A Companion to the War Film E-Book
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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
A Companion to the War Film contains 27 original essays that examine all aspects of the genre, from the traditional war film, to the new global nature of conflicts, and the diverse formats that war stories assume in today’s digital culture.
- Includes new works from experienced and emerging scholars that expand the scope of the genre by applying fresh theoretical approaches and archival resources to the study of the war film
- Moves beyond the limited confines of “the combat film” to cover home-front films, international and foreign language films, and a range of conflicts and time periods
- Addresses complex questions of gender, race, forced internment, international terrorism, and war protest in films such as Full Metal Jacket, Good Kill, Grace is Gone, Gran Torino, The Messenger, Snow Falling on Cedars, So Proudly We Hail, Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War, Tender Comrade, and Zero Dark Thirty
- Provides a nuanced vision of war film that brings the genre firmly into the 21st Century and points the way for exciting future scholarship
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Contributors
Introduction
1 “Hearing” the Music in War Films
References
2 Antilochus’s Burden
Bereaving for Patroclus: The Origin of the Death Message
Saving Private Ryan
and
The Messenger
: Rhetoric, Catharsis, Purgation
The Message of Citizenship and Sacrifice
References
3 War Films in an Age of War and Cinema
References
4 Exploring War Horror’s Narrative Punch in Spielberg’s
Munich
and
Saving Private Ryan
References
5 The Service Tragicomedy
Far Cry from Rebellion: War and Comedy
The Vietnam Era: No Time for “Service Comedy”
Old-Time Laughs Gone (New): Allen and Kubrick
References
6 The Wartime American Woman on Film
Lives of American Women Revolutionized by War
Branches of Service for the Home-Front Soldier on Film
References
Further Reading
7 “Conspiracy of Silence”
Introduction
Slander and the Soldier Girl
Sabotage and Denial of Status: Women Air Force Service Pilots
Women Are Very Essential Sometimes
References
8 Filming a Nuclear State
Lookout Mountain: An Inquiry
Lookout Mountain: A Brief History
Lookout Mountain: A Laboratory of (Cold) War Film
Co-Production and Mutual Orientation at Lookout Mountain
Conclusion
References
9 The Gendered Remembrance of Japanese-American Internment
References
10 “The Angels of Bataan and Corregidor”
So Proudly We Hail
: The Disembodied Voice and the Home at War
Cry Havoc
: Surrounding Domestic Space with Orientalist Sound
They Were Expendable
: Serenading the Nurse
Conclusion
References
11 In the Exigency of a National Cause
References
12 Transnational Algerian War Cinema Revisited
Nostalgic Returns: A
Pieds-noirs
Vision of the “Homeland”
Fragile Masculinities
Dreaming of Freedom: Female Characters
References
13 Fifty Years Hence
References
14
Dresden
(2006)
German Polarities and Dresden as Disaster Movie
“Bomber” Harris and the Legacy of British Bombing in World War II
The Inadequacy of Melodrama
Conclusion
References
15 How to Recognize a War Movie
References
16 Making Citizens out of Soldiers
References
17 Those at Home Also Serve
References
18
Generation Kill
References
19 “TiK ToK on the Clock, but the Party Don’t Stop, No”
References
20 Kuwaiting for Godot
References
21 The Meaning of the Soldier
References
22 Why We (Shouldn’t) Fight
References
23 A War for Everyone
References
24 Is There Such a Thing as an Antiwar Film?
References
Further Reading
25 Through a Soldier’s Eyes
Making War Easy
Identification through Perspective Taking
Operation Homecoming
“Section 1: Trauma and the Inexpressibility of War”
“Section 2: Regarding Enemies”
“Section 3: The Dead and the Dying”
Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 05
Table 5.1 Structure of the Service Tragicomedy
List of Illustrations
Chapter 03
Figure 3.1 Lewis Ayres in
All Quiet on the Western Front
, 1930, directed by Lewis Milestone and produced by Universal Pictures.
Figure 3.2 Gary Cooper in
Sergeant York,
1941, directed by Howard Hawks and produced by Warner Bros.
Figure 3.3 World War II Army veteran Harold Russell, who lost both his arms, starred in
The Best Years of Our Lives
, 1946, directed by William Wyler and produced by The Samuel Goldwyn Company.
Figure 3.4 Robert Duvall in
Apocalypse Now
, 1979, directed by Francis Ford Coppola and produced by Zoetrope Studios.
Figure 3.5 Debra Winger and Richard Gere in
An Officer and a Gentlemen
, 1982, directed by Taylor Hackford and produced by Lorimar Film Entertainment and Paramount Pictures.
Figure 3.6 Mark Wahlberg portrays Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell in
Lone Survivor
, 2014, directed by Peter Berg and produced by Film 44, Emmett/Furla Films, Spikings Entertainment, Herrick Entertainment, Envision Entertainment, Closest to the Hole Productions, Leverage Management, Foresight Unlimited (uncredited), Hollywood Studios (uncredited), Knightsbridge Entertainment, and Weed Road Pictures (uncredited).
Figure 3.7 Kevin Bacon in
Taking Chance
, 2009, directed by Ross Katz and produced by HBO Films, Civil Dawn Pictures, and Motion Picture Corporation of America (MPCA).
Figure 3.8 Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster in
The Messenger
, 2009, directed by Oren Moverman and produced by Oscilloscope Laboratories, Omnilab Media, Sherazade Film Development, BZ Entertainment, The Mark Gordon Company, Good Worldwide, All the Kings Horses, and Reason Pictures.
Chapter 08
Figure 8.1 Lookout Mountain Laboratory, still hidden in California’s Laurel Canyon, and now a private residence.
