Time in 'Letters From Iwo Jima'

Question: How do you create probably the best American war film of the last 20 years?
Answer: You tell of one of America’s greatest military victories from the "enemy’s" point of view. You show the Other’s time-line.

I was struggling to identify what "time" meant in Clint Eastwood’s impressive Letters From Iwo Jima. The title itself refers to fragments of recorded time – correspondences written by soldiers, possibly never delivered to loved ones back home. The setting is the soon-to-be decimated island, as the Japanese soldiers wait for weeks on end for the final attack and then hide in an elaborate systems of tunnels - where measuring time becomes difficult due to the darkness and the insanity. The island seems to encompass the "in-between" -- in-between the Americans and the Japanese homeland; in-between life and death; in-between histories; and, most potently, in-between present and past.

While the film takes a typically Eastwood linear narrative, the historical recreation seemed to encompass a confused, altered time to me. This is not through some surprising move toward stylistic innovation from Eastwood. It is more through a skillful development of mood by the director, who really just gets better with age. In this film, time feels of the essence (in every sense of the word "essence").

In general, war films are so much about fruitlessly measuring time. When will they invade? When will we fire our first shots? But here, it felt even more potent and "different."
Maybe this is just a feeling for an American viewer. Is it the thought of the ‘untold’ history of the other side. How was time measured "over there?" Is there such a thing as our time vs. the Other’s time? (Perhaps this is why the film feels so provocatively confounding in terms of temporality. I never saw Flags of our Fathers.)

I revisited Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time Image this evening to see if it could help me contemplate this issue. As he outlines, when we as viewers are placed in a certain "sheet" of time - that time, whether it is past, present, or even future, becomes present. In Last Year at Marienbad, "the 'past', 'present', and 'future' are no longer in any semblance of succession, but are simultaneously implicated" (101). Deleuze writes of a "powerful time-image," that can give "narration a new value, because it abstracts it from all successive actions [...] Thus the narration will consist of the distribution of different presents to different characters [...] where the inexplicable is thereby maintained and created (101).

Despite the narrative clarity of Letters, I could not help feel moments of the inexplicable in terms of mood. It might be getting into a weird auteur comparison if I examine Eastwood and Resnais’s films in the same post - contemplating a classically narrative director with a less story-based, "art cinema" director. But perhaps this is a great way to really contemplate the time-image by looking at such a standard narrative artist. Eastwood’s Letters is an often traditional war genre narrative with its usual thematic points on sacrifice, heroism, and loss. But something was added for this viewer as he watched it. This is created through the feeling of a "different" present/past. This partly appears because I do follow multiple characters with, possibly, multiple "presents" - as Deleuze notices in a much more inventive form in Marienbad.

Yet, this also feels more tied to my nationality, my collective memory of a historical past as an American. (An American who heard war stories about the Pacific from my grandfather).

Letters is a war film with a "different" historical past/present told by an American to an American audience. No wonder its effect felt so inexplicable to me. Temporality is fundamentally "different" here on some profound historical, yet 'in-the -present,' level.

No wonder, ironically, it probably is the best American war film in years.