GREAT BOYS STOP WARS

It is the 50TH year of Independent Bangladesh. On this occasion, an article by Tanvir Mokammel published in 'Anandabazar Patrika'. While reading this write-up I remembered a boy whom I saw in my childhood. In our school, he was two classes below me. He came wearing a T-shirt at one of our school events. I stared at the graffiti on his T-shirt for a long time. There are two reasons to be surprised. One, Graffiti on T-shirt was written in Bengali. This is not surprising nowadays, but when we were in school, we could not see Bengali writing on T-shirts. Two, the T-shirt read: The Great Boys go to war. As a child, I knew that those who do good things like studying, listening to their parents and elders, etc., are good boys. But I didn't know what 'Great boy' was. I knew what war was. Courtesy of Rama-Ravana War or Kurukshetra War. But I didn't know that boys who go to war can be not only good but also Great. But at that time again in walls of different places of the city, and in Shantiniketani bags, I used to see writing: We want peace, not war. Now the question is, if you want peace, then why would the boys who went to war be the Great? Today, many years later, those who want to stop the war are being praised for their excellence. I saw narratives being made about the Great Boys who stopped the war, and these narratives have been made by two British directors: Sam Mendes and Christopher Nolan.

The less said about 2020, the better. Yet for a cine-lover like me, the year will be a memorable one for two movies. Sam Mendes' 1917 and Christopher Nolan's Tenet. Mendes's film was released in India earlier this year and Nolan's film was released at the very end. The two movies released this year are about ending the war. But the first is real and the second is science fiction.

1917, a film with the numerical title is about World War I. British army on one side and the German army on the other. The British army learned that the Germans were retreating. But the British soon realized that it was the Germans' maneuver. They will actually attack the British from another direction. So, it was hastily decided that the British troops would not advance. The war must stop. The news is not being reported to Colonel McKinsey, because the phone lines were cut. Inevitably two British soldiers were sent to give this message. Now it was the responsibility of two British soldiers named William Schofield and Tom Blake to stop the war.

Tenet, a movie with a Palindromic title is the story of a Protagonist who travels between past-present-future to save the world from the Third World War. This film depicts a story that a weapon or gun has been created in the future, the bullets of which are moving backward to the past instead of moving forward. Someone in the future wants to use this weapon to create a new history by destroying the past.

Mendes’ 1917 is about past history. Nolan's Tenet tells the story of a fictional future. The interesting thing is the storytelling aspects of these two movies. 1917 continues to speak of our past as the story continues to move forward. This movie has started in one place and ended in another. No place in the movie has been shown more than once. In fact, the soldiers (later one soldier) are moving forward with the message of stopping the war, the story of the movie is also following them. So, the same place hasn’t come more than once. No flashbacks. This movie just keeps moving forward. All movies are the same (except Memento); However, there are occasional flashbacks in some of the movies as the story progresses, and later events are told a little earlier. But 1918 is not like that.

This is in stark contrast to Christopher Nolan's second film, Memento which released in 2000. It is a flashback movie. This movie begins at the end and ends at the beginning. Nolan has been playing with time and space in movies after movies. Tenet is a recent example of this experiment. Its story confuses the viewer's mind as it comes and goes in the past-present-future. Nolan has used a theory of reverse entropy to travel from time to time. Everything in this world decays. Nothing is permanent. In physics, this is called entropy. Since the subject of this movie is a gunshot from the future to the past, it is called reverse entropy. This means that the shot was fired, but it did not explode forward but gradually moved backward. Whose goal is to destroy the past.

We keep the past alive, forget the past, or want to forget, distort the past. But completely destroyed! Sunil Gangopadhyay said about his historical novel ‘Prothom Alo’ (New Dawn), one has to step back a little to throw the arrow forward. From his words, it can be said that not only do you have to run forward like a cheetah, you also have to look back like lions. Therefore, Mendes tells the story of the past and Nolan tells the story of saving the past. In fact, in order to build a new history, one has to know the old history. But what if creating a new history and composing a new past becomes the new reality of the future world?

© TAPAS PAUL / 20.12.2020