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This study examines the persuasive effect of a historical movie about World War II in audiences with different attitudes toward and prior knowledge of the figures and events portrayed in the movie, based on different cultural backgrounds (U.S. and China). Empathy levels for controversial historical figures (e.g., Adolf Hitler, Josef Goebbels) and groups (e.g., Germany as a nation) were analyzed, as were related story-consistent beliefs. U.S. participants reported having more empathy toward the figures and groups after viewing, while their general opinions toward war were more negative. A different and mostly contradictory pattern was observed among Chinese participants. Results suggest that preexisting attitudes and knowledge likely play an important role in the narrative persuasion process for historical movies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on my experiences making the film documentaryThose Dying Days(South Africa, 2012). The documentary itself explores the question of personal and public remembrance of World War Two in Cape Town. It speaks not only to the fluid and adaptive nature of memory, but also to the relative silence regarding the war in terms of public commemoration. The article discusses the challenges and rewards of film as a medium for historical argument and information and argues for an affinity between film and oral history. It provides the thinking behind the choices made in the construction of argument in a non-written discourse (film) and reveals the methods adopted in an attempt to create a complicated historical account which recognises the contingent nature of history and one which allows for a multiplicity of perspectives and voices to be heard. After discussing the making of the documentary, the article concludes that film is more than capable of creating nuanced and complicated historic arguments. Film, in this light, is considered as an alternative discursive mode to the written word (which remains the dominant mode of historical production within academia) and one which questions how, why and for whom historical knowledge is produced. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this paper is to describe use of realism in the World War II propaganda film, The Next of Kin and the purposive approach to public information film making used by the director, Thorold Dickinson to convey a didactic message about careless talk in cinematic form. Through this historical exposition of a purposive and realistic form of public information discourse in wartime cinema, the paper seeks to add to public relations (PR) historical knowledge on the filmic past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that historicising the iconic 1959 French film Hiroshima mon amour reveals a different set of meanings that most scholars have overlooked. As France found itself embroiled in the brutal and bloody Algerian War of Independence, many started reflecting on the meaning and aftereffects of the Second World War. Despite its anti-colonial universalist humanism, Hiroshima remains haunted by colonial ghosts and fantasies of post-war 'Asia' where Asian female bodies are passive and Asian male bodies only echo other European male bodies. Ultimately, sexual and racial differences organise the film's narrative of war and canonises a Eurocentric version of 'history'. The film's melodramatic love story renders invisible the ways gender and sexuality shape understandings of violence, wars, and violated bodies. Against Marguerite Duras's and Alain Resnais's intentions, the love story allows the remembering and forgetting of a (French) national history that only the female character embodies. Only the French woman stands in for subjectivity, memory and trauma, rendering everything else secondary. Once read as a historical text, the film illustrates the limits and ambivalences of post-war anti-colonial humanist political imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 1939, Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, starting World War II. The war’s end in 1945 marked not the true liberation of the country, but the beginning of a period of Soviet domination that ended only in 1989. As a result, for forty-five years of Polish history, the alliance made by the Hitler with Stalin in 1939 and its tragic consequences for Poland were taboo across society. Polish filmmakers presenting the beginning of World War II were constrained by realities of the Communist state and its own historical narratives. These films reflect what happened to their country in 1939 and highlight the political changes that occurred within Poland under Communist rule, as well as the impact of shifts in the regime itself. The most significant period in this regard was 1945–67, when the outbreak of war was first presented following the end of Stalinism, emerging as a component of national memory both generally and for the Communist authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article looks at 'Trümmerfilme' from different zones of occupation and discusses the roles which the young were allocated on German post-war screens. While in all films under-age characters are central to negotiating the severe national crisis following the end of World War II and the defeat of the Nazi dictatorship, the analysis highlights emerging differences in the depiction of the young between films from the Soviet Zone and the Western zones of occupation. Despite the general use of the young as figures of distraction from the adults' involvement in Nazi crimes, children in films from the Soviet Zone help to articulate a new national ideal based on collective, public productivity, while the young in films from the Western zones help to formulate the dangers inherited from the immediate past. These differences are reflected in the opposing depictions of the young as innocent in the East and feral in the West, as well as in the intergenerational relations resulting from this. While the children's potential in the East replaces the parent generation, which is implicitly marked as guilty, the dangers posed by the young in the West strengthen the authority of the parents and the nuclear-family model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memories of the Second World War played a central role in shaping the European imaginary and in founding the European political order after 1945. Nevertheless, while the Second World War was a global event, its memories have been mainly studied from a national point of view, thus underestimating the conspicuous phenomena of transmission of narratives and representations of the conflict from one country to another. This article analyzes the Italian reception of American movies about the Second World War, as a way to overcome the preponderance of a nation-centered perspective and to open up to a transnational analysis mainly based on the concepts of communication, diffusion and exportation of cultural products. After a theoretical introduction, the article analyzes an original source of great use for the study of the reception of American movies: the evaluation forms produced by the audience of an Italiancineforumabout five American war movies in the 1960s. The importance of the source lies in its rarity: direct testimonies of the opinion of a non-specialist public about a movie are very rare, and thus extremely precious for a bottom-up approach to such issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The film Marytė (1947) was part of an intensive campaign of Sovietization, an attempt to consolidate Soviet rule through cultural propaganda. The film's impact at the time was limited because the relatively undeveloped film distribution network and the disruptions caused by the anti-Soviet armed resistance. For those who did view the film, the narrative of Marytė evoked a 'reality' quite different from the recent experience of Soviet mass deportations, the anti-Soviet insurgency, and the predominant mood of fear and insecurity. Nonetheless, its narrative was attuned to local concerns and vernacular motifs, seeking to exploit national state-building themes propagated during the interwar period, drawing a link between Sovietization, national, and individual emancipation, with gender playing an important role. The film appealed to the economic, national and social self-interest of the viewers through its depiction of the redistribution of land, the return of Vilnius as the capital of Lithuania, and the opportunities for young men and women offered by the new regime. This article examines Marytė as an illustration of the methods, means and objectives of Soviet propaganda and cultural policy in the Western borderlands, and the manner in which a Soviet technological and ideological template was adapted to suit local circumstances and views on history, culture and identity. In this regard, Marytė graphically set the trend of postwar Soviet attempts of tapping into nationalist sentiment in order to construct a Soviet-Lithuanian identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among Hitchcock's films released during World War II, Shadow of a Doubt (1943) occupies an uneasy position between apolitical melodrama and overtly political thriller. Reading the film as a comment on the home-front experience opens up new possibilities to reassess it as a complex piece of wartime propaganda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the study on the nationalization of Czech cinema after the end of the Second World War in May 1945 and on continuities and discontinuities with the Protectorate era that preceded it. Topics include featuring films that were shot on sound stages or on locations and initiated in the years 1944 or 1945, before the end of the war; private producers such as Rozina Sebranec released their movies after war; and films that were discontinued and never finished such as Jenom krok.

