Hell on the Battleground

“Do you shed your fur, little rabbit? The rabbit said no and so he took him and wiped his ass with him” – paraphrased from a dialogue between a male and a female soldier after a nerve-wrecking battle. Thanks to the user Enšpígl for letting me see and experience this movie. (19/07/2016)

Hell on the Battleground is a pure distillation of David A. Prior. It is evidently a film that he had always wanted to make and, following the success of Deadly Prey, finally got the funding for it. For the first and, peculiarly, last time, he came up with his own story uncontaminated by genre rather than a mere paraphrase of recent hits and bizarre pastiches. This time, he presents a story straight from his own crazy green heart about the fact that war is hell, though it also makes heroes out of men and gives their lives meaning. With the characteristically intended seriousness and impassioned tone of the project, Prior sets aside the overall framework borrowed from Buster Keaton, which he brilliantly utilised in Deadly Prey, and rather conceives the narrative with often Bresson-like purity. He transforms his ensemble of trashy non-actors led by the Holy Trinity of Fritz Matthews, Ted Prior and David Campbell, into archetypes of war epics. By limiting the expressions of his “models”, which he allows to be heard in long shots of non-verbal reactions, always by all members of the unit in succession, he emphasises the automatism of the difficulties of war, which he further thematises with numerous sequences of random mechanical gunfire. Like the French classic, the patron of trash also intersperses his most significant work with sacral motifs – from the colonel’s prophetic monologue to the symbol of the cross as a representation of hope and protection, as well as redemption. Hell on the Battleground is not a run-of-the-mill variation on Platoon; instead of that film’s literalism and emotional appeal, it is a film that should be felt, not understood. Following the iconoclastic anti-war cri de coeur by angry veteran Oliver Stone, the Republican military fan Prior brought pathos and heroism back to war with his film. (01/01/2016)