Figure 8.2 Actor Reed Hadley (center) and others prepare to observe the world’s first thermonuclear explosion during the filming of
Operation Ivy.
Figure 8.3 Actor Reed Hadley introducing an episode of
Racket Squad
.
Figure 8.4 Reed Hadley narrating
Operation Ivy
.
Figure 8.5 Four views of narrator Reed Hadley on a tour of the
USS Estes
in scenes from
Operation Ivy.
Figure 8.6 Reed Hadley surveys the damage post-detonation on Eniwetok during the filming of
Operation Ivy.
Chapter 09
Figure 9.1 Hiroshi mentally breaks down at the internment camp.
Figure 9.2 Jack and Charlie dance comically, taking the gender roles.
Figure 9.3 Jack, Lily, and Mini are finally reunited in the last scene of the film.
Figure 9.4 Ishmael observes the trial from the second floor of the courtroom.
Figure 9.5 Ishmael wears his father’s pair of glasses.
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 The ghostly visage of Lt. John Summers (George Reeves) appears to Lt. Janet Davidson (Claudette Colbert) in
So Proudly We Hail.
Figure 10.2 Female medical volunteers in
Cry Havoc
prepare to surrender to Japanese soldiers yet unseen.
Figure 10.3 Closeup captures Lt. Sandy Davyss’s (Donna Reed) strength while under bomb attack in
They Were Expendable.
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1 A scene of shelling recreated on a real location.
Figure 11.2 Blood-stained hand of a dead soldier.
Figure 11.3 Jalal points out the LOC to Karan.
Figure 11.4 Romila gets stationed as war correspondent at Kargil.
Figure 11.5 Karan hoists the national flag after defeating his enemies.
Chapter 13
Figures 13.1 and 13.2 The grandsons of Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) secretly rifle through his memorabilia from the Korean War.
Figure 13.3 Walt Kowalski shows his 1st Cavalry Division lighter to his Hmong neighbor.
Figure 13.4 Koreans mourn the war dead at the excavation site of the Battle of Dumillyong.
Figure 13.5 South Korean soldiers celebrate after a hard-fought battle.
Figure 13.6 Jin-seok and his granddaughter witness his brother’s remains.
Figures 13.7 and 13.8 A young Korean woman gazes skyward as a US warplane plummets downward.
Figure 13.9 Patrols from the two opposing sides hold each other at bay over the villagers of Dongmakgol.
Chapter 16
Figure 16.1 Private Vierbein (Paul Bösiger), standing at attention, endures a verbal assault from First Sergeant Schulz (Emmerich Schrenk) while his comrades Private First Class Kowalski (L: Peter Carsten) and Private Asch (R: Joachim Fuchsberger) look on.
Figure 16.2 Asch and Kowalski attempt to comfort Vierbein after he nearly passes out crawling through the mud in the “Schleifer” scene.
Figure 16.3 After she convinces her husband to assign a soldier to help her with her household cleaning, Lore Schulz (Helen Vita) flirts with Vierbein.
Chapter 19
Figure 19.1 The squad marches up the street in loose formation.
Figure 19.2 The soldiers crouch before beginning their dance.
Figure 19.3 The soldiers flap their arms like chickens before executing a spin.
Figure 19.4 The squad proceeds while skipping like children.
Chapter 20
Figure 20.1 Anthony “Swoff” Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) reading
Julius Caesar
at base camp during the first Gulf War.
Figure 20.2 Staff Sergeant Siek (Jamie Foxx) seen through the eyeholes of Swoff’s gas mask during training.
Figure 20.3 Swoff, back at the barracks, is caught in a
mise en abyme
of Marine bunks.
Figure 20.4 A horse appears to Swoff in the Kuwaiti desert as the oil wells burn.
Figure 20.5 Swoff, safely at home, is haunted by memories of his fellow jarheads “still in the desert.”
Chapter 23
Figure 23.1 Stanley and his brother debate the politics of Iraq in front of Stanley’s young daughters.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
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A Companion to the War Film
Edited by
Douglas A. Cunningham and John C. Nelson
This edition first published 2016© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cunningham, Douglas A., 1969– editor. | Nelson, John C., 1964– editor.Title: A companion to the war film / edited by Douglas A. Cunningham and John C. Nelson.Description: Malden, MA : John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016003714 (print) | LCCN 2016006956 (ebook) | ISBN 9781118288894 (hardback) | ISBN 9781118337622 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781118337615 (ePub)Subjects: LCSH: War films–History and criticism. | BISAC: PERFORMING ARTS / Film & Video / History & Criticism.Classification: LCC PN1995.9.W3 C66 2016 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.W3 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/658–dc23LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016003714
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover image: Courtesy of the Author
Contributors
Tanine Allison is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Emory University, where she teaches courses on film, video games, and digital media. She has published essays on war video games, digital realism, and motion capture in the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Critical Quarterly, and Literature/Film Quarterly; her essays on contemporary visual effects and race in digital animation appear in two edited collections on special effects. She is currently completing a book on the aesthetics of combat in American films and video games set during World War II. Her website is www.tanineallison.com.
