Hollywood War Research Articles

The Construction of U.S. Armed Forces` Image Through Translation Activities in Hollywood Blockbusters

This paper studied 22 influencing Hollywood war films, and extracted translation behaviors among them. Some of the most influencing Hollywood blockbusters themed on wars would be examined to see the role they played in depicting the image of the United States Armed Forces hope to build through the plot(s) of translation activities performed in theatre. From such changes can see the change of people`s attention, as well as the effect Hollywood blockbusters contributed on the building of the U.S. Armed Forces` images. Video productions (especially films) are some of the most welcomed ones. The United States has one of the most powerful film-making industries in the world, which successful products of its are popular around the world, definitely have the American way of thinking and judgment spread and accepted by the film-lovers around the world. Research conducted on such films would reveal how the U.S. Armed Forces` image has changed on cinema screens, and provide a collection of data for translation researchers who has an interest in the field combining translation (behaviors) with the mass media.

Transmilitainment: Morocco's Role in Hollywood's War on Terror Films

Transmilitainment: Morocco's Role in Hollywood's War on Terror Films

The Hollywood War Film: Critical Observations from World War I to Iraq by Daniel Binns (review)

Reviewed by: The Hollywood War Film: Critical Observations from World War I to Iraq by Daniel Binns Pearl James Daniel Binns, The Hollywood War Film: Critical Observations from World War I to Iraq. Intellect/University of Chicago Press, 2017. ISBN 978-1-78320-754-1. 180 pages. $43. Daniel Binns is a lecturer in media studies at Melbourne’s RMIT University. He also works as a writer, producer, and consultant for film productions. His monograph on the Hollywood war film is not the first book on this subject or even the first with this title, but he brings a more theoretically-informed and less historicist approach to bear on the topic than previous scholars. He draws thoughtfully on the best and best-known works on the topic, including those by Paul Virilio, Jeanine Basinger, and Robert Eberwein. Over the course of an introduction and four chapters, he works to elicit a new understanding of the war film genre and, in the process, of generic formation more generally. Yet the book is organized historically and ultimately makes an argument about how the Hollywood war film genre has evolved over time. Each of the first three chapters focuses on a broad cultural moment: World Wars I and II, Korea and Vietnam, and ‘Conflict in the Middle East.’ The final chapter traces the working of the war film genre across media, specifically into video games and comic books. That final chapter contains the book’s most original and interesting insights. Binns describes an overarching trajectory of the war film genre and its relation to what he calls, drawing upon Jean-Francois Lyotard and Hans-Ake Persson, a “grand narrative,” specifically, a myth of American national supremacy. Simply put, in the Hollywood war film, the “grand narrative can be both a representation of former glory, and a powerful inspiration for or justification of future engagements” (15). In Binns’s account, films about the World Wars instantiate this grand narrative in cinema and are typically epic in scale. They portray war as glorious and necessary. But different wars beget generic shifts, and this period of the genre ends with Patton (1970). Hollywood’s depictions of the wars in Korea and Vietnam still belong to the genre, but strain it; they tend to express “fear and frustration” through portrayals of “loneliness, quietness, and introspection” (56). While films of the World Wars tend to be organized (as Jeanine Basinger has demonstrated) around a platoon of representative Americans, films about Korea and Vietnam instead typically focus on a single individual. After the Gulf War, Hollywood war films return to the grand narrative and again portray war(s) in the Middle East and Afghanistan as necessary and sometimes heroic. While this overarching chronology makes sense at a macro-level, it leads Binns to make his least convincing points. Particularly problematic for me as a scholar of World War I film is his conflation of films about World War I and II. Those are two entirely different wars and cultural moments in the United States, and as such they receive dramatically different treatment in film. But perhaps because he’s primarily interested in laying a groundwork for his final claims about where the genre has gone most recently, he paints this section with rather large brush-strokes. He uses Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) as a primary example of what he describes as “the cinematic message of World War I” that “combat is glorious [End Page 53] and victory is sweet” (25). That claim is pretty hard to accept. The film was famously banned in Germany precisely because it was seen to portray war as an obscene waste of life by the nationalist state. Perhaps aware of the stretch he’s making, Binns vacillates; in some places he softens his overarching claim and admits that All Quiet “portrays war for what it is: violent, hard, and futile” (30) only to reiterate a page later that it and other films about World War I suggest that war, for all its brutality, “is ultimately necessary for the greater good” (31). Binns’s local observations about Milestone’s film are interesting, particularly as he points out its tendency to...