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.

The article presents a report from a March 17-18, 2016 conference in Erlangen, Germany of the Arbeitskreis Soziales Gedächtnis-Erinnern-Vergessen social memory research group on the role of digital media in collective memory. Topics of presentations delivered included covers of popular songs on the streaming video web site Youtube.com, the role of disasters on the messaging platform Twitter in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and the creation of "memory sources" through East and West German weekly film shows of the 1950s and 1960s depicting World War II.

The author discusses about the American movies made in Hollywood post second World War that were dubbed as noir by the French. He highlights the basic theme of anxiety depicted in the movies following the effects of the war on the American society he states that made within wartime governmental film budgets, the films used the censorship to their advantage. The author provides several examples such as Detour (1945),The Killers (1946), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946).

The article begins from a comparison of German Triimmerfilme ("rubble films") that came to define the genre and contemporaneous Austrian films also representing post-World War II physical and cultural devastation, but that are largely excluded from scholarly discussions of Trummerfilm. By considering the exemplar films' aesthetic, narrative, and symbolic strategies, as well as the conditions of production and ideologies undergirding postwar filmmaking, the analysis reveals scholarly biases surrounding historiographic divisions between these national cinemas. The author concludes by proposing a reconceptualization of Trummerfilm as a comparative cultural category that could serve to productively expand the scope of postwar film studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the portrayal of Nazis in American motion pictures both during World War II and in the post-war period. Films considered include the 1943 "This Land Is Mine." the 1945 "Hotel Berlin," the 1946 "The Stranger," and the 1968 "Where Eagles Dare." Topics include Nazi uniforms used in films, the House Un-American Activities Committee and the motion picture industry, the Holocaust, and the depiction of evil.