Kaustav Bakshi is Assistant Professor of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. A Charles Wallace fellow, he is currently pursuing his doctoral research on Sri Lankan expatriate fiction at the Department of English, Jadavpur University. He was awarded an M. Phil by the same department in 2008, and his thesis on Rohinton Mistry’s fiction was extended into a University Grants Commission sponsored Minor Research Project. He has published in both national and international journals, including South Asian Review (University of Pittsburgh, 2012), New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Films (Intellect Books: Bristol and Wilmington, NC, 2012–13) and South Asian History and Culture (Routledge/Taylor and Francis: London, 2015). His articles have been published in several anthologies, including Muses India: Essays on English Language Writers from Mahomet to Rushdie (MacFarland: Jefferson, NC, 2013) and Gay Subcultures and Literatures: The Indian Projections (IIAS: Shimla, 2012). He has co-edited two anthologies, Anxieties, Influences and After: Critical Responses to Postcolonialism and Neocolonialism (Worldview: New Delhi, 2009) and Studies in Indian Poetry in English (Bookaway: Kolkata, 2011). His forthcoming co-edited volume Rituparno Ghosh: An Afterword with Routledge/Francis and Taylor is in press currently. He blogs at kaustavsarden.blogspot.in.
Jeanine Basinger is the Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies, founder and curator of the Wesleyan Cinema Archives, Founding Chair of the Film Studies Department at Wesleyan University, and a 1996 and 2013 recipient of Wesleyan’s Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Her book Silent Stars won the National Board of Review’s William K. Everson Prize, and her most recent book, The Star Machine, published by Knopf, 2007, won the Theatre Library Association Award. She is the author of numerous articles and book reviews as well as ten books on film. She is a trustee of the National Board of Review, a trustee of the American Film Institute, and a current member of Warner Brothers Theatre Advisory Committee at the Smithsonian Institute.
Laura Browder is the Tyler and Alice Haynes Professor of American Studies at the University of Richmond. Her most recent book is When Janey Comes Marching Home: Portraits of Women Combat Veterans, with photographs by Sascha Pflaeging, for which she interviewed 52 women from all branches of the military. She is also the executive producer of the PBS documentary The Reconstruction of Asa Carter, based on her book Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities. She is currently working on a documentary film called Mothers at War as well as a documentary about her grandfather, Communist Party leader Earl Browder.
Douglas A. Cunningham teaches film, literature, and humanities at Brigham Young University and Westminster College. He is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and taught literature and film at the U.S. Air Force Academy for five years of his 20-year military career. He is the editor of another essay collection, The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: Place, Pilgrimage, and Commemoration (Scarecrow, 2011), and his other essays have appeared in Screen, CineAction, The Moving Image, Critical Survey, and as chapters in several anthologies. Many of these essays may be read under his name at www.academia.edu. Doug is currently at work on a monograph titled Celluloid Airmen: World War II, Hollywood, and the Army Air Forces First Motion Picture Unit. He earned a PhD in Film Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009.
Robert Eberwein is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus, Oakland University. His many books include The Hollywood War Film (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Armed Forces: Masculinity and Sexuality in the American War Film (Rutgers, 2007), The War Film (Rutgers, 2004), and Sex Ed: Film, Video, and the Framework of Desire (Rutgers, 1999).
Kris Fallon is an Assistant Professor in Digital Cultures at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches courses on the history and theory of media in the Program in Cinema & Technoculture. Before coming to Davis, he played an active role in the early stages of both the Berkeley Center for New Media and the CITRIS Data & Democracy Initiative at UC Berkeley, where he received his PhD. His research focuses on documentary practices across photography, film, and digital media, and places established modes of representation alongside emergent media such as data visualization and virtual environments. His essays on digital technology and documentary have recently appeared in Film Quarterly and Screen and are forthcoming in several edited anthologies in Contemporary Documentary from Routledge. He is currently working on a book entitled Where Truth Lies: Digital Culture and Documentary Film after 9/11.
Anna Froula is Associate Professor of Film Studies at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. She has published on war, satire, trauma, zombies, and gender in Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, Cinema Journal, The Journal of War and Culture Studies, In Medias Res, Globalizing Dissent: Essays on Arundhati Roy (Routledge, 2008), and Iraq War Cultures (Peter Lang, 2011). She is co-editor of Reframing 9/11: Film, Popular Culture, and the “War on Terror” (Continuum, 2010), The Cinema of Terry Gilliam: It’s a Mad World (Wallflower, 2013), and American Militarism on the Small Screen (Routledge, forthcoming).
Mark Gagnon is an Academy Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York. He earned a PhD in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Harvard University.
John Garofolo is the author of Dickey Chapelle Under Fire: Photographs by the First American Female War Correspondent Killed in Action (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2015). A former entertainment industry executive, John is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and was on the Humanities faculty at the US Coast Guard Academy and an adjunct at Yale. He is the recipient of a grant from the Brico Fund and the Milwaukee Press Club endowment to write a play about the life of Dickey Chapelle. He holds a PhD from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.
Kevin Hamilton is Associate Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he holds appointments in the School of Art and Design and the program in Media and Cinema Studies, and serves as Dean’s Fellow for Research in the College of Fine and Applied Arts. Working in collaborative and cross-disciplinary modes, Kevin produces artworks, archives, and scholarship on such subjects as race and space, public memory, history of technology, and state violence. His articles with Ned O’Gorman on Air Force film production have appeared in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Visual Culture, and Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies. Their book-in-progress and accompanying digital archive trace the history of the Air Force’s most famous film unit, Lookout Mountain Laboratory, from 1948 through 1969. At Illinois Kevin also codirects the Center for People and Infrastructures, an effort currently focused on the ethics and civics of algorithmic culture through research, design, and outreach. Kevin’s artworks in digital form have appeared in Rhizome, Turbulence, Neural, and the ASPECT DVD series. Recent commissioned artworks have included a printed mural on the history of cybernetics, and a graphic novel on race, geology, and university politics in Urbana, Illinois. More of his work can be found at complexfields.org.