Book review: Hollywood War Film: Critical Observations from World War I to Iraq

Book review: <i>Hollywood War Film: Critical Observations from World War I to Iraq</i>

Third-Force Influences: Hollywood's War Films

Third-Force Influences: Hollywood's War Films

Organization Development in Hollywood War Movies: from The Sands of Iwo Jima to G. I. Jane

G.I. Jane and many other war movies such as those of John Wayne demonstrate how organization development is, and always has been, an inherent part of military training.

Star Testimonials and Trailers: Mobilizing during World War I

Hollywood's war mobilization efforts in support of the Liberty Loan Bond Drives (1917–1918) were critical to shifting government officials' perceptions of the value of commercial cinema as a tool of propaganda and cultural policy during wartime. By tracing the industry's efforts in the bond drives, and the narrative production and distribution of the Liberty Loan propaganda films in particular, this article shows how the patriotic film star testimonial became an expedient ideological mechanism. The propaganda films reinforced perceptions held by some political elites of commercial film as lowbrow as they also signaled a new manner of effectively linking popular culture with state power to promote unified national identity during crisis.

‘Flag-raising on Iwo Jima’ (1945) and the Hollywood war film

The iconic photograph ‘Flag-Raising on Iwo Jima’ shows five men raising the US flag on Mount Suribachi on the island of Iwo Jima, part-way through a battle between Japanese and US forces in World War II. The photograph was taken by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal on 23 February 1945 and appeared on the front pages of US newspapers two days later. A painted interpretation of the photograph was used in the Seventh War Loan Bond Drive,which raised $26.3 billion for the war effort in just three months. The image appeared on 137 million commemorative stamps, or ‘Iwo Jima greens’, between 1945 and 1948, and provided the model for the Marine Corps Memorial in Washington DC, which was dedicated in November 1954. As with many iconic photographs there is also a parallel history of related film production. Marine cameraman Sergeant Bill Genaust shot 16mm colour film footage of the flag being raised, and his footage has appeared in newsreels and documentaries. The photograph and Genaust’s footage have also been reenacted in further film representations, including the Hollywood war films Sands of Iwo Jima (Allan Dwan, 1949), The Outsider (Delbert Mann, 1961) and Flags of Our Fathers (Clint Eastwood, 2006).

War-image as affect, war-image as spectacle in turn-of-the-millennium Hollywood: how are violent masculinities expressed?

Through a theoretical engagement with the emergence of a new war film cycle in the 1990s, this paper asks: how are violent masculinities experienced and perceived? Specifically, I point to three distinct directorial approaches to the Hollywood war film – The thin red line, Saving Private Ryan, and Pearl Harbor – in order to analyze how films use war-images for affect or spectacle. This cinematic investigation aims to uncover the visual relations between masculine subjectivities and violence in the war film. Through a theoretical encounter with earlier work, this paper aims to increase the theoretical tools and concepts for understanding and thinking about the intersections of cinema, violence, war, and masculinities. By referencing the war films of Malick, Spielberg, and Bay, I argue that this category of genre film, in turn-of-the-millennium Hollywood, can use affective force to open up possibilities for critiquing and re-thinking masculinities, rather than merely contributing to American myth and nationalism through the use of spectacle.

