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1 War Introduction This I feel. A curse. Mother said it more than once, ‘You could be killed over there, Oliver,’ as if I were incompetent, not man enough to take care of myself; I hated her motherlove arrogance. Did I listen? Did it make sense? Mothers are cowards. Curses passed down the vaginal passageways deep to man. True as true can be. I told her that I didn’t really want to go back to Yale, I was an adventurer, just like her and went to Vietnam instead. But I wonder what she’ll say when she finds out about this. My limbs stiffening, waiting in this groin
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 recent uses of digital technology in war films have sparked a wave of discussions about new visual aesthetics in the genre. Drawing on the approach of film discourse analysis, this article critically examines recent claims about new visual grammar in the war film and investigates to what extent the insertion of different media channels has affected the persuasive function of the genre. Through a detailed analysis of Redacted (2007), which constitutes an extreme case of a fiction filmmaking use of a variety of digital channels, this article demonstrates that the multimedia format works within systems of classical film discourse while also generating new patterns of persuasion tied to new visual technology.
4 War and order One of the most pervasive myths reiterated in Hollywood movies is the narrative of virtuous and hence legitimate order – the story of the good nation, the good society, and legitimate leadership and authority. Films which focus on order, on ‘us’, elicit a sense of identification with ‘home’, linking not only self and collective but also citizen and nation in positive, active constructions of security. This construction of security is found in a relatively limited array of genres. By contrast, those which concentrate on disorder, fear of them
The Second World War was a radio war. Radio in wartime was informational and inspirational. It provided news, entertainment, propaganda. Speeches on the radio by the national leaders, Roosevelt in the United States and Churchill in the United Kingdom, lifted morale. The links between cinema and radio became ever closer. Three notable British films derived their titles from recurrent phrases in the news bulletins: One Of Our Aircraft Is
Case studies: L’Arche du désert (Mohamed Chouikh, 1997), Rachida (Yamina Bachir Chouikh, 2002), Barakat! (Djamila Sahraoui, 2006) In Algeria the 1990s are known as ‘the black decade’, a period of widespread terror and trauma. Ostensibly this was a civil war, fought between the forces of the state and
This book charts the changing nature of cinematic depictions of the Spanish Civil War. In 1936, a significant number of artists, filmmakers and writers – from George Orwell and Pablo Picasso to Joris Ivens and Joan Miró – rallied to support the country's democratically elected Republican government. The arts have played an important role in shaping popular understandings of the Spanish Civil War, and the book examines the specific role cinema has played in this process. Its focus is on fictional feature films produced within Spain and beyond its borders between the 1940s and the early years of the twenty-first century – including Hollywood blockbusters, East European films, the work of the avant garde in Paris and films produced under Franco's censorial dictatorship.
the plays too explicit and lacking in subtlety, while orthodox left-wing critics questioned the emphasis on the problems of Socialism: the compromises of the British post-war Labour governments, the revelations about Stalin’s atrocities, and the failures of communism in Eastern Europe. The plays may be Marxist in their stress on the need for a political revolution, but the
2 From the war to Westminster Abbey: the BBC and the empire, 1939–53 F or the historian, examining the BBC’s representation of empire during the Second World War is both challenging and particularly revealing. C onsistent with its policies from the 1930s, the BBC broadcast a considerable number of empire programs. As Chapter 1 made clear, these pre-war programs carried a significant amount of ideological content. But during the war, the empire and Commonwealth had to be constructed with even greater deliberation and precision. Although the BBC had resolved
TNWC03 16/11/06 11:27 AM Page 80 3 Hollywood and the one-ocean war The contribution of the American film industry to the war effort can be divided chronologically between preparatory propagandist films made before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and combat films made after it, and formally between non-fiction (newsreels, documentary and instructional films) and feature film productions. As in Britain, a convoluted relationship between the propaganda arm of government and the filmmaking establishment was wrought to mobilise and exploit the entertainment industry