Mary Elizabeth Haralovich teaches television and film history in the School of Theatre, Film & Television at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Among her studies of television are popular appeal of Magnum, P.I., geopolitics of civil rights in I Spy, and third-wave feminism in Mad Men. Her social history of the 1950s suburban family domestic comedy has been reprinted several times. Studies of the film promotion of “scandalous females” include flirting with the viewer in A Free Soul (1931), housewife/adventurer Marlene Dietrich as Blonde Venus (1932), film noir mother Mildred Pierce (1945) and the proletarian women’s film, Marked Woman (1937). Co-editor of Television, History, and American Culture: Feminist Critical Essays (Duke University Press, 1999), Haralovich is a founder and Board Member of the International Conference on Television, Video, New Media, Audio and Feminism: Console-ing Passions.
Dan Hassoun is a Ph.D student in cinema and media studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. His work on audiences, new media practices, and mediated attention is published or forthcoming in Continuum, Television & New Media, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, New Media & Society, and Cinema Journal.
Deborah L. Jaramillo is Assistant Professor of Film and Television at Boston University. She is the author of Ugly War Pretty Package: How CNN and Fox News Made the Invasion of Iraq High Concept (Indiana University Press, 2009). Her articles on both early and contemporary television have appeared in the Journal of Communication Inquiry, Television and New Media, Ethnic and Racial Studies, and Communication, Culture and Critique. A board member of the Texas Archive of the Moving Image and a research associate for the Radio Preservation Task Force, Deborah’s current book project examines the roles of the National Association of Broadcasters, the Federal Communications Commission, the United States Congress, and television viewers in the years leading up to the adoption of the Television Code in 1952.
Christa C. Jones is an Associate Professor of French at Utah State University, where she teaches classes such as Business French, France Today, French Culture and Civilization, and Conversation, as well as French and Francophone literature, music and fairy tales. Her publications on North African Francophone postcolonial literature, film, and music have appeared in Al-Raida, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Dalhousie French Studies, Expressions Maghrébines, Francofonia, French Review, Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, Nouvelles Etudes Francophones, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is the author of Cave Culture in Maghrebi Literature: Imagining Self and Nation (Lexington, 2012), co-editor of Femmes du Maghreb (Dalhousie French Studies, volume 103, in press) and she is currently co-editing a teaching volume titled New Approaches to Teaching Folk and Fairy Tales (University Press of Colorado, forthcoming in 2016).
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet is Professor of American Literature at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her publications range over topics such as national identity, feminism and queer theory, political melodrama, war gothic, the combat film, Civil Religion, race on film, night vision in the horror film, Batman, and writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Louisa May Alcott, and Maxine Hong Kingston. She has published a monograph on nineteenth-century American literature, The Poetics and the Politics of the American Gothic (Ashgate, 2010), and co-edited several volumes, including The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture (Routledge, 2012), and Emotion, Affect, Sentiment: The Language and Aesthetics of Feeling (Narr Verlag, 2014), and a special issue of Gothic Studies on post-9/11 horror (Manchester University Press, 2015).
Cason Murphy is an MFA candidate at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, with a focus on directing for the stage. He previously earned his bachelor’s degree from UCLA’s School of Theatre, Film, and Television. Cason has professionally produced, directed, and acted in shows in Arizona, Texas, California, and New York, while his work as a researcher has previously been published in Theatre Topics and Texas Theatre Journal.
John Nelson is an Academy Professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York. He earned a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Washington. Among other works, he has published book chapters on Nobel laureate Derek Walcott and his play Pantomime, and contemporary military memoirs and their use of landscape. He teaches courses on literature, film, and cultural criticism at West Point.
Ned O’Gorman is an Associate Professor and Conrad Humanities Scholar in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of The Iconoclastic Imagination: Image, Catastrophe, and Economy in America since the Kennedy Assassination (University of Chicago Press, 2015), Spirits of the Cold War: Contesting Worldviews in the Classical Age of American Security Strategy (Michigan State University Press, 2011), and, with Kevin Hamilton, the forthcoming Lookout America! The Secret Hollywood Film Studio at the Heart of the Cold War State about Lookout Mountain Laboratory.
Yuki Obayashi is a PhD candidate in Literature at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her most recent article, “Interpreting the Vietnam War from a Vietnamese American Perspective,” was published in The Adaptation of History: Essays on Ways of Telling the Past (eds. Laurence Raw and Defne Ersin Tutan, McFarland, 2013). She has also published articles in Japan, including “Paternal Projections of 1.5 Generation Vietnamese-American Writers,” by The Japanese Association for Migration Studies. Obayashi involves with community services in Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) and The Japanese American National Library.
Linda Robertson is on the faculty of the Media and Society Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. She initiated the program in 1996 and served as its director until 2007. Her areas of scholarly interest are the history of documentaries, war propaganda, and war films. She has published a book-length study of the influence of propaganda on the development of American military aviation, The Dream of Civilized Warfare (2005), and is currently at work on a feature-length documentary about Sarah Bradford, Harriet Tubman’s biographer.
David Ryan is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Language at the University of San Francisco. He teaches courses in film criticism, strategic communication, and rhetoric studies. His essays have appeared in Rhetoric Review and many anthologies. He is the co-author of The Speaking-Writing Connection (Fountainhead Press).
Ramit Samaddar is Assistant Professor of English at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India. He received his BA (Honours), MA, and MPhil. degrees in English from the same university. He has been awarded the Charles Wallace India Trust Research Grant for his doctoral thesis on Anthony Trollope. His areas of interest are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture, travel writing, postcolonial studies, and film criticism. He is a member of the Centre for Victorian Studies at Jadavpur University.
