| In her
prize-winning documentary WAR STORIES Our
Mothers Never Told Us, New Zealand filmmaker
Gaylene Preston takes a simple idea and turns it
into a rich, universal experience. She has gathered seven elderly women,
seated them one at a time in front of a black
dropcloth, and asked them about the impact of
World War II on their lives, while interspersing
archival footage and stills.
There are many levels and
meanings to what skilled off-screen interviewer
Judith Fyfe draws from these pleasant,
grandmotherly women. Right away Preston and Fyfe
remind us of how easy it is for it not to occur
to us that ordinary-looking people could ever
have had extraordinary experiences. Yet these
women are full of alternately warm, romantic,
harrowing and tragic tales.
Preston’s film inevitably
provides a fresh perspective on the World War II
era. The United States and New Zealand were
– and are – so much alike in many ways.
Both countries sent their young men to distant
locales, both have puritanical traditions, but
New Zealand, which had a population of only 1.5
million when war broke out, is so much smaller,
so much more remote and even now so much more
conservative. What we hadn’t expected to
learn is how strong and deep anti-American
feelings ran among New Zealanders at the onset of
war, and Preston, in addressing her own people
primarily, never tells us why.
Two of the women are Maori, and
one of them became an honorary U.S. Marine for
her service as a kind of mother figure for an
American military camp, where her informal duties
extended far beyond washing and ironing uniforms.
By and large this woman, Jean, has good things to
say about Americans, but she does report putting
a racist in his place.
The other Maori woman, Mabel,
tells of taking over her family’s school bus
and trucking business while her husband served in
the Maori Battalion, which suffered great losses.
Throughout, Preston’s
researchers went to considerable effort to
provide specific contexts for their
interviewees’ recollections, and the
newsreels of the returning Maori soldiers and all
the traditional ceremonies involved are
especially memorable.
Preston’s women all have
such striking, often painful revelations that
they shouldn’t be given away here. (One
woman, for example, tells of her own devastating
frontline experiences in Egypt and Italy.)
Inevitably, they involve losses
but also various forms of discrimination and, at
times, an oppressive conformity.
Ironically, in this light, one
woman, who is in fact Preston’s own mother,
tells of an unhappy wartime marriage she had a
special reason for not forsaking and what it cost
her to make work.
There are lots of things we
don’t learn about these women we’ve
come to care about. Are those whose husbands
survived the war still alive? What about their
children and grandchildren? But that’s not
what War Stories is about, and Preston has made a
succinct, captivating 95-minute movie that
perhaps wisely leaves us wanting more.
|