"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..." Juxtaposing German writer and army officer Ernst Jünger's Parisian Diaries, which describe German-occupied Paris, French newsreel footage of the period, "Aryan" music by Hans Pfiltzner and Richard Strauss and "Degenerate" music by Arnold Schönberg and Franz Schreker, Cozarinsky creates a "documentary fiction," finding each in the other. With his collage of "quotations," he is not concerned with delineating a historically accurate portrait of the time, but rather in creating a sense of the web of lies, half-truths and deceptions spun by both the mass media and private individuals. Newsreels of Parisian designers devising hats out of newspapers or Jünger's journal entry describing an execution, detailing the bullet wounds in the man's chest as "five dark dew drops," reveal what Janet Maslin in the New York Times describes as "the process by which French and Germans alike may have tried to ascribe normality to abnormal situations"...a tactic all too familiar today. Kathy Geritz