Despite the momentous achievement in film, there are deeply troubling representations of Britishness that should cause alarm argues Arzu Merali

War films celebrated for their use of sound such as Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998) and The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) have tended to focus on the subjective and phenomenological experience of war from the perspective of soldiers, whose agency and placement within the very centre of the action drives the film’s narrative. By contrast, the two Iranian films I will discuss here, Bahram Beizai’s Bashu, The Little Stranger (Bashu, gharibeye koochak, 1990) and Bahman Ghobadi’s Turtles Can Fly (Lakposhtha parvaz mikonand, 2004) record the experience of war from the perspectives of those whose lives have been radically and violently disrupted by it, but who have had no active role in shaping its outcome. Focusing on the experiences of children, both films use sound design to articulate a sense of their characters’ fragmented subjectivity and powerlessness through techniques such as point-of-audition, close-perspective miking, and non-synchronous sound and image. In both films, characters rarely speak about their trauma. Instead, embodied sounds and vocalisations are heard on the soundtrack at key points in the narrative to align the spectator with their perspective while at the same time emphasising their characters’ vulnerability at the centre of the larger, global ‘sensate regimes of war’ in which they have no voice or control (Butler 2012, 110). In this way, the films discussed have strong affinities with other ‘anti-war’ films such as Diamonds of the Night (Démanty noci, Jan Němec, 1964) and Come and See (Idi I smotri, Elem Klimov, 1985) that also feature children as their central protagonists. Through close, comparative analysis of the sound design in these films, I argue that sound can play a crucial restorative role by articulating a sense of characters’ agency and subjectivity so often denied to civilian victims of war both in official records and in their cinematic representation. As such I claim that the films offer a radical alternative to dominant conceptualisations of war as depicted in Hollywood cinema, challenging and broadening our understanding of the genre, as well as potentially deepening our understanding of the impact of war on the lives of civilians and refugees.

This paper examines five American war films (Green Zone, The Hurt Locker, Body of Lies, Rendition, and Jarhead) with stories distinctly counter to the dominant war, government, and soldier narratives promoted by government and mass media. Each of these films, although commercial failures in the U.S., serves as an example of the very acts of defiance of pro-war propaganda and the counter thinking that is called for by the scholarly work that grounds my analysis: James Der Derian’s Virtuous War, Judith Butler’s Frames of War, and Peace Journalism, War and Conflict Resolution (eds. Keeble, Tulloch, and Zollman). As such, the films can be viewed as a powerful interruption to the status quo useful tools for exploring the role of fiction, media, “truth,” and memory in a networked age.

In that it privileges the grand perspective (the landscape, and the battalion arrayed in all its splendour), The Longest Day (1962) is typical of big-picture World War II films produced up until the mid-1970s. There are few close-ups, and takes are ponderously long. The focus is on grand strategy, and an attendant grand narrative; the lens offers a blow-by-blow assessment of the massive assault. Shot in 1998, Saving Private Ryan periodically echoes this perspective but reflects modalities informed by changing technologies and a hyper-mediated culture. The result is more intimate framing, punctuated by shots sometimes adapted from the source material: footage captured on Omaha Beach, 6 June 1944, by the Signal Corps cameramen. This portrayal serves two purposes: it opens the film in spectacular fashion, introduces the main characters and prefaces their mission. This article identifies and examines filmic frames from the day of the landings; from the grand narrative of The Longest Day; and from Spielberg’s confronting representation Saving Private Ryan. The aim is to show how, through the lens alone, cinematographers approximate the character of a tumultuous and terrifying day in ways that are surprisingly similar and profoundly different.

There have been many celebrated engines in war history but the Aquabelle ship and the Spitfire Mk1 N3200 plane can justifiably claim to be among the most famous of the Operation Dynamo taken over to Dunkirk and emerged from the World War II. Information about the Salvation by floods are to be read in "L'Est Républicain" 01-06-1940 page 3: La Bataille des Flandres https://kiosque.limedia.fr/ark:/31124/dbkpb3rl1gwmqvhr/

In this paper, I will look into the cinematic strategies used in the war documentary film Armadillo (Metz, 2010 DK), depicting Danish soldiers on mission in Afghanistan, as orientations for the viewer's ethico-political engagement. The paper was presented at the concerence Ethics of Storytelling, in June 2015, Turku, Finland.

This dissertation argues that discussions of war representation that privilege the nationalistic, heroic, and redemptively sacrificial strand of storytelling that dominate popular memory in Britain ignore a whole counter-history of movies that view war as an occasion to critique through devices like humor, irony, and existential alienation. Instead of selling audiences on what Graham Dawson has called “the pleasure culture of war” (a nationally self-serving mode of talking about and profiting from war memory), many texts about war are motivated by other intellectual and ideological factors. Each chapter includes historical context and periodizing arguments about different moments in British cultural history, explores genre trends, and ends with a comparative analysis of representative examples. Chapter One traces competing representational modes between 1939 and 1945, arguing that films about war and wartime during this period trouble the traditional binarism in British film historiography between realism and fantasy. Chapter Two looks at historical intersections of comedy and war, arguing that the embrace of irony as a argumentative position allows war comedies to engage with the idea of failure, a notion all but missing from dominant strands of war representation. Chapter Three describes a post-1956 brand of war tragedy that embraces cynicism, tonal bleakness, and the cultural vogue for existentialism as another affront to triumphalist war narratives. Chapter Four shifts from bigger conceptual categories to a specific, historically embedded interest in technology and strategy that intensifies after 1945. This chapter argues that many films turn away from war as historically grounded fact, and towards a conception of war that is overtly simulated and virtual. Chapter Five examines the representational challenge of the nuclear bomb for British cinema, arguing that beyond similarities to international trends that align these weapons with panic and horror, the specter of atomic energy encapsulates a larger geopolitical visioning of the nation’s loss of control. A Conclusion examines the reception of many of the films analyzed and acknowledges the influence and legacy of these alternative approaches to war.