Com­pos­er Michael Nyman has made a great new film

It’s been a long while since British com­pos­er Michel Nyman has exer­cised his redoubtable com­pos­ing tal­ents for the pur­pos­es of a tra­di­tion­al fea­ture film score. He grasped the movie world in his mitt dur­ing the mid ​’80s for the won­der­ful, Hen­ry Pur­cell-quot­ing baroque score he pro­duced for Peter Greenaway’s The Draftsman’s Con­tract. Fol­low­ing that, he con­tributed stun­ning sound­tracks to films like Andrew Niccol’s Gat­ta­ca and Michael Winterbottom’s Won­der­land. And the music was, in the case of both films, a vital con­stituent of their con­sid­er­able dra­mat­ic heft.

More recent­ly, Nyman has become fas­ci­nat­ed with the film essay. Not mod­ern exam­ples of the form that you might see clog­ging up YouTube chan­nels and the pro­grammes of dinky Euro film fes­ti­vals, but those made by the Sovi­et inno­va­tor, Dzi­ga Ver­tov. He even pro­duced a new score for Vertov’s sem­i­nal 1929 work, The Man with a Movie Cam­era – a film which was recent­ly vot­ed the great­est doc­u­men­tary ever made by Sight & Sound mag­a­zine. This fas­ci­na­tion extend­ed into the his own direc­to­r­i­al project, NYman with a Movie Cam­era, a new­ly-built mon­tage of silent footage with a churn­ing score overlaid.

Nyman clear­ly enjoyed the process of exca­vat­ing the archives of cin­e­ma and build­ing a movie from his haul, as he returns now with a new medi­um-length mon­tage film enti­tled War Work: 8 Songs With Film which is avail­able to view on MUBI​.com exclu­sive­ly until 8 Jan­u­ary 2016. It’s a memo­r­i­al work which was com­plet­ed in 2014 – 100 years since the out­break of World War One – and it employs the words of eight British poets who fell dur­ing the con­flict. The footage used was gleaned from French, Ger­man and US film archives and has been spliced togeth­er by Max Pugh, who also worked on NYman. The film has been edit­ed in a way so the con­tent of the footage match­es the tone of the music, not just cuts crude­ly occur­ring in synch with the score.

It’s hard to make a film about a bloody and hor­ren­dous con­flict such as this and show any kind of moral equiv­a­lence towards the sides involved in the fight­ing. Yet Nyman’s film isn’t a doc­u­ment of good ver­sus evil, rather an explo­ration into the cul­ture of war at that time. It opts not to focus on the results, which most will already be aware of, but what hap­pened to those involved both before and after the conflict.

The film is toploaded with dis­turb­ing footage of var­i­ous folks adapt­ing to the injuries they’ve suf­fered on the bat­tle­field. Some have become freak­ish sub­jects for the cam­era as the con­vulse and con­tort as lab-coat­ed pro­fes­sion­als prod them unfeel­ing­ly with var­i­ous blunt instru­ments. It also infers that war might have expe­dit­ed the devel­op­ment of pros­thet­ic limbs, as the film’s shock­ing open­ing shot shows a man with his jaw blown off hav­ing it replaced by a what appears to be a clay-based appro­pri­a­tion of his pre-acci­dent face.

The aim of the film is to show how the cul­ture of war has seeped into all stra­tum of life, both per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al. The instru­ments of war­fare – planes, guns, swords – have been appro­pri­at­ed as a new way for chil­dren to have fun. We also see fic­tion films where direc­tors have trans­formed the act of state-spon­sored mass mur­der into dra­mat­ic (and some­times even com­ic) enter­tain­ment. The film ends with a series of on-screen quo­ta­tions, all of which are unsen­ti­men­tal procla­ma­tions that look beyond war as a machine pow­ered by pure evil, but as a nasty busi­ness that has become so entrenched with­in soci­ety that we have start­ed to accept it as the sta­tus quo.

War Work: 8 Songs With Film is exclu­sive­ly avail­able to view on MUBI​.com until Jan­u­ary 8, 2016.