The article compares and contrasts two documentary films by director John Ford about World War II and the Korean War, respectively, the 1942 film "The Battle of Midway" and 1951 film "This is Korea!" Topics considered include empirical and expressive methods of filmmaking, the cinematography of Ford, an overview of Ford's fictionalized historical films, and film audiences.

This essay discusses Spike Lee's 2008 World War II filmMiracle at St. Annaas both a response to the myth of national unity in Frank Capra's 1942 documentaryPrelude to Warand a reminder of the campaign for “Double Victory” launched that same year by thePittsburgh Courier. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

The article discusses the use of mid-20th-century European films in the study and teaching of World War II. The authors suggest that the films "The Blue Lamp," "Stalingrad: Dogs, Do You Want to Live Forever?," "The Murderers Among Us," "Manon," and "Paisa" can be used to illustrate different nations' experiences of victory, defeat, and occupation during the war. Topics include empathy and historiography.

The article discusses the depiction of undersea warfare and submarines in U.S. films during World War II, focusing on how these films helped boost morale among Americans during the war. Other topics include the role of submarine films in recruiting volunteers for submarine service, the role movies played in entertaining sailors on ships and submarines, and a discussion of the types of movies used for recruiting and screened onboard.

The article discusses the screenwriter and film critic James Agee, focusing on how his criticism influenced the aesthetics for his 1955 film "The NIght of the Hunter." Other topics include how the traumatizing effects of the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War influenced Agee's criticism, Agee's refusal to embrace the post-World War II American security regime, and a discussion of the aesthetics used in "The Night of the Hunter."

An interview with German film director Volker Schlöndorff is presented. On his film adaptation of writer Günter Grass's novel ‘The Tin Drum', Schlöndorff says that it was it was Oscar's biography, but it was also the story of World War II. On director Alfred Hitchcock's comment that never film a ‘literary masterpiece' because the cinema had made what he called ‘distortions' of such work, Schlöndorff explains that hestarted with the books he loved to read.

The article examines the theory of vernacular modernism in the development of cinema in Chongqing, China during World War II. It explores the role of Chinese cultural imagination in film theory and propaganda under wartime media ecology. It references the essay "The Infinite Cinema" by Li Lishui which was published in the Dianying jishibao in 1941 and proposes a new way of understanding vernacular modernism by presenting an alternative definition of cinema.

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 examines the production history of Ihor Savchenko's film Tretii udar [The Third Strike, 1948], a World War II epic and the most significant project of the Kyiv Film Studio in the first post-war years. Using the example of The Third Strike, the author demonstrates how Stalinist cinema as an institution influenced Soviet film directors' thematic and ideological choices as well as their style. Specifically, the supervision of such projects by the USSR's political centre served to integrate Ukrainian film makers into Soviet cinema by fostering Soviet versions of the country's political and social history and by preventing Ukrainian film makers from pursuing stylistic practices that might have become foundational to Ukrainian cinema. Filming a Stalinist war epic in postwar Ukraine was especially difficult in view of the Soviet struggle against Ukrainian nationalism. By featuring soldiers of different nationalities, The Third Strike underscored the idea of the "fraternal friendship of the Soviet peoples" during the war, which became a canonical element in Soviet depictions of the war. In this way, Ukrainian artists ingratiated themselves with the Soviet authorities and proved their loyalty to Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, 1946), which was the highest-grossing film in the United States after Gone with the Wind (Fleming, 1939), was instantly praised for its realism by Gen. Omar Bradley and by numerous film reviewers. Justly influential scholars and theorists continue to single out this film as an example of realism, the style for which Andre Bazin commended William Wyler (What Is Cinema, 1967). The present article draws upon evidence of three kinds: the film's production files, including the film-makers' correspondence about the script; a specific comparison of the film's narrative content with that of the novel on which the screenplay is based (Glory for Me (1945) by MacKinlay Kantor); and analysis of the cinematography and artistic composition of the film. The present article suggests that the film reverses some of the polemical novel's central and recurrent meanings. In the interest of stylistic realism, The Best Years of Our Lives includes critique of the artifices of illusion in the consumerist American culture of the post-war years, even while it exploits that artifice and becomes an outstanding example of it. Like the later postmodern parodies that Linda Hutcheon characterizes as 'complicitous critique' (The Politics of Postmodernism (1989) by Hutcheon), The Best Years of Our Lives exemplifies the corporate culture that it criticizes. The film's extreme artificiality achieves the illusion of realism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]