A deeply personal meditation on the haunting power of American photos and films of the 1940s
Wartime Kiss is a personal meditation on the haunting power of American photographs and films from World War II and the later 1940s. Starting with a stunning reinterpretation of one of the most famous photos of all time, Alfred Eisenstaedt's image of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day, Alexander Nemerov goes on to examine an array of mostly forgotten images and movie episodes—from a photo of Jimmy Stewart and Olivia de Havilland lying on a picnic blanket in the Santa Barbara hills to scenes from such films as Twelve O'Clock High and Hold Back the Dawn. Erotically charged and bearing traces of trauma even when they seem far removed from the war, these photos and scenes seem to hold out the promise of a palpable and emotional connection to those years.
Through a series of fascinating stories, Nemerov reveals the surprising background of these bits of film and discovers unexpected connections between the war and Hollywood, from an obsession with aviation to Anne Frank's love of the movies. Beautifully written and illustrated, Wartime Kiss vividly evokes a world in which Margaret Bourke-White could follow a heroic assignment photographing a B-17 bombing mission over Tunis with a job in Hollywood documenting the filming of a war movie. Ultimately this is a book about history as a sensuous experience, a work as mysterious, indescribable, and affecting as a novel by W. G. Sebald.
Alexander Nemerov is the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University. He is the author of five previous books, including To Make a World: George Ault and 1940s America, Icons of Grief: Val Lewton's Home Front Pictures, and Acting in the Night: "Macbeth" and the Places of the Civil War.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
One Kissing in August 1945 - Belita Jepson-Turner 5
Two Sleeping Beauty - Olivia de Havilland 23
Three When the World Smiled - Margaret Bourke-White 61
Four Sentimental Mysticism - Stovall at Archbury 97
Five Hold Back the Dawn - Olivia de Havilland 127
Acknowledgments 147 Bibliographic Notes 149 Index 169
What People are Saying About This
From the Publisher
"Alexander Nemerov's incandescent new book elucidates moments of being—an electrifying kiss, a lost snapshot of a dreamy Olivia de Havilland and Jimmy Stewart, the shimmery arc of a swimmer on the cover of Life magazine—and through them reveals and deciphers the invisible writing of lost time. A mesmerizing meditation by one of our most brilliant and original thinkers."—Cynthia Zarin, author of An Enlarged Heart: A Personal History"Wartime Kiss creates an exhilarating high from a seductively humble set of connections with the strange, fragmentary pictures of the past that happen to move us. It is a luminous and deeply felt meditation on pursuing history as a poetic flight."—Elisa Tamarkin, University of California, Berkeley"Filled with personal self-reflection and insightful analysis of photographs and films, this eloquent book is ultimately a meditation on how we know and write history. Nemerov is a wonderful stylist and he is extraordinarily adept at picking out telling details and mining them for all they are worth. Wartime Kiss is a pleasure to read."—Cécile Whiting, University of California, Irvine
