The Birth of an Empire

Abstract

The Spanish-Cuban-American war of 1898 was one of the first wars in history to be filmed. Yet despite its participation in the birth of American cinema, the war disappeared as a subject from the later archives of filmmaking. No major films chronicle the three-month war in Cuba or the subsequent three-year war in the Philippines, although films have been made about virtually every other war in American history. My paper is about that duality, about the formative presence and telling absence of this pivotal war in the history of American film.