Saving Private Ryan' Documentary Theme Analysis
Omaha Beach opening sequence “Saving Private Ryan” theme analysis. Steven Spielberg’s World War II epic, Saving Private Ryan, follows a small group of American soldiers led by Captain Henry Miller (Tom Hanks’ character) on a unique mission during the Normandy invasion of June 1944. Spielberg portrays World War II combat in gruesomely realistic terms, especially in the twenty-minute D-day Omaha Beach opening sequence. The bleakness of this sequence unsettles the iconography of earlier WWII combat films. Unsettling images remain, and stem not just from the violent beach landing’s lingering effect, but also from a narrative and visual structure focusing on male vulnerability, which Spielberg does not abandon until the final sequence of the film. But for this opening montage, abandons Hollywood war movie conventions in favour of the iconography of war photography in the Omaha Beach sequence.
Saving private Ryan begins and ends with a close-up shot of a translucent American flag blowing in the breeze, an image and narrative positioning that suggests that the US is the alpha and the omega of human civilization. The visual transparency of the “stars and stripes” used in the opening image may just reflect Spielberg’s transparent and obvious propagandistic meaning: in the second World War, America saved the world and emerged victorious despite great sacrifices. As a point to consider, we never see any other nation’s troops, even though in this “realistic” depiction of the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944, it should have focused on the collective allied military effort. Rather, as presented, D-Day is an all-American operation.
The modern-day framing episode, shows an unidentified older man and his family wandering in the military cemetery above Omaha Beach. The camera isolates on the elderly gentleman as he drifts away from his relatives, scans a veritable field of identical crosses and an occasional star of David. As the character drops on his knees and begins to sob, Spielberg cuts to three separated shots of crosses before zooming in slowly on the man’s eyes. Accompanying the zoom, the sound of the sea lapping against the shore becomes more noticeable and relevant and triggers the flashback memory that constitutes the rest of the film. The calmness and serenity on this first part of the sequence, the measured pace of the editing, and the steadiness of the camera are in marked contrast to the chaotic scene that follows: the landing on Omaha Beach.
Suddenly the camera is handheld and shaky, several soldiers vomit in fear, and explosions around get louder and louder as the landing crafts approach the shore. Instead of the safety crosses above the beach, we see one GI kissing he crucifix for luck, and instead of the serene grassy site of the bluff, we view pandemonium as soldiers jump into the water in full battle gear, swimming for their lives amid slow-motion blood and terror. A sequence that innerved even teenage audience jaded by the ultra-violence of port-production. It manages to induce not just suspense, shock, and disorientation but a kind of combat fatigue.
As in every other WWII American film, the Germans in Saving Private Ryan are depicted as depraved monsters. In this opening montage, for instance, shows waves of GIs being mowed down by Nazi machine guns, blown out of the water by powerful enemy mortal fire, and shot through their helmets, incinerated, dismembered by unseen enemy ordnance. Although we occasionally see a shot from the physical point of view of the Axis gunners, we are clearly not in their moral viewpoint. The Point of View shot from behind the German troops preserves their anonymity, preventing any identification leaving them faceless automatons, no more human than their weapons.
This battle scene thus establishes empathy for the U.S forces, who are far beyond the enemy stronghold and hardly able to wrest a foothold on the heaviest fortified Omaha Beach without suffering intense carnage and massive casualties. Both the film’s narrative structure, which opens on a gore-filled and ostensible “anti-war” scene of death and destruction, and the natural geography of the space, create an immediate sense of epic heroism amid despair. The film’s “anti-war” realism is a representation of the calamitous contingency of combat – an effect du reel enhanced by the use of desaturation film stock and conveys the look of old 1940s black and white news-reel footage.
Saving Private Ryan reclaimed the attention to material detail. The authenticity in arms, vehicles, uniforms and unit insignia, even stripe and hash mark in place, down to the distinctive diamond-shaped design of a Hitler Youth dagger. For this to be possible, they had endorsements from scholars and veterans, not just in the unflinching depiction of violence but also in the set design, costuming and supply lines.
