A Companion to the War Film

by Douglas A. Cunningham (Editor), John C. Nelson (Editor)

Overview

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 Prouvédly 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 21^st Century and points the way for exciting future scholarship

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781118337615
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	03/28/2016
Sold by:	JOHN WILEY & SONS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	500
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Douglas A. Cunningham is Adjunct Professor of Humanities at Brigham Young University and Adjunct Professor of Literature and Film Studies at Westminster College, USA. 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 earned a Ph.D. in Film Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009. He is the editor of The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: Place, Pilgrimage, and Commemoration (2011), and his essays have appeared in Screen, CineAction, The Moving Image, and Critical Survey. He is currently at work on a monograph titled, Celluloid Airmen: World War II, Hollywood, and the Army Air Force’s First Motion Picture Unit.

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. He has published book chapters on Nobel laureate Derek Walcott’s play Pantomime and the use of landscape in contemporary military memoirs. He has taught courses on literature, composition, film, and cultural criticism at West Point for over ten years.

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Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors

Introduction

01 “Hearing” the Music in War Films
Robert Eberwein

02 Antilochus’s Burden: The Crisis-Catharsis Rhetoric of Bereavement Messages
David Ryan

03 War Films in an Age of War and Cinema
John Garofolo

04 Exploring War Horror’s Narrative Punch in Spielberg’s Munich and Saving Private Ryan
Sandra Singer

05 The Service Tragicomedy: From Woody Allen to Full Metal Jacket
Matthew Sorrento

06 The Wartime American Woman on Film: Home Front Soldier
Jeanine Basinger

07 “Conspiracy of Silence”: The Containment of Military Women in World War II Newsreels and Short Films
Anna Froula

08 Filming a Nuclear State: The USAF’s Lookout Mountain Laboratory
Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman

09 The Gendered Remembrance of Japanese-American Internment: Come See the Paradise and Snow Falling on Cedars
Yuki Obayashi

10 “The Angels of Bataan and Corregidor”: Representing Nurses in the Pacific Theater
Debra White-Stanley

11 In the Exigency of a National Cause: Bollywood’s Responses to the Kargil War
Kaustav Bakshi and Ramit Samaddar

12 Transnational Algerian War Cinema Revisited: Comic Relief in Merzak Allouache’s Bab el-oued City and Bab el-Oued
Christa Jones

13 Fifty Years Hence: The Forgotten War Remembered in South Korean and American Cinema
John Nelson

14 Dresden (2006): Marketing the Bombing of Dresden in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States
Linda R. Robertson

15 How to Recognize a War Movie: The Contemporary Science-Fiction Blockbuster as Military Recruitment Film
Tanine Allison

16 Making Citizens out of Soldiers: Rearming the Individual in Paul May’s 08/15
Mark Gagnon

17 Those at Home Also Serve: Women’s Television and Embedded Military Realism in Army Wives (Lifetime, 2006-2014)
Mary Elizabeth Haralovich

18 Generation Kill: The Invasion of Iraq As Seen on HBO
Deborah L. Jaramillo

19 “TiK ToK on the Clock, but the Party Don’t Stop, No”: The Parodic Military Dance Video on YouTube
Leah Shafer

20 Kuwaiting for Godot: The Absurd Theatre of War in Jarhead
Cason Murphy

21 The Meaning of the Soldier: In the Year of the Pig and Hearts and Minds
Laura Browder

22 Why We (Shouldn’t) Fight: The Double-Optic of the War Documentary
Kris Fallon

23 A War for Everyone: Strategic Ambiguity in the Homefront War Drama
Dan Hassoun

24 Is There Such a Thing as an Antiwar Film?
Agnieszka Soltysik

25 Through a Soldier’s Eyes: Stereoscopic Gazing in Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
Kelly Wilz

Index