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TNWC05 16/11/06 11:26 AM Page 120 5 American films of the Cold War Representations of naval operations, up to and including actual combat, in films made during the Cold War appear as varied and problematic as the political and operational complexities afflicting the navies themselves in that period. The moral clarity and narrative certainty sought in the war film genre, as it had evolved during the Second World War (in the clear delineation of goals, the unity to be sought and the enemies to be defeated in order to achieve them), were not readily or
at the back of his mind. Similarly, Ralph Thomas’s film of A Tale of Two Cities was released in the tense atmosphere of the Cold War. And it shows. Ten years previously the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands signed the Brussels Treaty, allying themselves against armed attack in Europe. Three days after the Treaty was signed, the USSR delegates walked out of the Allied
The Big Clocks skyscraper is a mechanical, entrapping grid controlled by a huge timepiece. It is presided over by the homosexual Janoth who tries to frame Stroud for a murder that he committed. This article traces Stroud‘s journey within the International Style skyscrapers temporarily ‘queered spaces.’ The Cold War film seeks the removal of undesirable ‘aliens’ to liberate capitalist space and reassert hegemonic heterosexuality. The married Stroud outsmarts his adversaries, leading to Janoth‘s death by his own building. After Janoth is symbolically ‘outed,’ he kills his partner before plummeting down a hellish elevator shaft, punishment for his ‘perverse’ deeds.
This book undertakes a consideration of the depiction of naval warfare within British and American cinema. The films (ranging from examples from the interwar period, the Second World War, the Cold War and contemporary cinema) encompass all areas of naval operations in war, and highlight varying institutional and aesthetic responses to navies and the sea in popular culture. Examination of the films centres on their similarities to and differences from the conventions of the war genre as described in earlier analyses, and seeks to determine whether the distinctive characteristics of naval film narratives justify their categorisation as a separate genre or sub-genre in popular cinema. The explicit factual bases and drama-documentary style of many key naval films (such as In Which We Serve, They Were Expendable and Das Boot) also require a consideration of them as texts for popular historical transmission. Their frequent reinforcement of establishment views of the past, which derives from their conservative ideological position towards national and naval culture, makes these films key texts for the consideration of national cinemas as purveyors of contemporary history as popularly conceived by filmmakers and received by audiences.
The Blunt Affair: Official secrecy and treason in literature, television and film, 1980–89 examines a number of significant plays, films and novels about or related to the Cambridge spies from the time of Anthony Blunt’s unmasking as the “fourth man” in late 1979 to the end of the Cold War. This study argues that these works collectively offer a forceful response to issues at the forefront of British politics and culture in the decade, such as the rise in anti-gay sentiment and policies during the AIDs crisis, nuclear proliferation and CND’s stand against it, state secrecy and the abuse of the Official Secrets Act, Thatcherism and patriotic imperatives. This study also offers a much-needed reassessment of the literary and filmic culture of the decade, arguing that these texts, by writers as diverse as Dennis Potter, Julian Mitchell, Alan Bennett, Tom Stoppard, John le Carré, Robin Chapman and Hugh Whitemore, deserve a more central place in the cultural assessment of the decade.
Jean Renoir is widely seen as the greatest French director and one of the major figures of world cinema. This book introduces Renoir's life and his highly uneven career. It demarcates his vision of his films, craft and ideological evolution and draws substantially on his writings and interviews. As he made films addressing different audiences with varying degrees of freedom in shifting production and socio-historical contexts, the book identifies the periods when the contextual factors remained relatively stable. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, mon père is the text most frequently drawn upon to fill in his early years. The book deals with Renoir and his leftist critics and the auterists. He is a challenge to auteurists because of his commitment and his many changes of direction. Cahiers was a polemical journal, and the Cahiers critics were far from uniform in their general outlook or their specific response to Renoir. It then considers the films that Renoir directed during his first decade as a film-maker. They are considered in two groups: the silent films and those that followed the introduction of sound. Critics seem to assume a dehistoricised and homogenised America that is somehow the antithesis of France. Perhaps this is because 'Renoir américain' was seen on European screens when the cold war was raging and the world seemed polarised between two monolithic blocs. The book also deals with Renoir's late films after his return to France in 1951, after an absence of more than ten years.
generated by the Cold War. Like his fellow Wisconsin natives Nicholas Ray and Orson Welles, Losey began his directorial career in the leftist political theatre of the 1930s. From 1928 (when he became student director of the Dartmouth College Players) until 1939, the year of his first short film, Pete Roleum and his Cousins , Losey’s career was confined to either conventional dramatic repertory or political drama. Not surprisingly
of the decade by advancing social acceptance for the LGBTQ community, combatting government secrecy and outmoded patriotic pieties, and addressing the exigencies of the late Cold War. Although it is questionable whether or not a “canon” of 1980s literature exists, few would challenge the high regard in which a select group of writers, especially novelists of a certain age group, are held, and the frequency with which they appear on university curricula. Critical estimations of 1980s literature, in particular, show an inordinate valuation of the new, thereby
Christian grace and forgiveness was intended as a critique not just of its 1959 predecessor but also of the millennial cycle of epic films – Gladiator , Troy , 300 – and their attendant hard-bodied heroes. Rather than relying on a sort of Cold War/War on Terror brutal masculinity, this new Ben-Hur argues for a full embrace of an emotional, often melodramatic, form of Christian masculinity. New heroes and villains (and a new Jesus) for a new Ben-Hur Ben-Hur follows essentially the same plot of both the novel and its adaptations, though in this case the
taking place in such an otherwise picturesque context. Kurys’ first three films invite the spectator to read their family narratives against the background of the general upheavals in French society of the period. La Baule Les Pins is set at the time of the Cold War, in the year in which de Gaulle was re-elected to power in order to restore order in Algeria, an election which brought the Fourth Republic to an end. However