Introduction

You have your dress jacket hanging in the wardrobe cleaned, badges of personal meaning, medals up. However, the truth is - wars are cruel, violent and harsh. They can take away your friends, family and all the people you know.

Many painters tried to show the exact image of what is going on at war but the one of few who, in my opinion, showed in extreme realities of what the war can be, was Otto Dix.

Catch-22 is a satirical novel by the American author Joseph Heller. It is set during the World War II from 1942 to 1944. It uses the third-person narration by describing the war events from different points of view.

Naqoyqatsi in the Hopi Indian is a term for a war as a way of life. The movie itself summarizes everything that was done by mankind. Naqoyqatsi represents abstract ideas by showing different images of cliches like dollar signs equal money, Madonna is a synonym to a word fame.

"Wounded Soldier"

Otto Dix is a German painter who lived from 1891 to 1969, known for his harshly realistic images of war. Dix served in the First World War while fighting for the German Army.

It was there that he experienced the true horrors of war, which was a main catalyst on his art and allowing him to make emotionally moving pieces of artwork eventually recognized as "perhaps the most powerful as well as the most unpleasant anti-war statements in modern art."



"Wounded soldier" appeared ten years after the First World War began, Dix's work doesn't glorify World War I nor heroizes its soldiers but reveals the unbelievably horrible realities experienced by people who were there.

Otto Dix used dark colors to heighten the emotional and realistic effects of his images of horror. In the art piece "Wounded soldier" you can clearly see ghastly white bones, leaving white spots which show flesh.


One of the characteristics of Postmodernism is that authority is dangerous and we cannot trust it. Since government almost always glorifies war as "something that is needed", people need to see how harsh and cruel wars are. Truth is relative and we cannot just believe our government without thinking.

Catch-22

During World War II, a soldier named Yossarian is serving at Air Force squadron, near the Italian Coast. Yossarian and his friends think that they are just resources in the eyes of selfish officers. The squadron is sent into brutal combats where it is more important to get nice aerial photographs than to destroy their targets. Their colonels, also, raise up the amount of missions their soldiers have to participate in before they will be send home, so one one is sent home.

Yossarian discovers that is is possible to get out of army because of insanity. He claims that he is insane, however, by claiming himself insane he shows that he is sane because every single sane soldier would claim that he is insane in order to avoid the war.

Catch-22 is a law that is illegal to read, however, the place where it is written that is illegal is in Catch-22 itself. Catch-22 is also defined as a law that an enemy can do anything that one cannot keep him from doing. This novel is a paradox that catches victim in its illogic pattern and slowly hills those who made the law.

Therefore, Catch-22 shows how crazy and destructible wars are by giving its reader an image of all the cruelty. While "Wounded Soldier" by Otto Dix shows just one image of a hurt soldier, the novel shares a story that goes behind all the photos and newspapers.

 

Naqoyqatsi: Life As War

Naqoyqatsi is the third in Godfrey Reggio's trilogy of documentary films, which was made in 2002. Like two previous movies "Koyaaniqatsi" (1983) and Powaqqatsi (1988), it features series of images of our industrialized era. The title itself is taken from Hopi language which translates as "Life As War".

Overall the movie shows a variety of cliches like dollar sign equals money, Madonna equals fame, and so on. However, the main idea is to show how bad wars are by giving us unpromising and realistic photos of the true horror of wars.

The idea behind this film is deep, there is thinking at what man has done to the planet. Godfrey Reggio thinks that mankind is a threat to Earth - it would be better if there were no humans on the planet. Naqoyqatsi shows the pictures of troops, military vehicles and different explosions, so does it bring the idea that war was always our way of life?

Naqoyqatsi, along with the Wounded Soldier by Otto Dix and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, give a point that wars are cruel and destructive. To sum it up, those three relics are showing us the real bloody war story that humans need to know the truth about. 

Conclusion

Postmodern time has ended due to the beginning of the new era - era of technologies. West tries to dictate its own rules through different spheres of life - movies, music, books and many other ways. It is like you do not show up to another person's house with your set of rules but you follow the rules he has, like "are human rights universal, or are they a product of the decadent West that has no relevance in other societies?" ("Are Human Rights Universal?" by Thomas M. Franck).

West tries to influence on other countries by imposing its culture especially through different technologies like Internet, television and concerts. The new era will be an era of spreading American values, ideas and thoughts.

Works Cited

"Are Human Rights Universal?" Foreign Affairs - Thomas M. Franck

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Dix - Otto Dix's Wikipedia page

Google images on "Wounded Soldier" and "Stormtroopers Advancing Under Gas" by Otto Dix, 1916

Google images on "Saving Private Ryan" by Steven Spielberg 1998.

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller, 1961

Naqoyqatsi - Godfrey Reggio, 2002

Google images on "Naqoyqatsi" by Godfrey Reggio, 2002

Art Lecture Notes, Brett Potash, 2014

Existentialism Lecture Notes, Brett Potash, 2014

Google images on "Evolution stop following me". From the webstite tshirtpusher.com

Wikipedia page "Catch-22"

Google images on "Naqoyqatsi".

Images from criterionforum.org

Google images on "works cited"