decisive outcomes. Guerrilla war is ‘dirty’ war of the worst kind, though terrorism and special operations also lead to torture, random killings and abuse of civilians.
All three form the kinds of UW that have shaped many of the conflicts being conducted in various arenas around the modern world. Terrorism movies will remain staple items of the action genre, though it is likely too, as I suggest in Chapter 3, that many at the upper end of the action movie market will develop as ‘cerebral action features’ that will seek to be thoughtful over how they interrogate ethical issues of UW, such as the morality of drone strikes and collateral damage inflicted on civilians. Some of these ethical issues have previously emerged in other cinemas investigated in this book such as French films made on the Algerian war investigated in Chapter 6 or the morality of inserting Mossad hit squads into Europe to destroy the leadership of the Palestinian terrorist underground, examined in Chapter 7.
In the end, some of the grimmest forms of UW that I examine in this book are of the mercenary kind that I examine in Chapter 5. Here special operations are performed, or at least attempted, by those whose only motivation is financial. The movies that emerged around mercenaries in post-colonial Africa from the late 1960s onwards, such as Dark of the Sun in 1968, are violent early examples of action movies, though the attempts of film producers to impose some sort of moral gloss on these narratives have been unconvincing. Moreover, what I have called the mercenary subgenre of the action movie did not stop with the ending of any serious interest in the fate of mercenary squads in post-colonial terrains, but has evolved into a new kind of mercenary-type film centred on warlords and child soldiers, exemplified by such movies as Johnny Mad Dog and Beasts of No Nation. Here UW becomes emulated at the local level in fractured third world states, suggesting significant possibilities for directors to develop combat movies of their own that defy the conventions of Hollywood.