&lt;em&gt;China Doll&lt;/em&gt; in Flight: Li Lihua, &lt;em&gt;World Today&lt;/em&gt;, and the Free China–US Relationship

Using renowned Chinese actress Li Lihua’s border-crossing career in Asia and the United States during the 1950s as a case study, this article examines how Asian free celebrities like Li participated in and complicated the facile dichotomy of democracy versus communism in Cold War discourse. When read in juxtaposition with her writing in the US-funded magazine World Today, Li’s appearance in the Hollywood war film China Doll (1958) exposes the tensions within the Free China–US relationship on the one hand and, on the other, reasserts the role of Nationalist China in the Free China–US matrix.

Review: One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II, by M. Todd Bennett

Review: <i>One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II</i>, by M. Todd Bennett

One world, big screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II

One world, big screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II

Delinquent daughters: Hollywood's war effort and the ‘juvenile delinquency picture’ cycle

This paper examines a short-lived cycle of ‘juvenile delinquency pictures’ that have been almost entirely ignored in scholarship on the teen film, perhaps in part because they focus on female rather than male youth. Whilst individually unremarkable, collectively these films were central to political debates about the role of Hollywood in wartime. This paper maps the widespread discursive struggles between Hollywood, the middlebrow press, industry regulators, and various government agencies over the production of this cycle. It moves on to analyse the New York reception of these films, highlighting how this ‘cycle of sensation’ was debated in relation to the very local contexts of New York's ‘bobby soxers’ and ‘victory girls’ and the strategies to police them in and around Times Square. It demonstrates that focusing on the localized and contested terrain of discourses surrounding historically situated media cycles reveals the complexity and local specificity required of micro-historical enquiry.

‘Look to Norway!’ The Nazi occupation of Norway in Hollywood wartime cinema, 1942–1945

The article explores the cycle of six feature-length fiction films made in Hollywood during World War II that represented on-screen the Nazi occupation of Norway between 1940 and 1945. These six features in order of release are Spencer Gordon Bennett's They Raid by Night (1942), John Farrow's Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942), Lewis Milestone's Edge of Darkness (1943), Irving Pichel's The Moon is Down (1943), Dorothy Arzner's First Comes Courage (1943) and Sylvan Simon's Son of Lassie (1945). While several scholarly surveys of Hollywood war films from this period have paid some limited attention to this subgenre, this article offers a more comprehensive, deep-focused examination, paying special attention to the material specificity of the six films and differentiations among them. The analysis investigates how differences in Hollywood studios and house styles, budgetary concerns, production conditions, casting choices, music scores, uses of location shooting in synthesizing a Norwegian landscape, marketing campaigns and other factors all contributed to differentiated final products in each case.

The ‘anti-war film’ and the ‘anti-war-film’: A reading of Brian De Palma's Redacted (2007) and Casualties of War (1989)

<![CDATA[Brian De Palma's Redacted stands out amongst the current crop of post-9/11 war films in that it contains an unambiguous critique of the Iraq War supported by an effective, visceral visual interpretation. To better understand Redacted's function and intentions within the canon of post-9/11 war cinema requires a comparison of the film to De Palma's previous war film, Casualties of War. De Palma endeavoured to provoke a similar debate on warfare in Redacted as he did with Casualties of War, as well as to provide a nearly identical commentary. Redacted, however, is very much a part of a search by post-9/11 film-makers for a meta-language sufficient to come to grips with actual combat experience. What becomes clear by comparison is that his earlier approach to characterization, narrative structure and visuals does not – and perhaps could not – have the same impact on public discourse after 9/11. I contend that Redacted, as well as other IraqWar films, are engaging with past modes of filmmaking – with the New Hollywood Vietnam film in particular – in order to challenge or rethink media representations of war. A textual analysis of Redacted alongside Casualties of War will demonstrate that although the two films share several striking characteristics – psychological doubling of characters, themes in support of an anti-war message and an intention to provoke debate – De Palma has revised the war film mode in Redacted in order to underline the incapacity of earlier war films to effectively convey combat experience. Therefore, Redacted should be viewed as a critique of the conventional Hollywood war film, and by extension as constituting a form of self-criticism towards the approach taken in Casualties of War.]]>

