Movies

The Battle of San Pietro is a documentary film about the historic battle of San Pietro, a small village in Italy, in which over 1,100 United States soldiers were killed while attempting to capture the village that blocked the way for the Allied Forces. Directed by John Huston, the film was noted for its dependency on raw emotions, events, and the cost of the war and the hardship endured by the soldiers in taking the village.
Critics of the film said that Huston dealt so much with the other difficulties of the battle rather than filming a full account of how the soldiers had claimed victory over the enemies. But such character of the documentary film had earned Huston the respect of film scholars and gave him the distinction of one of the creators of finest classic documentaries. Huston can be considered as a director with an insatiable appetite for making diverse and challenging movies that explore character and delve into universal themes.

Among the threads that run through his craft includes his fascination with unfulfilled and dangerous threads. The Battle of San Pietro is one of his documentary and combat films directed for the United States government. Facing a great deal of risk as he followed the grueling and prolonged battle at the village of San Pietro, he accentuated the film with a crisply written and compassionate narration. Hustons narration had made the film brutally honest in its portrayal of the high cost of the war and the difficulties of the said battle.
Hustons masterpiece was both an informative and authentic account of combat and a moving human document. The film utilizes diagrams to explain military strategy behind the long battle in the Italian village and footages of peoples faces to show the brutal impact of the battle. The documentary film was said to be hardly concerned with policy or the rhetoric of war and relies entirely on one of its greatest strengths voice over narration of Huston.

The voice over narration of the classic documentary was enough to convey the tenacity and impact of the candid shots of death under fire and the poignant scenes of villagers who were able to return to their ruined shelters. The documentary film uses the technique voice of God (voice over narration) commentary to put much emphasis of the films honest and raw qualities. It can be said that voice over narration opens many avenues for a certain film to employ all types of verbal ironies. Moreover, the utilization of voice of God or the voice over narration doubles the source of the narration as an image-maker and a storyteller.

Adding voice over narration to a film establishes a pliable, multi-layered structure which is definitely perfect for developing ironic disparities and elements of contradictions. Huston can be regarded as an ironic narrator based upon the descriptive terms that he used to convey an honest portrayal of war.

The Battle of San Pietro is a combat documentary which paired eloquent words with footages that defy words. As an ironic narrator, Hustons voice over narration was a remarkable factor in the film because he equipped his story with slightly simplified technical yet dramatic prose and sidetracked it with parody shaded with irony.

As it is noted that filmmakers can exploit many possibilities with the ironic potential of voice over narration, Huston was able to maintain the connection between the images and the narration. It is observed in the film that the Huston was able to utilize clashes between narration and scenic presentation to compromise the narrator himself and to break the audiences provisional principle or belief in that narrators authority over the text.

Irony at the First Part of the Film
It has been suggested that ironic narration entails the portrayal of tensions of the observational approach. This notion has to do with the tensions between showing and telling, between the specific and the general, and between filming and creating being transferred to the introductory dialogue. This displacement appeared at Hustons film in which an introductory statement from a representative of the army attempts to draw away the main perspective of the documentary film.

Put differently, films like the San Pietro, usually maintain a tension between the particular and the general, and between the historically unique instances and generalizations. Without generalizing, potential documentary films could become mere records of particular events and experiences. But with the combination of the individual shots and scenes that locate viewers in a specific time and place and the organization of these film elements into a larger whole, the film has its own power and fascination.

The concept of irony of the narration in the film was best explicated in the interplay between the commentary and the images on the screen (Kozloff 1988). Huston was able to show irony through the canny pairings of shots and verbal narration. In the introductory part of the film, footages of the horrendous destruction were combined with guidebook phrases such as A farming community (paired with shot of blasted fields), Patron St. Peter (paired with shot of ruined statue), and Point of interest St. Peters, 1438, (paired with shot of bombed church).

 The ironic understatement of Huston in the face of the horrors which expressed the counterpoint between the casualness of the narration and the honest brutality depicted on the screen was a chilling experience for the viewers.

Hustons incidental reference to the carnage in the tone of the film and the narrators vocabulary of architectural design established a vivid sense of irony. It is noteworthy to mention the interesting treatment of the chancel of the town church in San Pietro when all the audience could see are its ruins.

The use of the narration in the first part of the film, in the scene in which footage of the sun rising in the Liri Valley in Italy paired with melodramatic sounds and the harmonious effects of the wind rushing through the leaves of the trees, the bush and the soil were just perfect to represent the concept of irony. In this particular, the narrator was able to exploit all the angles of irony beginning with the beautiful and deceitful facade of war followed by factual representation of war in which that certain location was turned to a historic containment of bloodshed.

Though the use of sound was of minor importance to the film, it was an added potion in the film to entice the audience of what lies ahead after the harmonious narration and to prepare them for the brutal and honest scenes that will lie before the viewers eyes.

The enticement period which the first part portrayed was being reinforced by the unemotional yet highly expressive commentary of Huston who opened the story with minimal level of emotion and gradually grabbing the full attention of the viewers.
The Battle of San Pietro delved on its basic aim to illustrate the hardships which soldiers had to bare in the Italian soil before obtaining victory. As the documentary film is meant to include nothing but facts and honest portrayals, the use of voice of God classical narration was used to express the narrators mastery of the subject and to convey authority over the audience.

The film was a visible product of the many possibilities of using the irony concept for narration. The voice of God was used to convey rather than explain the battle for San Pietro. The voice of God narration was able to bring the viewers back from an acute moment of despair with the help of the images that define that the truth of the war is loss. The authoring presence of Huston in the film was represented by the commentary and his steadfast avoidance of the triumphant approach and epic narration.
The movie stood out alone in the history of documentaries as it portrayed the battle in the Italian valley using cruel realism. The film presented the battle as a costly continuing campaign rather than in retrospect as a victorious quest. Huston was able to mobilize such aim by imposing an aura of authority delivered through the narration mixed with irony.

Overall, the application of voice of God narration made the Battle of San Pietro  as approaching neorealism from the direction of the documentaries rather than a mere narrative and film practice. The narration of Huston was crafted to relate directly to the audience a realistic view of war.

Hustons narration in the film was aiming at creating a holistic picture of the real battle that happened in the Italian village through the balance between images and voice over. In this sense, it can be said that Huston meant to support the factual images with ironic words rather than to overpower the images using descriptive terms.