Full Description
Hollywood Remembrance and American War addresses the synergy between Hollywood war films and American forms of war remembrance. Subjecting the notion that war films ought to be considered ʻthe war memorials of today' to critical scrutiny, the book develops a theoretical understanding of how Hollywood war films, as rhetorical sites of remembering and memory, reflect, replicate and resist American modes of remembrance.
The authors first develop the framework for, and elaborate on, the co-evolution of Hollywood war cinema and American war memorialization in the historical, political and ideological terms of remembrance, and the parallel synergic relationship between the aesthetic and industrial status of Hollywood war cinema and the remembering of American war on film. The chapters then move to analysis of Hollywood war films - covering The Great War, World War II, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, The Cold War, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - and critically scrutinize the terms upon which a film could be considered a memorial to the war it represents.
Bringing together the fields of film studies and memory studies, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in not just these areas but those in the fields of history, media and cultural studies more broadly, too.
Contents
1. Hollywood Remembrance and American War 2. Their War, Our War: Private Memory and Public Commemoration in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk 3.Lions for Lambs: Ambivalent Memorialization and Melodrama 4. Hysterical Colonels and Kernels: Apocalypse Now Redux and Ápres Coup Remembering 5. Dr. Strangelove: MAD Clowns and Phantom Memorialization 6. "A Quiet Day at the Front": Realism as an Act of Memorialization in Cease Fire 7. The Thin Red Line: The Hero's Desire to be More Realized 8. The Abyss of the "Other": Wounded Memory and the Negative Exception in Letters from Iwo Jima 9. The Living Memorial: War Horse and the Horse Crux 10. Afterword
