Slaughterhouse-Five

A film adapted from a novel. Billy Pilgrim is an ordinary man. An optometrist in provincial America; married, with children, and from outside his life looks flat. But Billy is not fixed in time. He passes from one scene to another in no order: one moment at war, the next at home, the next on another planet. The war sections are the Second World War. Billy is taken prisoner and brought to Germany; he is held in the cellar of a slaughterhouse. Dresden is bombed, and while the city burns he is underneath it. The present sections are in America. Work, family and neighbours; everything looks normal, and from time to time Billy disappears. The third strand is on another planet. He is kept there under a dome and told how time works: every moment always exists, and so does death. What the film is interested in is not science fiction but trauma: the narrative shows a man refusing to remember something he lived through and inventing an explanation for it. The jumps are not an editing game but a defence. The editing is the film's real work. Scenes fold into each other; a sentence begins in one place and finishes in another time. The source is Kurt Vonnegut's novel. The author was in Dresden during the bombing and was held in the same cellar. Michael Sacks plays Billy. Ron Leibman, Eugene Roche and Valerie Perrine are in the cast. George Roy Hill directed. The film won a jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Who it is for: anyone who likes experiments in editing and war films that do not tell the war directly. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a straight narrative; the film keeps changing place and never stays long in any one time.