“One Man's War is a frightening descent into the garbage can of history....” New York Film Festival
“The basis of my film,” writes Argentine-born director Edgardo Cozarinsky, “is an idea of Walter Benjamin's to write a book consisting entirely of quotations. I wanted to let quotations talk to each other, so that by the process of confrontation alone they would say more....”
Pitting French newsreels of the Occupation period against the journals of German writer and career army officer Ernst Jünger, Cozarinsky creates a collage of lies, public and private, gross and subtle--the lies that wars thrive on. Cozarinsky's deft handling of Jünger's writings reveals a horribly detached intellectual who fancies himself in touch with the reality he writes about. In a “dialogue” with Jünger are the images and voice-over narration of the newsreels, which display not the Nazi atrocities Jünger describes but the everyday life of Parisians, into which Nazism seems to blend like a smooth crème.