Terminal Indifference: The Hollywood War Film Post-September 11

Speaking about the state of the Hollywood film industry at the 2008 Academy Awards, the Oscars’ host – comedian Jon Stewart – made the following wry assessment: ‘Not all films did as well as Juno obviously. The films that were made about the Iraq War, let’s face it, did not do as well. But I’m telling you, if we stay the course and keep these movies in the theatres we can turn this around. I don’t care if it takes 100 years. Withdrawing the Iraq movies would only embolden the audience. We cannot let the audience win.’ The films he is referring to include Home of the Brave (2006), In the Valley of Elah (2007) and Stop-Loss (2008) – all of which focus on the personal cost to American soldiers on their return to civilian life, as well as exposing the failure of the US invasion of Iraq at home and abroad. Despite their topical subject matter, these movies were, for the most part, commercial failures. This article seeks to investigate audience indifference (Jean Baudrillard claims a certain indifference is a fundamental consequence of the Western globalising ideology) to mainstream cinematic depictions of the post September 11 invasion of Iraq, via a consideration of the trauma and abjection depicted in these films. Baudrillard’s hypotheses on terrorism – as a symbolic challenge put forth by terrorism (embodied by the attack on the Twin Towers) – and the West’s incapacity to respond to it, forms the basis for our investigation of the limits of these films to incite and engage viewers. His writings offer a lens through which to consider how ‘terrorism’ operates symbolically, and fundamentally, the dilemmas this raises for a Western psyche grappling with how the ‘terrorist threat’ might be answered, engaged with, responded to.

Hollywood's War with Poland, 1939-1945 (review)

Reviewed by: Hollywood's War with Poland, 1939-1945 John M. Grondelski M.B.B. Biskupski . Hollywood's War with Poland, 1939-1945. University Press of Kentucky, 2010. 362 pages; $60.00. Ever wonder why Victor László is not a Pole? The underground leader who cannot get out of Casablanca is identified in the film as Czechoslovakian, even though his name is thoroughly Hungarian and the Czech resistance to Hitler was but a shadow of its Polish counterpart. Indeed, while Rick's Café is a veritable watering hole of Norwegians, French, and other Allied conspirators no Pole—amazingly, given the country's underground and its people's immigration proclivities—ever managed to make his way to Casablanca! The Polish absence from one of Hollywood's most known World War II movies about the underground is symptomatic of the issues Professor Biskupski addresses in this book. Poland was the first victim of Nazi aggression to stand up to Hitler: the September 1939 invasion was the casus belli of World War II. Poles fought in East and West and ran the largest underground resistance. Poland lost 20% of its population and was the scene of the most brutal Nazi repression, including the Holocaust. Yet Poland is curiously invisible from almost all the war films made in Hollywood in the period 1939-45 and, when Poles appeared, they were universally stupid, cowardly, vile, and/or self-interested. Why? Biskupski, professor in the Blejwas Chair of Polish History at Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, assigns three reasons for this situation: the politics of Hollywood writers, the politics of the Roosevelt Administration, and the attitudes of Polish Jews in Hollywood. These three factors, while independent, mutually reinforced a climate hostile to [End Page 109] the Polish cause. He also gathers an impressive body of data documenting the parvity of Poles in films of the era as well as the derogatory roles in which they were cast when they did appear. The author maintains that a significant number of Hollywood writers from the period were either Communists or at least left-wing fellow-travelers, committed to casting Stalinist Russia in the best possible light. Their political predilections dovetailed with the Roosevelt Administration views (advanced in Hollywood through the Office of War Information), which sought to sell the Soviets as the indispensable ally needed to defeat Hitler. For both groups, Poland posed awkward problems. World War II had begun after Germany and the USSR first became allies and decided to partition Poland between them: Hitler invaded September 1, 1939, Stalin September 17. The Hitler-Stalin alliance only collapsed in 1941, when Germany invaded the USSR. Hawking the USSR as an Allied country required passing over nearly two years of history in silence, and became especially difficult after discovery of the Katyn massacre: it's hard to explain why an ally murdered almost 20,000 of another ally's officers. Given the delicate political minuet then being performed, " . . . Victor László could never have been a Pole, but as a Czechoslovakian he was suitably exotic without raising criticism of Soviet Russia" (p. 75). Ignoring Poles is one thing; making them disappear or going out of one's way to denigrate them is another. The screenplay for The Mask of Dimitrios eliminates the book's Polish spy, who emerges without nationality. In Lifeboat, Steinbeck's original Polish Sheinkowitz [sic] becomes the Czech Kovac. Where Poles appear, they are negative. Boley in Rise and Shine is a stupid jock. Action in the North Atlantic's Pulaski (the namesake of the only foreign general who died in the American Revolution) is a whining coward. Winocki in Air Force has an inflated ego coupled with professional incompetence. The Story of G.I. Joe falsifies the Polish role in the Battle of Monte Cassino. The list can go on. The third factor, which Biskupski least develops, is the attitude of Hollywood Jews of Polish ancestry towards their old country. Biskupski focuses on Warner Brothers, whose family hailed from north of Warsaw. He notes a desire to forget Poland, colored by memories of anti-Semitism (albeit carried out by the partitioners, e.g., Czarist Russia), but also forthrightly notes that the low...

