First World War portayed in movies

«Torneranno i Prati» (There will be meadows again)is a 2014 movie, directed by Ermanno Olmi.

The movie shows a day and a night in 1917 of twenty men trapped in the highland of Asiago. Imprisoned in a trench, covered by snow, the soldiers don’t live the true experience of the front-line. They hear the far away noises of the front coming from the valley.

Between Man and History

The soldiers feel alienated and forced up to fight against an almost invisible enemy, perpetually hidden in the background.

The war has evolved, hand combat is replaced by the explosions of cannons. The snipers, tunnels dug under the threnches and filled with dynamite, allow the enemies to blow up the lines.

In this conditions the Italian soldiers don’t know who their real enemies are.The Austro-Geman soldiers are replaced by the forces of Nature and the meaningless orders of their commanders.

The cold winter in the mountains.

Badly dressed, locked in wooden huts with few stoves, the snow becomes the soldiers’ most dangerous enemy.

In the freezing cold, the soldiers are exposed to flu and epidemics that easily spread and infest all the troops. They start to have hallucinations which considerably affect the general morale.

The errors of the StaffThe Officers also represent an enemy for the soldiers. They are often inexperienced.They follow outdated military strategies. They are strict in punishments and they observe everything from above, regardless of the real conditions of the army and the place.

The escape route

Men seek an escape to their alienating situation. They are devoid of security, besieged on the external front and without news from home.

The film

The most desperate men prefer suicide in the trench to the uncertainty of death on a mission. The situation of the soldiers can be defined both as poetic and nonsensical: they create a fantasy world, faraway from the horrors of the war.

La propaganda

The Venetian lookout is an example. Everynight there is a fox that rests under a shrunken larch: the man at the lookout begins to see a gold covered tree, sparkling in the night.

Reality

But every illusion is doomed to fail, under the blows of the war.

Film making

«A mio padre»(To my father)

This may be the last work by Ermanno Olmi. As he said, the idea for the film spang from a childhood emory: "Quando ero bambino mio padre mi raccontava della guerra dove era stato soldato“(“When I was a child my father used to tell me about the war in which he had been a soldier”)