Cinematic Corpographies: Re-Mapping the War Film Through the Body

by Eileen Rositzka

Overview

Writing on the relationship between war and cinema has largely been dominated by an emphasis on optics and weaponised vision. However, as this analysis of the Hollywood war film will show, a wider sensory field is powerfully evoked in this genre. Contouring war cinema as representing a somatic experience of space, the study applies a term recently developed by Derek Gregory within the theoretical framework of Critical Geography. What he calls “corpography” implies a constant re-mapping of landscape through the soldier’s body. These assumptions can be used as a connection between already established theories of cartographic film narration and ideas of (neo)phenomenological film experience, as they also entail the involvement of the spectator’s body in sensuously grasping what is staged as a mediated experience of war. While cinematic codes of war have long been oriented almost exclusively to the visual, the notion of corpography can help to reframe the concept of film genre in terms of expressive movement patterns and genre memory, avoiding reverting to the usual taxonomies of generic texts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783110709124
Publisher:	De Gruyter
Publication date:	07/06/2020
Series:	Cinepoetics - English edition , #3
Pages:	210
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.06(h) x (d)

About the Author

Eileen Rositzka, Freie Universityät Berlin, Kolleg-Forschergruppe Cinepoetics - Poetologien audiovisueller Bilder,
Berlin, Germany.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction 1

1.1 Cartographic Cinema, Embodiment, and the Navigating Spectator 5

1.2 The War Film as a Corpographic Genre 12

1.3 Pathos, Affect, and Expressive Movement 18

2 Measuring the Trenches: Corpographies of the First World War 25

2.1 The Great War in Literature and Film 26

2.2 Geographies of Fear: All Quiet on the Western Front 30

2.3 Images of the Paths: Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory 45

3 From Above and From Within: Aerial Views and Corpographic Transformations in the WWII Combat Film 57

3.1 Documenting War: The United States, Britain, and the Burma Campaign 59

3.2 Objective, Burma! / Subjective Burma: The Illusion of Overview 63

3.3 Corpography and Conversion: FURY'S Hell on Wheels 80

4 Dismembering War: Touch and Fragmentation in Anthony Mann's Men in War 97

4.1 The Forgotten Subgenre: The Korean War Film of the 1950s 100

4.2 Forgetting to Remember: In and Out of Touch in Men in War 106

4.3 Vectors, Bodies, and Blind Spots 117

5 Uncharting Territories: The Vietnam War's Shattering of the Senses 126

5.1 Shattered Senses 128

5.2 The Boys in Company C: Sonic Envelopes and Aural Traces 133

5.3 Off-screen Monstrosity 138

5.4 Rescue Dawn: Into the Abyss 142

6 Zero Dark Thirty: Corpographies of the War on Terror 151

6.1 Echoes of Terror: Black Screens and Black Sites of 9/11 153

6.2 Behind the Surface 158

6.3 Tracking Shots 163

6.4 Night Visions / Night Calls: The Canaries 168

7 Conclusion 173

Bibliography 182

Filmography 193

Subject index 195

Name index 198

Film index 201

Editorial Reviews

"By examining how cinematic representations of war speak so closely to our human condition, Rositzska skilfully depicts how such representations are inflected with intersubjective permutations and assumptions about the material body, gender, and even race, assumptions which can be challenged or interrogated through aesthetic, cinematic forms in order to undercut - even subvert - a predominantly visual discourse in film and media studies."(Panayiota Chrysochou in: Punctum, 5(1): 271-273, 2019)

From the Publisher