A Companion to the War Film / Edition 1

by Douglas A. Cunningham, John C. Nelson

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:	9781118288894
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	05/31/2016
Pages:	472
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 9.70(h) x 1.20(d)

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.

Read an Excerpt

Click to read or download

Table of Contents

Contributors vii

Introduction 1
Douglas A. Cunningham

1 “Hearing” the Music in War Films 6
Robert Eberwein

2 Antilochus’s Burden: The Crisis–Catharsis Rhetoric of Bereavement Messages 20
David Ryan

3 War Films in an Age of War and Cinema 36
John Garofolo

4 Exploring War Horror’s Narrative Punch in Spielberg’s Munich and Saving Private Ryan 56
Sandra Singer

5 The Service Tragicomedy: From Woody Allen to Full Metal Jacket 71
Matthew Sorrento

6 The Wartime American Woman on Film: Home-Front Soldier 89
Jeanine Basinger

7 “Conspiracy of Silence”: The Containment of Military Women in World War II Newsreels and Short Films 106
Anna Froula

8 Filming a Nuclear State: The USAF’s Lookout Mountain Laboratory 129
Kevin Hamilton and Ned O’Gorman

9 The Gendered Remembrance of Japanese-American Internment: Come See the Paradise and Snow Falling on Cedars 150
Yuki Obayashi

10 “The Angels of Bataan and Corregidor”: Representing Nurses in the Pacific Theater 163
Debra White-Stanley

11 In the Exigency of a National Cause: Bollywood’s Responses to the Kargil War 180
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 198
Christa C. Jones

13 Fifty Years Hence: The Forgotten War Remembered in South Korean and American Cinema 214
John Nelson

14 Dresden (2006): Marketing the Bombing of Dresden in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States 234
Linda Robertson

15 How to Recognize a War Movie: The Contemporary Science-Fiction Blockbuster as Military Recruitment Film 253
Tanine Allison

16 Making Citizens out of Soldiers: Rearming the Individual in Paul May’s 08/15 271
Mark Gagnon

17 Those at Home Also Serve: Women’s Television and Embedded Military Realism in Army Wives (Lifetime, 2006–2014) 289
Mary Elizabeth Haralovich

18 Generation Kill: The Invasion of Iraq As Seen on HBO 305
Deborah L. Jaramillo

19 “TiK ToK on the Clock, but the Party Don’t Stop, No”: The Parodic Military Dance Video on YouTube 320
Leah Shafer

20 Kuwaiting for Godot: The Absurd Theatre of War in Jarhead 338
Cason Murphy

21 The Meaning of the Soldier: In the Year of the Pig and Hearts and Minds 356
Laura Browder

22 Why We (Shouldn’t) Fight: The Double-Optic of the War Documentary 371
Kris Fallon

23 A War for Everyone: Strategic Ambiguity in the Home-Front War Drama 385
Dan Hassoun

24 Is There Such a Thing as an Antiwar Film? 404
Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet

25 Through a Soldier’s Eyes: Stereoscopic Gazing in Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience 422
Kelly Wilz

Index 445