War

Those who don’t know what a post-apocalyptic mood really is will get the definitive answer from this film. The melancholy of the black & white images is scorching. The desolation of the bare drama speaks directly to the bone marrow. The war from the title was not fought out with weapons of mass destruction, but the effect on the landscape seems the same. The film is set in the countryside of Warren County, Pennsylvania. A region where (as almost all over the American countryside) the traditional family farm has more or less died out. And here, in this country so sensitively recorded by the film maker with a clockwork camera, nothing has come to take its place. There is only decay and the odd effort to keep something running in spite of everything. The film does not have a traditional story -it is mainly about mood – but it does have several intriguing protagonists. For instance there is the minister, Jack Masters, who goes from farm to farm to talk about the world after the end of the world. The farmer (fourth-generation) Jacob Jenkins inspects the fence around his land every spring and Hanky the Junkman keeps a scarce nodding donkey working on the land of Jenkins. A truly poetic film. (GjZ)