Stanley Kubrick’s feature debut and his least-seen work marks the beginning of his interest in manifesting antiwar politics in films (anticipating the later Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket). Fear and Desire follows a group of soldiers who have survived a plane crash behind enemy lines, lost in a forest while fighting in an unidentified war—a journey that grows increasingly surreal as they try to rejoin their own troops. Preserved by the Library of Congress.

Screening with:

The War Game
Peter Watkins, UK, 1965, 35mm, 48m
Originally intended as a television film for the BBC, The War Game was pulled from the schedule after being deemed too disturbing for TV audiences. Peter Watkins’s film was instead presented to the public through a number of organized screenings and shown abroad; it didn’t end up airing on the BBC until 20 years later. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1967, it is one of the earliest examples of the so-called docudrama, presenting a fictional nuclear attack on the UK by Soviet missiles. Film print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.