The Forgotten Battle · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Picture the causeway. A single road about the width of a tank, raised over flooded fields, and at the far end German guns that have already ranged it. Men have to walk into that. There is no flank to take, no cover to reach, no clever line through. You go forward on the road or you don't go. The Forgotten Battle stages the Walcheren assault exactly this way, and that one image is the key to what the film is doing — and to why a war movie, the most action-hungry genre there is, keeps bumping against the limits of action.

Deleuze had a name for the shape of the classic war film: the large-form action-image. A situation presses on people — a front, a port that has to open — until somebody acts decisively and the situation changes. Situation, then act, then new situation. The genre breathes between two spaces. There is the vast encompassing milieu, the thing that summons the deed (Deleuze calls that summoning milieu the synsign, the encompasser), and there is the taut line where everything narrows to one confrontation, force pitted against force — what he calls the binomial. The rhythm of inhaling the panorama and exhaling the duel he named respiration-space. The Western lives there. So does most of WWII cinema.

What is striking about The Forgotten Battle is how literally the Zeeland landscape hands Deleuze's abstraction a body. The milieu here is water: polder country below sea level, much of it deliberately flooded, the dykes breached by the RAF until the island drowned. The encompassing space is enormous, grey-green, flat to the horizon — the inhale. Then it narrows, with terrible precision, to that causeway: the exhale, the skeleton of the action reduced to one exposed strip. The film didn't invent respiration-space. The history did. Van Heijningen's real choice is to refuse to prettify it.

And here is where the genre cracks a little. The action-image needs room — the hero perceives a threat and maneuvers, and the maneuver resolves the situation. That circuit is the engine of every battle picture. The causeway denies it. There is nothing to perceive your way out of and nowhere to move but straight ahead into the fire. Compare the kinetic freedom of 1917, with its rolling country to flow through, or the vertical scramble of Hacksaw Ridge. Those films keep the sensory-motor circuit humming. The Forgotten Battle, by honoring the actual topography, stages an action-image stripped of the very thing action needs. The soldiers can act, but the geography has already decided the outcome. The deed is forced, not chosen. It is the war film at the edge of its own form.

The multilingual premise pushes in the same direction. Each character speaks his own tongue — English, Dutch, German — and they never translate for one another; the film insists they can share only actions and suffering, never words. Deleuze has a term for the bond that ties a person to a situation so that each marks the other: the imprint, the empreinte. Subtract a common language and the imprint is all that is left. What passes between the glider pilot, the resistance recruit, and the German soldier is purely physical — the mark the battle leaves on a body, legible precisely because it needs no translation. The film's premise quietly argues Deleuze's own point: the action-image, the raw coupling of situation and response, is the part of cinema that crosses borders without a subtitle.

Structurally, the three strands are held together by what Deleuze called American organic montage — convergent parallel cutting, threads braided so they tighten toward a single meeting point. The film moves between British, Dutch, and German lines for ironic rhyme, then lets them converge on the estuary. That is Griffith's old grammar, and the film knows it; its restraint lies in not forcing the convergence too soon.

None of this is invented from nothing, and the reading is better for saying so. The humanized enemy threaded against the occupied comes straight out of Das Boot, by way of the Dutch tradition that begins with Soldier of Orange. The desaturated grade and the close-range handheld combat, the selective focus that denies you tactical orientation in a firefight, are Saving Private Ryan's bequest. The three perspectival strands crosscutting one underremembered Allied engagement is Dunkirk's architecture, scaled down. Even the title performs a move The Assault made decades earlier — the buried event recovered from national amnesia, named at last so it can be mourned. The film is a chapter written carefully in an existing sentence.

So what did it add? Not a new image of war. It consolidates rather than invents. But its one genuine contribution is discipline: it lets terrain, not the genre's appetite for maneuver, govern the action. By binding the action-image to a real causeway over real flooded fields, it makes visible the moment when the heroic circuit of perceive-and-act runs out of room. That is a small thing and an honest one. Watch it again for the water — for how the wide flat emptiness keeps tightening to that single deadly line, and back. Once you feel the film breathing that way, the battle stops being forgotten.