Leah Shafer is an Assistant Professor in the Media and Society Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where she teaches courses in media studies, with an emphasis on television and new media. Her scholarship focuses on the marketing and branding of entertainment media, activist new media art, and media literacy. She has been published in Women & Performance, Cinema Journal, and Afterimage. Her essay on cat videos is forthcoming in Film Criticism, and she is currently completing a textbook that teaches US History using television commercials.
Sandra Singer (PhD, Cambridge) is an Associate Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies, University of Guelph, Canada. She is co-editor of Doris Lessing Studies. Recently she published a co-edited collection of essays entitled Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times (Ohio State University Press, 2010); an entry on Ethnographic Memoir in Sage Encyclopedia of Case Study Research (2010); and an article entitled “Acting Out Justice in J.J. Steinfeld’s ‘Courtroom Dramas’” in Canadian Ethnic Studies 41.1 and 2. Her manuscript, Intersections of Terror, Trauma, and Terrorism, is currently under review.
Matthew Sorrento teaches film and media studies at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey, and is the author of The New American Crime Film (McFarland, 2012). The former editor of Film Threat, he has edited the film section of Identity Theory and is currently Interview Editor of the journal Film International (filmint.nu), where he is a regular contributor. Sorrento directs the Reel East Film Festival (reeleastfilm.org).
Debra White-Stanley serves as an Associate Professor of Film Studies at Keene State College and earned her PhD from the University of Arizona. Her fields of research and teaching interests include gender and war media, media adaptation, and the study of sound in media. She has published in Velvet Light Trap, the anthologies Heroism and Gender in War Films (2014), Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound (2009), and War Isn’t Hell, It’s Entertainment: Essays on Visual Media and the Representation of Conflict (2009).
Kelly Wilz is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Theatre Arts at UW-Marshfield/Wood County. Professor Wilz received her PhD in Communication and Culture with a minor in Religious Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington. Professor Wilz’s research focuses on rhetorical constructions of gender, violence, and dissent within the context of US war culture, and how dehumanizing and demonizing rhetoric extend beyond war to issues of social violence based on discourses of race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and other identity markers. Her most recent article focuses on the mainstreaming and brutality of depictions of rape and assault within popular television shows. In addition to her research, Professor Wilz has worked with groups such as Equality Now in efforts to petition the Secretary of Defense and the House and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairs to reform the military justice system so that professional military prosecutors—not the perpetrator’s command—are responsible for investigating and prosecuting cases of sexual assault. She is the author of “Richard’s Story: The Present Referent in In the Valley of Elah,” Global Media Journal (2009) and “Rehumanization through Reflective Oscillation in Jarhead,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs (2010).
Introduction
Douglas A. Cunningham
In the blistering Colorado summer of 1989, I was immersed in the belly of “Beast,” which is to say “BCT” (Basic Cadet Training) at the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. The program worked to prepare new trainees to become officer candidates, most of whom would complete Beast, go on to four years of subsequent college education and military training, and—at the end of it all—accept commissions as second lieutenants in the US Air Force. In Beast, however, the days felt long; we “Basics” were awakened at 5:00 am each morning by loud poundings on our dorm-room doors by upperclassmen trained to give us hell. We were then run through obstacle courses, assault courses, drills and ceremonies, and high-pressure situations designed to test our memorization of military history facts, quotations by famous generals, aircraft technical details and silhouette identifications, and all four verses of the National Anthem. If any one of us slipped on any given task, we could expect a cadre of male and female upperclassmen to surround that person, pelting the unfortunate soul with verbal assaults and commands for push-ups. Day in and day out, over the course of that grueling 1989 summer, the struggle continued.
One day, however, we were diverted from the routine of drill, exercise, and rote memorization, and we were funneled into Arnold Hall, the large auditorium of the main campus (known as the Cadet Area, or “the Hill”), its stage flanked by blue-gray curtains. We’d been here before, of course, usually for lectures on Air Force history or pep talks from cadet leadership. This time, however, the house lights dimmed as an immense screen lowered from above the auditorium stage. Silence and anticipation followed until, curiously, another stage—one not unlike our own in Arnold Hall—appeared on the screen, its curtains open to reveal an immense American flag. Somewhere, an authoritative voice called the troops to attention. But wait—that wasn’t a voice in Arnold Hall—it wasn’t a voice meant for us. No, the voice came from the image on screen, and before long, we understood its purpose. A highly decorated and magisterial figure gradually took his place before the flag, returning a salute for the duration of a bugler’s tribute. General George S. Patton manifested before us in the person of an equally commanding figure: George C. Scott.
Not one of us cheered in the darkness—not because we felt fearful of repercussions from upperclassmen, nor because this moment generated no excitement in us. Rather, the whole spectacle inspired in us such a feeling of awe, even reverence, that to interrupt it—even with whoops of elation—seemed unthinkable, sacrilegious. It was a very “meta” moment. We were being prompted to take patriotic and masculine cues from a fictional rendering of an actual man who, in his own sense of legend-creating theatricality, sought to emulate in a modern form the great conquerors of ancient Rome. Military leadership, then, could be defined, at least in part, as a series of multi-generational signifiers, each building on perceptions—and its power has remained with me for a quarter century. For in that moment, I first began to contemplate, in some form at least, the following question: What does experiencing a war film mean?
Context plays an undeniably large role in answering such a question, of course. Watching Patton with 1500 military recruits in a service academy theater in 1989 will necessarily differ from the experience of viewing the same film in a crowded California drive-in on a Friday night in 1969. And yet, something about a powerful war film resonates beyond the time and place of its own historical and/or historicized release. The war film is always relevant and always imbued with meaning because war itself, unfortunately, never leaves us, and its impact echoes across generations. In fact, historically, when have we, as a species, ever been separated from war by more than a single generation? No instance comes to mind, at least not when thinking on a global scale. Perhaps this fact is why no one ever speaks of a war film as being “dated.” The war film is always already modern in the popular imagination because the very causes of war—greed, enmity, fear, revenge, and the lust for power and resources—remain forever hardwired into our collective unconscious.
