A collectively made film by some of the leading figures in the new German cinema--Volker Schlöndorff, Alexander Kluge, Stefan Aust and writer Heinrich Böll. Like the team's previous collective film, Germany in Autumn, made with R. W. Fassbinder in 1978, War and Peace pushes the limits of the documentary tradition, integrating newsreel footage, satirical imagery, fictionalized passages and historical illustrations to treat the Number One issue in world politics today: the nuclear arms race. With Tolstoy's epic in mind and Germany in sight, the film attempts to present both a historical and a contemporary perspective on notions of war and peace: “War is far easier to depict than peace,” notes Schlöndorff, “just as there is more of a fascination with hell than with heaven.” Specifically, the film focuses on Germany as a base and a target for the weapons race. NATO's plan to install Pershing II and Cruise Missiles makes West Germany a “nuclear volcano,” the most dangerous country on earth. How do “they up there” and “they down here,” the governors and the governed, react to this threat? The answers are sought in grass-roots responses filmed at a Bonn peace demonstration; in a swearing-in ceremony of military recruits; in Kluge's “chain of associations,” linking experience with emotion and fantasy on the subject of war; in Schlöndorff's analysis of the media's interest in war as spectacle; and in a dramatization, written by Boll and filmed by Schlöndorff, of life after the bomb for a few unlucky survivors. War and Peace is a unique film, and a timely contribution to the time-bomb issue.