In many ways, two of the leading films competing for this year's Best Picture Oscar couldn't be more different.

The alien space-epic "Avatar" is a lurid science fiction opus with a reported $500 million price tag, credited with raising the bar on the art of digital effects. The decidedly lower-budget thriller "Hurt Locker" is a riveting human drama that rose from relative obscurity to become one of the year's most decorated films.

But in at least one key way, the movies are very much alike: Both tell stories about the dire consequences of war -- and in that regard each is part of an ancient artistic tradition that includes thousands of movies, millions of stories and billions of images.

For as long as mankind has gone to war, humans have made art about war. And James Svendsen believes works of art about warriors from thousands of years ago might be used to serve warriors of today. The University of Utah dramaturge is helping produce a series of staged readings of "The Toll of War," two short one-act performances cut from Sophocles' 2,400-year-old plays "Ajax" and "Philoctetes."

"Ajax" tells the story of a suicidal warrior who takes his own life after struggling to come to terms with the unjust spoils of war. "Philoctetes" is a play about a disabled soldier who is abandoned by his commander.

Svendsen said it's not hard to find modern resonance in either play. And he hopes military members and veterans of recent wars -- the performances will be staged at Fort Douglas, the Salt Lake City VA hospital and other locations where they are likely to draw a military-oriented crowd -- will walk away understanding they are connected to generations upon generations of past warriors, who also struggled to "come home" from war.

"It seems like we are always in a situation where these shows are just so relevant to what is going on," Svendsen lamented. "But it gives us an opportunity to put these shows on and to persuade other people to tell their stories. Because while these are good stories, we know they are not the only stories."

Not every piece of art that comes out of war is remembered for centuries, and some works fade quickly.

That's nearly what happened to William Johnson's drawings. The Army Air Corps artist from Ogden made his way through World War II with a pencil and paintbrush. And instead of writing home, he sketched cartoons on the backs of postcards.

For years Michael Johnson had heard stories about the postcards, but it wasn't until he and a brother were cleaning out their late father's home that they found the work that Air Force Historical Research Agency archivist Archie DiFante calls "a significant historical collection."

"What you can see when you look at the art that comes out of war is a story about what people were thinking at the time," DiFante said. "Art was a function of how they viewed their lives and their lifestyles."

That was the case for soldier Tyler Norager. The first scenes he captured with his digital camera when he went to war in Iraq in 2007 were raw images of the war's brutal cost. But after losing two men from his unit in a roadside bomb explosion in which he was wounded, the way Norager captured the war changed. The pictures were softer, with tighter crops and more emotion.

"Something had changed in him in that explosion and I was seeing it in his photos," said photographer Cat Palmer, who advised Norager and arranged for his work to be exhibited with hers at the Utah Arts Festival gallery.

Many of Norager's images were intended to be documentary, rather than aesthetic, in nature. But former war photographer James Fisher said that shouldn't preclude the work from being considered art.

"When a great photograph is made, it becomes more about the big picture and less about the specifics," Fisher said. "It moves people to a different kind of knowledge, to a different kind of truth. That's art."

mlaplante@sltrib.com

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