The past 15 years, in fact, have given rise to some of the most shocking and violent conflicts in recent memory, including the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; the Global War on Terror, particularly in Afghanistan and Iraq; the Second Chechen War; the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur; the ongoing conflict between the Columbian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (also known as the FARC); the intensities of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict; the Mexican government’s war against ultra-violent drug cartels; the killings of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin-Laden; the suppression of the Green Revolution in Iran; the revolutionary upheavals of the Arab Spring and their unfortunate aftermath; and the massive, violent unrest in places such as Libya, Syria, and Ukraine, to name just a very few. Given the changing nature of warfare—and the ways in which both traditional and new media tell its myriad stories—now is the perfect time to revisit and re-evaluate the genre of the war film. Indeed, John Nelson and I have designed A Companion to the War Film to be one of the most comprehensive volumes on this popular and important genre to date, aimed at examining war films not just from the US, but from many other countries around the world as well.
The extant publishing on the topic of the war film is, of course, legion. On World War II alone, for example, one can choose among several titles. Lawrence H. Suid’s Guts and Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film (University Press of Kentucky, 2002) explores the longstanding relationship between the US military and Hollywood. Similarly, Thomas Doherty’s Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (Columbia University Press, 1993) traces the way in which Hollywood worked to generate public support of the military during that oft-portrayed war. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black’s Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (University of California Press, 1990) studies in great detail the workings of the Office of War Information’s Bureau of Motion Pictures and the way in which that agency partnered with Hollywood and its War Activities Committee to shape public perception of the war. One of this collection’s notable contributors, Jeanine Basinger’s The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre (Wesleyan University Press, 2003) remains the staple text for understanding the generic formulations of this era’s war film. More generally, Armed Forces: Masculinity and Sexuality in the American War Film (Rutgers University Press, 2007), by Robert Eberwein, another of our esteemed contributors, tackles the gender implications inherent to the war film from World War I to the present. The same author’s anthology, The War Film (Rutgers University Press, 2005), features essays discussing the subject from the perspectives of genre, race, gender, and history, while his most recent monograph The Hollywood War Film (Wiley- Blackwell, 2009), traces patterns and themes in blockbuster American war films from the early days of Hollywood to the present. J. David Slocum’s Hollywood and War: The Film Reader (Routledge, 2006) assembles some of the best historical writings on the war film into a single collection. Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (Verso, 2009) explores its subject from unique theoretical angles that combine considerations of visuality and military history. Finally, Ed Halter’s From Sun Tzu to X-Box: War and Video Games (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006) examines the intricate relationship between video games and the recruiting practices of the US military. These stand as only a few of the dozens of books dedicated to the study of the war film and its profound impact on the way in which we conceptualize armed conflict.
While each of the aforementioned books is excellent in its own right, the scholarship on the war film genre at large needs to catch up with events of recent history and technologies: the ways in which new media now expands and also complicates our understanding and experience of war; the global nature of local, regional, national, international, and ethnic conflicts; and the myriad forms that stories about war can take when we allow the boundaries of the genre to expand, for example. Also, the scholarly conception of the war film in the United States has remained largely mired in examinations of Hollywood films on World War II and the Vietnam War for the past generation. By this statement, I do not mean to suggest, of course, that these wars merit no further attention; rather, our examinations of these well-trodden territories need to deepen, such that we approach them from new angles and perspectives.
Similarly, our definitions of the genre as a whole need to broaden. We must include in our analyses films from a wide variety of conflicts, nations, and time periods, and we also need to apply fresh theoretical approaches and archival resources to our study of these films. A Companion to the War Film seeks to fill these gaps in the genre’s scholarship while, at the same time, acting as an essential and multi-faceted classroom text for the hundreds of undergraduate and graduate courses on the war film taught throughout the world. While the book is aimed primarily at an academic audience (both students and military/film scholars and historians), we have commissioned essays easily accessible to general readers who share an enthusiastic interest in cinematic representations of war.
Although we have avoided assigning our chapters to strict “sections,” we nevertheless feel that A Companion to the War Film’s 25 essays might be said to fall roughly into one of five areas of interest: the war film and history; the historiography of the war film as a genre; race and gender issues in the war film; the war film outside the Anglophonic imagination; and the war film as experienced through alternative media and/or genres (e.g., television, cable, YouTube, straight-to-video projects, etc.).
Those chapters concentrating on history, for instance, deal primarily with how war films attempt to contextualize real-world conflicts and how such films, set as they are within certain periods, necessarily comment—either directly or indirectly—on other conflicts contemporaneous to the periods of production. Robert Eberwein considers the long-ignored traditions of music in the war film, while Ned O’Gorman and Kevin Hamilton delve deeply into the hitherto unknown history of the Lookout Mount Laboratory, Los Angeles, home of the many experts who filmed US nuclear tests for nearly 30 years. David Ryan notes the ways in which films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998) and The Messenger (2009) depict the complexities of the ancient tradition of the wartime bereavement message. John Garofolo briefly tracks trends and developments in the American war film from 1898 to the present. Sandra Singer also contextualizes her study of Saving Private Ryan and Munich (2005), noting Spielberg’s signature touch on both films, and Matthew Sorrento works to explain the dynamics of the “service tragicomedy” in films such as Bananas (1971) and Full Metal Jacket (1987). Chapters interested in historiography and genre examine the history and malleability of the war film itself—its development across the globe; its modes of production; its circumstances of exhibition and reception; and its influences and legacies. These chapters also consider questions of genre requirements, their variations, their changing natures, and how we might expand the standard definition of the genre—or create more subgenres—to account for new and innovative entries that don’t always meet the traditional genre expectations. If war films exist as an unquestioned genre, contributors such as Dan Hassoun and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet ask, should they be formally and ethically distinguished from anti-war films? Similarly, Tanine Allison, in her chapter, ponders connections between science-fiction action films and the military recruitment advertisements that often precede them in movie theater screenings. In a different vein, Cason Murphy contemplates the relationship between Sam Mendes’s Jarhead (2005) and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In separate essays, both Kris Fallon and Laura Browder think deeply about wartime documentaries and their relationships to the larger war film genre, and Kelly Wilz reveals how the lines between documentary and film blur in her study of Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience (2007). Issues of race and gender dominate (either overtly or in a subversive way) the subject matter of certain war films, and our book features several chapters that probe these topics. Yuki Obayashi, for example, tackles the harsh realities of the Japanese internment in her comparisons of Come See the Paradise (1990) and Snow Falling on Cedars (1999). The female soldier’s experience on the war front is addressed by both Debra White-Stanley’s study of wartime nurses and Anna Froula’s accounts of postwar Army training films that encouraged traditional femininity for female soldiers. Also, Jeanine Basinger takes an in-depth look at what she calls “home-front soldiers” in films such as Tender Comrade (1943), Since You Went Away (1944), and The War against Mrs. Hadley (1942). Chapters dealing with war films outside the Anglophonic experience consider many unique questions: Does the nature of the war film differ by language, region, and/or nation? What conflicts are considered of great importance to filmmakers from nations other the United States and the United Kingdom, and how do filmmakers from non-Anglophonic nations differ in their approaches to this thoroughly elastic genre? How do filmmakers from different countries, with both domestic and global markets in mind, portray the same conflict on the screen? Co-editor John Nelson addresses these questions in his study of two Korean War films produced in South Korea, just as Linda R. Robertson and Mark Gagnon look at German works for their respective chapters. Christa Jones discusses representations of the Algerian War in her chapter, and Kaustav Bakshi and Ramit Samaddar look closely at two films depicting the Kargil War between India and Pakistan. Finally, A Companion to the War Film considers how other forms of media—television, cable programming, YouTube, and videos posted to social-networking sites—affect our conceptualizations of the war film as a genre while, at the same time, they draw from (and then expand) the genre’s longstanding tropes. Deborah Jaramillo, for example, looks at the Iraq War as depicted by HBO’s Generation Kill (2008). Also sticking closely to issues of televisuality is Mary-Beth Haralovich’s study of the television series Army Wives (2007–2013) and the phenomenon of reality programming during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This collection thus examines all aspects of the genre, from the traditional war film to the new global nature of armed conflict, to the diverse formats war stories assume in today’s digital culture, which continues to expand with the global propagation of social media. The contributors discuss the traditional “combat film” but then move beyond those limited confines to cover homefront films, international and foreign language films, and the use of alternative media—including Internet videos, military recruitment advertisements, government-produced films, and television programs—across a range of conflicts, nations, and time periods. Thus, A Companion to the War Film contributes to the ongoing conversation about the profound and enduring role that war film has played and continues to play in our collective understanding of armed conflict and its impact on society. Our contributors have provided exciting and nuanced analyses of a variety of new and old war films, and, in doing so, they challenge the traditional approaches by which scholars have studied this longstanding genre.
1“Hearing” the Music in War Films
Robert Eberwein
My interest here lies in presenting a limited and preliminary exploration of various issues related to the reception of music by two distinct populations of audiences for American war films. First, I consider those in the late nineteenth century who attended Love and War (1899; James H. White), a film about the Spanish–American War, and those who saw “Break the News to Mother” (1897/1899; Charles K. Harris), an illustrated song slide show about the Civil War. Then I discuss modern audiences’ experience listening to the music in Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers (2006), a film about the battle for Iwo Jima. There is no way of determining if anyone in 1899 saw both the film and the slide slow. It is possible that a viewer of Eastwood’s film might have seen one of the earlier works. In a way it does not really matter, because what is important is realizing what occurs as a viewer/auditor “hears” certain music in war films. My speculative and provisional hypothesis is that the way music was used in the earliest war films establishes a kind of paradigmatic model, making music into a text, a site onto which various examples of cultural and political history are inscribed. Audiences hearing music in the works from the nineteenth century and in Eastwood’s from our own twenty-first can both be understood as experiencing the musical, auditory equivalent of a palimpsest. That is, like the mystic writing pad that retains traces of what was “written,” some music in war films continues to show impressions of the wars in which it figured and in some cases films in which it appeared, thus generating dynamic interaction between audiences and history.1
As I have indicated elsewhere, the war film genre can be said to have begun in 1898 during the Spanish–American War, which was the subject of three kinds of film. First, “actualities,” such as Burial of the Maine Victims (1898), were essentially newsreel accounts of events. In at least one venue, New York City’s Proctor’s Theater, this film was accompanied by an orchestra and the playing of “Taps” on a trumpet. According to one report, this produced a powerful reaction in the audience:
In these days of excitement it takes a good deal to stir a big theater audience to any great display of feeling unless applause is drawn from it by patriotic songs and a liberal waving of flags, but the people last night showed that they appreciated the service the [New York] Journal has done for humanity by giving to the simple black and white depiction of the Wargraph [Thomas Edison’s name for the projecting device] the same outburst of applause that greeted the National anthem … The orchestra hushed and a bugler behind the scenes began to play that last, sad call, ‘Taps,’ as a company of blue jackets swung around the corner of the pictured scene.2
Second, “reenactments” were films in which staged battles recreated specific encounters, such as US Infantry Supported by Rough Riders at El Caney (1899). Finally there were narratives, such as Love and War. This work can certainly be claimed not only as the first narrative war film, but, as far as I can tell, the first narrative film of any sort to use the word “war” in its title.3
This three-minute film, as it exists now in the Library of Congress print, has six scenes, each presented in a continuous shot from a stationary camera: (1) a youth leaves his anxious family to go to war; his brother holds the departing soldier’s rifle; (2) his mother, sitting next to the brother, reads the newspaper for accounts of him; (3) his father and another man come in with news that the soldier has been killed or wounded, producing anguish for all; (4) the brave soldier engages in battle, is wounded, and is rescued by his courageous comrade who dies saving him; (5) he is taken to a field hospital where a nurse prays over him; (6) he returns home and reunites with his family and girlfriend.
