Czech film director Václav Marhoul says that his latest work, “Tobruk, is not a movie about a war; it is a movie about the people in a war. The distinction, he says, is all important.
“The film was originally inspired by a book called ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ by the American author Stephen Crane, said Marhoul at the Cairo premier of “Tobruk earlier this week. “It was a watershed in American literature. It was published in 1897, and the author was just 24 years old.
“But this book was scandalous at the time because he very openly described the Civil War, and he described the feelings of ordinary soldiers. Because it was a civil war, the emotion I got from the book was so strong, and I decided to make a movie based on it.
Inspired by Crane’s work, Marhoul began to scour the history of his native Czechoslovakia for a suitable setting for his story, one that would allow him to make similar explorations into the horrors of combat. Finally, he settled on a particular battle in the Second World War, the defense of the city of Tobruk in Libya, which was besieged by German and Italian soldiers late 1941.
The city was occupied mainly by Australian troops, and among those sent to bolster the Allied defenses were soldiers of the Czechoslovakian 11th Infantry Battalion (East). The Battalion was composed mainly of Czechs and Slovaks who had fled Europe at the start of the war, rallying in Palestine to join the Allied cause.
The choice of subject, says Marhoul, was partly due to the cruel fate of the soldiers of the Battalion, who served all through the war in North Africa, Syria, France and the Eastern Front, only to be sent to concentration camps by the communists after 1948. The story of their service alongside their Western allies was subsequently repressed, an injustice that Marhoul is now seeking to correct through his cinematic tale.
The action follows a platoon of soldiers from their base in Egypt, through their deployment to the deserts of Libya, where they defended entrenched positions under daily bombardment.
“I tried to focus on the things you wouldn’t find in the various history books about Tobruk, he says. “In the books you can read about how many divisions were there and such things, but you never get to hear the ordinary voices, the ordinary feelings of the men in the trenches. How they were stressed and frightened.
In writing the script, Marhoul spent several years talking to veterans of the battle and researching their experiences through diaries from the period.
“Most of the surviving veterans are over 90 years old now, and when I talked to them, I was surprised to find that most of them still have nightmares. They are still being woken in the night, and they can never forget what they did and what they went through. It’s amazing that after 60 years of history they are still living with the consequences.
“War is crazy, really, and people from time to time have stupid ideas about war. They think that war is just a big amusement, but it’s not; it’s hell on earth.
While Marhoul’s script was inspired by first-hand accounts, he admits to having exercised a large degree of artistic license in creating characters and events. Alongside the aim of recreating the horrors of bombardment, he has attempted to illustrate the variety of moral challenges soldiers faced. One terrified man is seen running from his trench as shells explode around him, an act of apparent cowardice for which he might have been shot. Another is seen attempting to steal a ring from the body of a dead comrade, while from time to time anti-Semitism rears its ugly head.
“I’m very sure that in a war on Tuesday you are a hero and on Wednesday you are a coward, says Marhoul. “Your friend who was a coward on Wednesday is going to be a hero on Thursday. So it means that to be a hero is not a profession. It’s not like the decision to be a train driver. “
The inclusion of such moral dilemmas and incidents of human weakness are, he says, intended partly as an antidote to the tendency towards sentimentalism and moral certainties in many war movies, particularly those emanating from the United States.
Among the worst offenders, he lists “Pearl Harbor. By way of contrast, he cites Terrence Malick’s hypnotic “The Thin Red Line – which describes the experiences of US soldiers in the Battle of Guadalcanal from a psychological perspective – as a masterpiece.
If there is one potential weakness in Marhoul’s approach of artistic license, it is illustrated by a scene in which an Italian prisoner is executed by a ruthless Czechoslovakian corporal. So far as Marhoul is aware, no such incident occurred in the Battle for Tobruk. Clearly, there is a danger that such deviations from fact could be seen as re-writing history, rather than honoring it.
Marhoul, though, is unrepentant. “I’m an artist, sorry. I’m not a historian. But feature films are always fiction. In documentaries, you must stick closely to facts, but not if you are making feature films. It is a right of all artists to do this, to make a fantasy.
