Synopses & Reviews
Specters of War looks at the way war has been brought to the screen in various genres and at different historical moments throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Elisabeth Bronfen asserts that Hollywood has emerged as a place where national narratives are created and circulated so that audiences can engage with fantasies, ideologies, and anxieties that take hold at a given time, only to change with the political climate.
Such cultural reflection is particularly poignant when it deals with Americaandrsquo;s traumatic history of war. The nation has no direct access to war as a horrific experience of carnage and human destruction; we understand our relation to it through images and narratives that transmit and interpret it for us. Bronfen does not discuss actual conflicts but the films by which we have come to know and remember them, including All Quiet on the Western Front, The Best Years of Our Lives, Miracle at St. Anna, The Deer Hunter, and Flags of Our Fathers. Battles and campaigns, the home front and women-who-wait narratives, war correspondents, and court martials are also explored as instruments of cultural memory. Bronfen argues that we are haunted by past wars and by cinematic re-conceptualizations of them, and reveals a national iconography of redemptive violence from which we seem unable to escape.
Review
andquot;In this aerial reconnaissance of an entire century's filmmaking, Bronfen's high-powered lens examines both obvious battle zones and camouflaged violence in various psychic deflections. Movingly, and with rare command, mission accomplished.andquot;
Review
andquot;In Elisabeth Bronfen's important new book, war is remembered throughand#160;genre, with combat and its aftermath leaving an imprint on a startlingand#160;range of films. Nowhere has the impact of war on cultural life beenand#160;more vividly defined.andquot;
Review
"Ranging from Griffith to Eastwood, Bronfen's meticulous readings disc author of The Hollywood Historical Film
Review
andquot;In this accessible volume, Bronfen does a remarkable job of locating the point at which filmed representations of modem warfare intersect with popular culture. Recommended.andquot;
Review
"...a thoughful addition to the literature of cinema and war.
Spectars of War is clearly structured and stylishly written."
Garrett Stewart - author of Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema
Review
andquot;...a thoughful addition to the literature of cinema and war.
Spectars of War is clearly structured and stylishly written.andquot;
Review
andquot;Ranging from Griffith to Eastwood, Bronfen's meticulous readings disc
Review
andquot;Perceptive and engaging, Eberwein's examination of depictions of masculinity in war films goes beyond the commonplace in criticism that merely conflates friendship with homoeroticismandmdash;an important topic that will command significant interest.andquot;
Review
"Robert Eberwein's compelling study, Armed Forces, offers and interesting case study of this cultural phenomenon of fluid gender in a context that is traditionally associated with hyper-masculinity. The overall impression of this excellent study is one of a much more complicated gender coded cinema than previously attributed to war films. Professor Eberwein revisits with close analysis many classic war films, enters the murky realm of gender, and yet allows us to understand and appreciate these films without the binary reductions that traditionally shape notions of gender and sexuality."
Synopsis
Specters of War: Hollywoodandrsquo;s Engagement with Military Conflict looks at the way war has been brought to the screen in various genres and at different historical moments throughout the twentieth century. Elisabeth Bronfen asserts that Hollywood has emerged as a place where national narratives are created and circulated so that audiences can engage with fantasies, ideologies, and anxieties that take hold at a given time, only to change with the political climate.
Synopsis
Specters of War looks at the way war has been brought to the screen in various genres and at different historical moments throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Elisabeth Bronfen asserts that Hollywood has emerged as a place where national narratives are created and circulated so that audiences can engage with fantasies, ideologies, and anxieties that take hold at a given time, only to change with the political climate.
Such cultural reflection is particularly poignant when it deals with America's traumatic history of war. The nation has no direct access to war as a horrific experience of carnage and human destruction; we understand our relation to it through images and narratives that transmit and interpret it for us. Bronfen does not discuss actual conflicts but the films by which we have come to know and remember them, including All Quiet on the Western Front, The Best Years of Our Lives, Miracle at St. Anna, The Deer Hunter, and Flags of Our Fathers. Battles and campaigns, the home front and women-who-wait narratives, war correspondents, and court martials are also explored as instruments of cultural memory. Bronfen argues that we are haunted by past wars and by cinematic re-conceptualizations of them, and reveals a national iconography of redemptive violence from which we seem unable to escape.
Synopsis
In war films, the portrayal of deep friendships between men is commonplace. Given the sexually anxious nature of the American imagination, such bonds are often interpreted as carrying a homoerotic subtext. In Armed Forces , Robert Eberwein argues that an expanded conception of masculinity and sexuality is necessary in order to understand more fully the intricacy of these intense and emotional human relationships. Drawing on a range of examples from silent films such as What Price Glory and Wings to sound era works like The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Three Kings, and Pearl Harbor , he shows how close readings of war films, particularly in relation to their cultural contexts, demonstrate that depictions of heterosexual love, including those in romantic triangles, actually help to define and clarify the nonsexual nature of male love. The book also explores the problematic aspects of masculinity and sexuality when threatened by wounds, as in The Best Years of Our Lives, and considers the complex and persistent analogy between weapons and the male body, as in Full Metal Jacket and Saving Private Ryan .
About the Author
ELISABETH BRONFEN is a professor of English and American studies at the University of Zurich. She is the author of Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic; The Knotted
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Unfinished Business of the Civil War
2. Home and Its Discontent
3. War Entertainment
4. Choreography of Battle
5. Reporting the War
6. Court-Martial Drama
7. Warandrsquo;s Sustained Haunting
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Filmography
Index