Exactly what audiences in November in 1899 saw during the presentation of this film is difficult to determine since the film available to us now differs from the one described both in the Edison Catalogue and in the advertisement for the film published in The New York Clipper, a well-known trade publication, seven days after the film was copyrighted.4 According to the Catalogue, Love and War is
[a]n illustrated song telling the story of a hero who leaves for the war as a private, is promoted to the rank of captain for bravery in service, meets the girl of his choice, who is a Red Cross nurse on the field, and finally returns home triumphantly as an officer to the father and mother to whom he bade good-by as a private. The film presents this beautiful song picture in six scenes, each of which has a separate song, making the entire series a complete and effective novelty. PARTING. – “Our hero boy to the war has gone.” Words and music. CAMPING. – “What! A letter from home.” Words and music. FIGHTING. – The battle prayer. “Father, on Thee I Call.” Words and music. CONVALESCING. – “Weeping, Sad and Lonely.” Words and music. SORROWING. – The mother's lament. “Come back, my dear boy, to me.” Words and music. RETURNING. – When our hero boy comes back again. Hurrah! Hurrah! “Star Spangled Banner.” Words and music. The above scene can be illustrated either by a soloist, quartette or with an orchestra, and with or without stereopticon slides. This series of animated pictures, when properly illustrated or announced by stereopticon reading matter, should make a great success.5
The advertisement in the New York Clipper, a trade journal at the time, uses some of the language of the Edison Catalogue and adds two sentences:
LOVE AND WAR … A wonderful song picture. We have at last succeeded in perfectly synchronizing Music and Moving Pictures [my italics]. The above is an illustrated song, telling the story of a hero who leaves for the war as a private, is promoted to the rank of captain for bravery in service, meets the girl of his choice, who is a Red Cross nurse on the field, and finally returns home triumphantly as an officer to the father and mother to whom he bade goodbye as a private. The scenes are carefully chosen to fit the words and songs, which have been especially composed for these pictures [my italics]. LENGTH 200 ft., complete with words of song and music, $45.00.
(The New York Clipper, 18 November 1899, p. 801)
The disparity between the film we have and the printed descriptions in the Edison Catalogue and the New York Clipper is made even more problematic by the explanation offered by the Library of Congress: “Only four of the scenes described in the Edison Catalogue were submitted for copyright under the title Love and War and thus survive in the Library’s paper print copy; two other scenes were likely produced and, perhaps, copyrighted as separate films but then added to the Love and war picture sing and sold to fill out the description.”6 The advertisement does not mention the language from the Edison Catalogue about using soloists or presenting stereopticon slides. But both the Catalogue and Clipper describe the film as an “illustrated song” and “song picture.” According to Rick Altman, “illustrated songs” had begun to appear as early as 1863 when the producer “Tony Pastor bought lantern slide portraits of Civil War generals … to illustrate his song ‘Heroes of the War.’” He explains their history:
By the end of the century, illustrated songs were a vaudeville feature. In this period, sixteen to twenty slides would be used to illustrate each song. Photographed in black and white with live models staged to represent the words of the songs, the slides would then be hand-colored and projected while a singer belted out the lyrics. Audiences would usually be invited to join in the chorus, reading the words off the screen. 7
(Altman, 2004, p. 107)
Since the illustrated song was focused on only one work, it is not clear why the Edison Catalogue gives this label to Love and War even as it identifies six illustrated songs within the film. In addition, the advertisement makes a claim that cannot be supported historically in regard to having “at last succeeded in synchronizing music and moving pictures.” Edison himself had already done this in the 1894 or 1895 short, The Dickson Experimental Sound Test, in which two men dance with each other. Shown originally on the kinetophone, the music was supplied by a wax cylindrical tube.8
An even more problematic assertion in the advertisement is the claim that “the words and songs … have been especially composed for this picture.” Obviously “The Star-Spangled Banner” preceded the creation of Love and War. It was first introduced during the War of 1812. “Father on Thee I Call” duplicates the first line of Friedrich Heinrich Himmel’s “A Battle Hymn,” which dates from the 1860s. “Weeping, Sad and Lonely” was an immensely popular Civil War song by Henry Tucker and Charles Sawyer used by both Union and Confederate armies. Each side made the lyrics specific to itself. The Union’s version had: “How proud you stood before me in your suit of blue, / When you vowed to me and country ever to be true.” The Confederate’s went: “How proud you stood before me in your suit of grey, / When you vowed to me and country nevermore to stray.” Given the fact that Americans’ uniforms during the Spanish–American War were blue, it is more than likely that the version used in the 1899 film relied on the Union version.9