Hollywood's war with Poland, 1939-1945

Hollywood's war with Poland, 1939-1945

Challenging the border as barrier: Liminality in Terrence Malick's the thin red line

This paper is about the cultural production and negotiation of borders and boundaries in and through contemporary Hollywood war and action movies. It works on the assumption that the way borders are represented in artifacts of popular culture has an impact on political discourse and, therefore, on border practices. War and action movies are read through the concept of the border, i.e. the way in which conventions of representing self and other, friend and foe, give rise to epistemological and topographical barriers limiting the subject positions available within a particular movie discourse are sketched out. After having assessed these border effects in Aliens, Black Hawk Down, and 300, the article turns to The Thin Red Line. The concept of liminality is introduced in order to describe the techniques through which Malick's movie challenges and disrupts the notion of borders as barriers interlocking self and other in relations of mutually exclusive hostility. In reconfiguring the border as a zone of contact and negotiation, liminality enables a subversion of the subject positions implied by these barriers and enables a reconstitution of both the divided entities, effectively turning dogs‐of‐war back into human beings.

The Imperial Warrior in Hollywood: Rambo and Beyond

The Bush years have witnessed the elevated militarization of American society, marked by expansion of the war economy and security state, an aggressive foreign policy, increasing incidents of civic violence, and a media culture saturated more than ever with images and narratives of violence. The trends we identified in our book, The Hollywood War Machine, have only deepened and show no signs of receding. The most successful and widely-viewed films of 2007–2008, including several Oscar candidates, embrace dark images of savage, often relentless violence, graphic depictions of killing, and celebrations of social chaos. We argue that these trends, reflected in the ongoing interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, have dramatically influenced the national psyche. Here we devote special attention to two recent films that embellish strong patriotic and pro-military themes while reaching mass audiences with messages that champion US imperial power: Rambo IV, a particularly bloody recycling of the familiar 1980s Rambo episodes, and Charlie Wilson's War, a cinematic tale about well-intentioned US global designs in Afghanistan during the 1980s. Looking at the four Rambo films as an ensemble, it would be difficult to find a warrior hero better exemplifying the virtues of American military action than Sylvester Stallone, superseding even the legendary John Wayne. This motif converges with yet another—transforming Vietnam into another “good war”—that has shaped an entire cycle of Hollywood films, up to the present, dealing with the Vietnam War.