Robert Capa mise-on-scène and Army Signal Corps eye-lines clash in a barrage of jarring kaleidoscopic flashes: the blurry D-day images of the famous photographer spiced into the jostled, handheld perspective of military cameramen in the thick of it, scampering of cover, peering out from behind parapets, and peeking through the slits of pillow boxes. These devices used by Spielberg are designed to force us to share certain aspects of the experience of going into combat. Some of those devices are similar to those used in the cinema of action spectacle, rapid and unsteady camerawork serve much the same purpose in both cases. The main difference is that such techniques are used in deliberate effort to make de viewer uncomfortable. Newsreel memories are invoked by angles of sight, jump cut-action, and subtle shifts in film grain, but the newsreel unspooled nothing like this. The jagged suturing of the editing serves as a sickening complement to the surgical violations of the human frame: a man’s intestines spill out of his gut, a face blows apart, between others. The rending of human flesh leaves the spectator reeling from the emotional percussion. The experience is claustrophobic, with few long or establishing shots. The viewer has to wait about 15 minutes before being given a relatively long shot in which the action can be seen in the context of the sea. And it is not until about 35 minutes into the film that we are given a wide shot of the entire beach.
One of the first images is what appears to be a point-of-view shot, looking unsteady from one landing craft to another. The hand-held camera creates the same effect throughout the sequence, it bobs up and down, above and below the surface of the water, along with disembarking troops dragged under by the weight of their equipment. One other aspect that had a big impact in these moment is the sound design, which was carefully designed for this sequence. Gary Rydstrom, sound designer, broke this sequence down into several different elements and realized the most important aspect would be the bullet impact. The moment when the soldiers jump into the water and the camera shifts between above and under water, when its above water, the sound is chaos, giving us the sense the battle, the reality of what is happening in that moment, but when the camera goes underwater, the sound shifts completely to this cocoon, almost like the water is a shelter, a safe place. And into that moment, come the bullets killing the soldiers.
This sequence maintains a very low angle and jerks motion throughout most of the movement up the beach. With the exception of some shots from the position of German machine guns, our perspective remains of the troops on the ground. When the troops are pinned down behind a low ridge of sand near the top of the beach, so is the camera. A documentary type of effect is created, as if the camera was carried by one of the troops engaged in the assault.
Another aspect that make this sequence so unique and engaging is the relative absence of editing. Impact effects based on cutting are avoid in favour of camera movement, thus maintaining a greater sense of substance of the event. Increased shutter speeds removes the element of blurring in conversational camerawork, creating a strobing effect, noticeable especially in some of the rapid camera movements. The impression given is that the cinematic technology is unable to keep up with the pace and violence of the events. Some of these techniques involve a deliberate handicapping of the means of representation, a denial of the full scope to the cinematic apparatus. A technology such as the Steadicam, which permits fluid camera movement, is replaced by the precise opposite: a radically unsteadicam.
This documentary effect is heightened by processing techniques used to desaturate colours from the images, which has a brownish tone reminiscent of historical footage. Such technique is carefully contrived, and the overall effect depends on digital augmentation of both image and sound, that latter play an important part in the impact caused on the viewer. Authenticity remains itself a special effect and can be viewed both as an absorbing recreation of reality and as an impressive special effect in its own right.
As the first major World War II combat film to be fashioned in the modern age of computer graphic imaging (CGI), digital sound and forensic makeup, Saving Private Ryan took advantage of being able to revision in full color carnage. Even though this sequence includes digitally-composed special effects added in post-production, many of them are physical, created on the set, and had an impact on performers and crew.
“The practical effects gave us all – the crew, the actors, and myself – a feeling of actually being under combat conditions, and the actors couldn’t help to react to it. Often we would walk away from a setup with our hands shaking, and it informed everyone’s performance. It certainly rein-formed me, from shot to shot, how I needed to tell the story” – Steven Spielberg
Although set in the past, Spielberg’s “anti-war” film has ideological ramifications that affect spectators now and in the future, and provide the self-perpetuating jingoistic justifications for future unilateral military invasions, incursions and interventions.
