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The World War II combat films of the late 1990s and early 2000s reacted to Hollywood's digital revolution with nostalgia for old-fashioned celluloid. In these films, both photochemical and digital techniques illustrate the American soldier's bodily suffering, enacting his melodramatic redemption in the post-Vietnam and post-9/11 eras. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article focuses on the limits of sentimentalism in historical films, specifically those that center around World War II. The author analyzes the treatment of combat in the films "Saving Private Ryan," directed by Steven Spielberg, and "Inglourious Basterds," directed by Quentin Tarantino, and explores how each film utilizes emotion and moral value.

In that it privileges the grand perspective (the landscape, and the battalion arrayed in all its splendour), The Longest Day (1962) is typical of big-picture World War II films produced up until the mid-1970s. There are few close-ups, and takes are ponderously long. The focus is on grand strategy, and an attendant grand narrative; the lens offers a blow-by-blow assessment of the massive assault. Shot in 1998, Saving Private Ryan periodically echoes this perspective but reflects modalities informed by changing technologies and a hyper-mediated culture. The result is more intimate framing, punctuated by shots sometimes adapted from the source material: footage captured on Omaha Beach, 6 June 1944, by the Signal Corps cameramen. This portrayal serves two purposes: it opens the film in spectacular fashion, introduces the main characters and prefaces their mission. This article identifies and examines filmic frames from the day of the landings; from the grand narrative of The Longest Day; and from Spielberg’s confronting representation Saving Private Ryan. The aim is to show how, through the lens alone, cinematographers approximate the character of a tumultuous and terrifying day in ways that are surprisingly similar and profoundly different. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Hollywood cinema has given informal testimony to war, particularly World War II. Saving Private Ryan, a 1998 war film directed by Steven Spielberg, broke the naturalist and romantic model of this sub-genre. Based on the testimony of veterans, it is not a film about the development of a military operation; instead, it is a hyperealistic reproduction of combat and the daily rigors war. It gives audiovisual form to the individual memory and experience of veterans, who were not usually part of the institutional account of the war and its earlier portrayals on the silver screen. This paper offers a stylistic analysis of the sequence in Saving Private Ryan that is most applauded for its effect and artistic value: the D-Day landing on Omaha Beach. It describes the resources used in its planning, sound and editing. It shows how the expressive stylistic techniques shaped by S.M. Eisenstein are used to involve the film's audience in the fighting and in the feelings and reasoning of the soldier; in this case, Captain Miller. In the end, it manages to immerse the audience in the war, securing its commitment to the soldier, and enabling it to understand the source of his trauma. The analysis uses the method S.M. Eisenstein employed in two of his articles to convince his detractors of the value of the stylistic approach used in Battleship Potemkin (1925). It consists of a description of the expressive scheme behind the design of the shots and the fragments in the montage, and a comparison to those that precede or follow them. The overall style of the sequence and its expressive intentions are explained by way of this dialectical method, which also is used to pinpoint the moments of contrast and rupture that serve an emotional motive; namely, to translate the soldier's ordeal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical memory is one of the keys to strengthening what Anthony Smith calls the "deep cultural resources" of national identity (Chosen Peoples 5). This article argues that in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan of 1998 and Andrzej Wajda's Katyń of 2007 a dialogue with sacred cultural resources takes place. Focusing as they do on wartime experiences of Americans and Poles, the historical memory brought to the fore in these films evokes the specific trials that the respective nations endured in WWII. Through the depiction of the military community at war, the films contribute to the underlying sacred national communities that remain to this day. The themes of commemoration implicit in the films foster an ethical dimension within the respective sacred communities, since commemoration of the wartime dead develops moral memory. Through the depictions of their sacrifice in both films, the glorious dead augment both the sacred sources of their immediate military communities and, either as heroes or victims, those of their larger national communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article critiques the film "Saving Private Ryan," directed by Steven Spielberg," which explores the concept of salvation in World War II. Topics discussed include the ways that religion and belief are portrayed in the film, the ways that the story supports the argument that salvation is received and not earned and the balance between what is sacrificed and what is saved as portrayed in the film.

Abstract: The author examined how Saving Private Ryan and its evocation of a victorious America in World War II are used to exalt American arms and the American spirit in the contemporary era. Thus, Saving Private Ryan, which came after the low-key American victories in the Cold War and the Gulf War, was a perfect anodyne for the somewhat equivocal glory of those triumphs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evaluates some of the polysemic and polyvalent dimensions of the film 'Saving Private Ryan.' Argument that the film should be perceived as an intertextual representation where audiences and critics 'co-produce' their readings of the rhetorical meaning of D-Day, the Allied Invasion of Normandy in 1944 and World War II; Nostalgia and remembrance in critical memory studies; Film synopsis; Review of criticisms of the movie.

Reviews motion pictures about World War II. 'Saving Private Ryan,' directed by Steven Spielberg, screenplay by Robert Rodat and Frank Darabont; 'The Thin Red Line,' directed by Terrence Malick.