Specters of war: Hollywood's engagement with military conflict
2013; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 50; Issue: 09 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5860/choice.50-4889
ISSN1943-5975
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
ResumoSpecters of War looks at the way war has been brought to the screen in various genres at different historical moments throughout the twentieth century into the twenty-first. Elisabeth Bronfen asserts that Hollywood has emerged as a place where national narratives are created circulated so that audiences can engage with fantasies, ideologies, 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. nation has no direct access to war as a horrific experience of carnage human destruction; we understand our relation to it through images narratives that transmit interpret it for us. Bronfen does not discuss actual conflicts but the films by which we have come to know remember them, including All Quiet on the Western Front, The Best Years of Our Lives, Miracle at St. Anna, The Deer Hunter, Flags of Our Fathers. Battles campaigns, the home front women-who-wait narratives, war correspondents, 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, reveals a national iconography of redemptive violence from which we seem unable to escape.
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