Briefly explain why point of view in a film matters, using Clint Eastwood’s films Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima to illustrate

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answer: The ideal answer should include:
1. The French filmmaker Jean Renoir once observed that a person enjoys a story because he or she is in sympathy with the storyteller. The same tale, told by someone else, would be of no interest.
2. In the most general sense, point of view concerns how the story is shaped to reflect the values of a given character or group of characters.
3. For example, Flags of Our Fathers deals with an iconic event for most Americans: the raising of the American flag on the crest of a hill during the famous Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II. Photographer Joe Rosenthal captured this shot with his camera, and it subsequently became one of the most famous photos in the world, replicated in thousands of newspapers and magazines.
4. But in Clint Eastwood’s sister film, Letters from Iwo Jima, which is told from the Japanese point of view, the very same event barely registers on the screen. To the doomed Japanese soldiers defending the island, the event is meaningless, assuming any of them even noticed.
5. We thus get two very different points of view on the same material depending on who is telling the story, the Americans or the Japanese.