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Cineaste Magazine: One Man's War

"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 Paris Diaries, which describe German-occupied Paris, with 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 this collage of quotations, he is concerned not with delineating a historically accurate portrait of the time, but rather with creating a sense of the web of lies, half-truths, and deceptions spun by both the mass media and private individuals." -Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archive