War Starts At Midnight!

REVIEW:Guy Westwell, War Cinema: Hollywood on the Front Line

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-War@h-net.msu.edu (October 2006)

Guy Westwell. _War Cinema: Hollywood on the Front Line_. Short Cuts Introduction to Film Studies Series. London: Wallflower, 2006. 133 pp. Illustrations, filmography, bibliography, index. $20.00 (paper), ISBN 1-904764-54-1.

Reviewed for H-War by Lisa Mundey, U.S. Army Center of Military History

A Militant Hollywood

_War Cinema_ is part of the Short Cuts Series, a sequence of compact introductory survey texts for various aspects of film studies.  Guy Westwell, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at London Metropolitan University, provides a well-researched survey of contemporary war film scholarship, particularly focused on American cinema.  It is primarily geared toward students of film studies and popular culture.  Given the target audience, Westwell assumes the reader is familiar with such ideas as Benedict Anderson's "imagined communities," Antonio Gramsci's theory on hegemony, and other critical discourses.  He also presumes that the readers have a basic knowledge of film terminology and concepts, such as "genre" and "auteur," and American history.  Nevertheless, the text is not overly laden with jargon, so a non-expert can understand it. 

Westwell rejects the idea that war films are entertainment and argues that cinema and audiences have a complex relationship, which he describes as a cultural imagination about war.  In _War Cinema_, Westwell constructs a history of twentieth-century film cycles, capturing Hollywood's changing cultural imagination about war. Reflecting the overall state of film scholarship and his own predisposition, Westwell critiques Hollywood for its tendency to mythologize, construct myopic nationalistic interpretations, and produce pro-war films ...

MOVIE REVIEW: Flags of Our Fathers

A Ghastly Conflagration, a Tormented Aftermath

By Manohla Dargis

New York Times

Published: October 20, 2006

It seems hard to believe there is anything left to say about World War II that has not already been stated and restated, chewed, digested and spat out for your consideration and that of the Oscar voters. And yet here, at age 76, is Clint Eastwood saying something new and vital about the war in his new film, and here, too, is this great, gray battleship of a man and a movie icon saying something new and urgent about the uses of war and of the men who fight. "Flags of Our Fathers” concerns one of the most lethal encounters on that distant battlefield, but make no mistake: this is also a work of its own politically fraught moment.

The film distills much of the material covered in James Bradley and Ron Powers’s affecting book of the same title about the raising of the American flag during the battle for Iwo Jima. Mr. Bradley’s father, John Bradley, nicknamed Doc and played by an effectively restrained Ryan Phillippe, was one of six men who helped plant the flag (it was the second planted that day) on the island’s highest point on the fifth day of the monthlong American offensive. An Associated Press photographer, Joe Rosenthal, immortalized the moment, and American politicians seized the day, sending the three surviving flag raisers — Doc, Ira Hayes Adam Beach, delivering heartbreak by the payload) and Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) — on a hugely successful war-bond drive.

Humphrey Jennings - London Can Take It! (1940)

British Wartime (and Selected Postwar) Films - A List-In-Progress

"NATIONAL CHARACTER" AND THE BRITISH FILMS OF THE FORTIES and FEATURES OF POST -WAR BRITISH CINEMA, by John W. Williams.