Breaker Morant - "Australian for Boer"

Breaker Morant (1980)

H: This movie was interesting because it's a good chance to learn about the Boer War in South Africa, something I didn't know too much about. It's also interesting because the main action of the movie doesn't happen in real time, it's told through flashback. We also have to rely on the testimony of the three Australian soldiers charged with killing Boer soldiers to know what happened, testimony we find out can't be trusted. What do you think about the accused mens' decision not to tell their lawyer the truth?

K: What is the truth? If you're talking about the three Australians killing Boer men in cold blood, that was because of implicit instructions from their higher-ups. It's the code of war - you do what you think is right, even though there are rules that need to be followed. If they had told the truth to their lawyer, it would be revealing that the rules of war don't matter and that war can make really upstanding men kill people unjustly. If they're capable of doing it, there's probably even more bad stuff going on.

You really want to be tried by your own country during war because you go to war to support them and in turn they're supposed to support you, unconditionally almost because of what you're doing for them.

H: So if events at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay are the result of implicit instructions from those higher up in the military, do we let those foot soldiers actually perpetuating the crimes off? Certainly we're not executing these people and also, they're not all necessarily operating under combat stress as those soldiers in Breaker Morant, but just as in the Iraq War it's primary fighting an insurgency/insurgencies, so it was with the Boer War. Still, I think we find ourselves siding with the Australians, because the English they're fighting for seem so hypocritical.

K: We're shown the personal complexities of these men - we're told details of their personal lives and why they're in this position, why they're in South Africa. The movie is shaped so that you root for them, because it's these individuals versus faceless England. It's not as though you're rooting for England to win the war.

H: So we're in agreement about how we feel about the English in this movie and we're on the side of the Australians. How did this movie make you feel about the Boer?

K: The movie shows the Boer as savage, violent men, but under the circumstances they're defending their land.

H: Yeah, they're much like Americans during the Revolutionary War. The Americans stole their land from the Native Peoples just as the Boer stole South Africa from Black Africans. Then, both the Americans and the Boer portray themselves as natives fighting off an illegitimate English governing body.

I thought the movie did a great job of getting your hopes up, when the prisoners are treated to wine and told that they'll probably be found innocent, contrasted with the next day when two of the three are handed their execution sentences and left to wait alone in brick cells.

K: A scene that I liked was when they're being held in jail and there's a Boer attack. The prisoners are the only ones that successfully fend off the attack and are then put back in prison. It's obvious that they're skills could better be used outside of jail than in jail.

Do you think the scenes with the pianos and singing were explained well? Were they just to show that he had a personal life or something outside of the army?

H: I think those scenes combined with the fact that Breaker Morant is a poet, illustrate what you were saying earlier. That cultured, civilized men are capable of evil in evil circumstances. At the start, he treats Boer prisoners fairly and is surprised when his commanding officer has them killed for little reason. Once the commanding officer, also his friend, is killed in an ambush by the Boer, he loses that civility and in so doing, loses his life to the courts.

K: What did you think of his poems?

H: I thought they were interesting as a device in the film but were also interesting in their own right. It's a very poignant scene at the end when he's reciting poetry while he and the other Australian await the firing squad sitting on wooden chairs in a field at dawn.

K: It's a nice contrast to have such a violent scene to have, instead of a musical score, to have a narration of a poem - that this gentle man meets such a grim end.