Specters of War

Hollywood's Engagement with Military Conflict
None Auflage
ISBN: 978-0-8135-5398-6
Verlag: Rutgers University Press

Buch, Englisch, 336 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 160 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 612 g

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. 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 particuarly 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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bronfen, Elisabeth

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- 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. War’s Sustained Haunting
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index

Über Autor(innen)

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 Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents, and Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema.