New Perspectives on the War Film

311 Pages·2019·3.709 MB·English

by  Clémentine Tholas, Janis L. Goldie, Karen A. Ritzenhoff

New Perspectives
on the War Film
Edited by
Clémentine Tholas
Janis L. Goldie
Karen A. Ritzenhoff
New Perspectives on the War Film
Clémentine Tholas · Janis L. Goldie ·
Karen A. Ritzenhoff
Editors
New Perspectives
on the War Film
Editors
Clémentine Tholas Janis L. Goldie
CREW Center for Research Communication Studies
on the English Huntington University
Sorbonne Nouvelle University Sudbury, ON, Canada
Paris, France
Karen A. Ritzenhoff
Department of Communication
Central Connecticut State University
New Britain, CT, USA
ISBN 978-3-030-23095-1 ISBN 978-3-030-23096-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23096-8
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To Julien who taught me the things worth fighting for when we are faced
with challenges and struggles
—Clémentine Tholas
To Marin, Grady, and Tom—my constant sources of joy and peace
—Janis L. Goldie
For my children; may they never experience war
—Karen A. Ritzenhoff
F
oreword
The remarkable range of essays gathered in this distinctive volume reveals
a striking dualism within the genre that is only now becoming apparent.
Shaped from its earliest moments by a history of prestige productions, the
war film has been defined, in large part, by adrenalized spectacles of con-
flict between men and nations, accompanied by exemplary technological
achievements. Yet the genre has also quietly developed a set of alternative
dramatic frameworks for the depiction of conflict and struggle, in which
stories of child warriors, women on the frontlines, homoerotic affection
within the service, and female revolutionary terrorists have become cen-
tral subjects of what has often been mistaken as a highly conventional
form. Indeed, the notion of a genre defined by a rigid set of genre codes
has dominated even the best work on war and representation.
Fredric Jameson, for example, once wrote that the war story and, by
extension, the war film were essentially unchanged from the time of the
Iliad. Viewed in terms of deep narrative structure, he argues, the war
story has little to teach us. War constitutes one of the most celebrated
and universal story forms, present in nearly every society over many
millennia—a universality that is partly due to the fact that it seems to
have a built-in story structure, one that lends itself to narratological
mapping. The agonistic structure of the war story, its clear-cut actantial
roles, and well-defined schema of conflict and resolution suggest that
it could be broken down quite easily into a core morphology or syntax
that a certain patterned regularity can be found. As the author says, “one
often has the feeling that all war novels (and war films) are pretty much
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viii FOREWORD
the same and have few enough surprises for us, even though their situa-
tions may vary” (1533).
In the essays that comprise this volume, the description of the war
film genre as one of patterned regularity and monochrome consistency
is decisively countermanded. Reading through the essays collected here,
I am newly convinced that the history of the genre has yet to be writ-
ten, and that it’s most distinctive characteristic is precisely its elasticity, its
ability to absorb the new forms of combat, the new types of war, and the
unfamiliar human dramas that they contain. Moreover, as is evidenced in
two of the essays in this volume, the genre can mutate into other forms,
as the imagery of haunting and hallucination play a role that shifts the
codes and conventions of war representation, a shift that, once noticed,
can be found throughout the history of the form.
Where the classic war film centered on the production of emotion around
scenes of combat suffering and death, translating images of pathos into
icons of sacrifice for nation—or its opposite, into a testament to the utter
waste of war—the films the authors treat in this volume detail the rending
experiences of war without the consoling script of a collective metanarra-
tive. In this volume, the authors bring a new set of themes and a distinct
set of dramatis personae into frame. And they discover, in this most ancient
story form, a range of original perspectives on a genre that history, with its
through line of conflict and savagery, will almost certainly continue to renew.
Robert Burgoyne
Honorary Professor
University of St Andrews
St Andrews, Scotland
work Cited
Jameson, Fredric. “War and Representation.” PMLA 124, no. 5, Special Topic:
War (October 2009): 1532–547.
Robert Burgoyne is Honorary Professor in the Film Studies Department at
the University of Saint Andrews. His research centers on historiography and
film, with a special emphasis on American cinema, history and national identity,
and the counter narratives of nation that have emerged in many films. Recent
publications include Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History: Revised and
Expanded Edition and The Epic Film in World Culture.
C
ontents
1 Introduction 1
Clémentine Tholas, Janis L. Goldie and Karen A. Ritzenhoff
2 Women and Nation in Films of the Great War 17
Thomas J. Saunders
3 Vamps and Virgins: The Women of 1920s Hollywood
War Romances 39
Liz Clarke
4 Rafi Bukaee’s Avanti Popolo: Telling the War
from the Traumatized Perpetrator’s Perspective 59
Yael Munk
5 The Other Fights Back: Indigenizing the War Film 75
Jennifer L. Gauthier
6 Shoulder Arms (1918), What Price Glory (1926),
Wings (1927): How Silent War Films Discuss
Homosexuality and Gender Representations
During World War One 107
Clémentine Tholas
ix
x CONTENTS
7 Black Skin, White Faces: Dead Presidents
and the African-American Vietnam Veteran 131
Kathleen McClancy
8 “So Long as They Are Maintaining a Bona Fide Family
Relationship in the Home”: Women in World War II
American Film Propaganda 159
Zachary Baqué
9 Post-socialist Hauntings in Vietnamese Revisionist
Cinema 179
Thong Win
10 The New Face of Fear: How Pandemics and Terrorism
Reinvent Terror (and Heroes) in the Twenty-First
Century 203
Dahlia Schweitzer
11 Rebelle Rebel: African Child Soldiers, Gender,
and the War Film 223
Janis L. Goldie
12 Sisters in Arms: Epic Narratives in United Red Army
(2007) and The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) 245
Elena Caoduro
13 The Form of the White Ethno-State: Dunkirk (2017)
Omits Indian Soldiers for White Vulnerable Bodies 265
Zachary Michael Powell
Index 293
n C
otes on ontributors
Zachary Baqué is an Associate Professor at the University of Toulouse-
Jean Jaurès where he teaches American and film studies. He has also
taught at the University of Texas in Austin and at Dickinson College. He
published several articles on various American directors, notably David
Lynch. His current research deals with the politics of documentary, espe-
cially those produced by the American government in the 1930s and
1940s.
Elena Caoduro is a Lecturer in Media Arts at the University of
Bedfordshire where she teaches film and media studies. Her work on
contemporary European cinema, analogue nostalgia, and the trauma and
memory of terrorism has been published in edited collections and jour-
nals, including Networking Knowledge, Alphaville Journal of Film and
Screen Media and NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies. Her cur-
rent research deals with the relationship between fashion and non-fiction
media, especially the recent wave of fashion documentaries released in
the last ten years.
Liz Clarke is an Assistant Professor in Communication, Popular
Culture, and Film at Brock University. Her research is focused on fem-
inist media history, including women in silent American film, women
screenwriters, and women showrunners in American television. She
has published in journals such as Camera Obscura, Feminist Media
Histories, Gender & History, Literature/Film Quarterly, and the Journal
of Popular Film and Television, as well as contributing chapters to the
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