Hollywood's Imperial Wars

Hollywood's Imperial Wars
Author: Armando Jose Prats
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2024-04-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806194448

When the Vietnam War punctured the myth of American military invincibility, Hollywood needed a new kind of war movie. The familiar triumphal narrative was relegated to history and, with it, the heroic legacy that had passed from one generation to the next for more than two hundred years. How Hollywood helped create and instill the American myth of heroic continuity, and how films revised that myth after the Vietnam War, is what Armando José Prats explores in Hollywood’s Imperial Wars. The book offers a new way of understanding the cultural and historical significance of Vietnam in relation to Hollywood’s earlier representations of Americans at war, from the mythic heroism of a film like Sands of Iwo Jima to the rupture of that myth in films such as The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, and Platoon. As early as the mid-1940s, Prats suggests, fears aroused by the Cold War were stirring anxieties about sustaining the heroic myth—anxieties reflected in the insistent, aggressive patriotism in films of the period. In this context, Prats considers the immeasurable cultural importance of John Wayne, the cinematic apotheosis of wartime valor and righteousness, whose patriotism was nonetheless deeply compromised by his not having served in World War II. Prats reveals how historical and cultural anxieties emerge in well-known Vietnam movies, in which characters inspired by the heroes of the Second World War are denied the heroic legacy of their fathers. American war movies, in Prats’s analysis, were forever altered by the loss in Vietnam. Even movies like American Sniper that exalt war heroes are marked as much by the failure of the heroic tropes of old Hollywood war movies as by the tragic turn of actual historical events. Tracing what Prats calls the “anxiety of legacy” through the films of the World War II and post–Vietnam War periods, this book offers a new way of looking at both the Hollywood war movie and the profound cultural shifts it reflects and refracts.

The Hollywood War Machine

The Hollywood War Machine
Author: Carl Boggs
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 484
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1351543601

The newly expanded and revised edition of The Hollywood War Machine includes wide-ranging exploration of numerous popular military-themed films that have appeared in the close to a decade since the first edition was published. Within the Hollywood movie community, there has not been even the slightest decline in well-financed pictures focusing on warfare and closely-related motifs. The second edition includes a new chapter on recent popular films and another that analyzes the relationship between these movies and the bourgeoning gun culture in the United States, marked in recent years by a dramatic increase in episodes of mass killings.

Cinema Wars

Cinema Wars
Author: Douglas M. Kellner
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2011-09-13
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1444360493

Cinema Wars explores the intersection of film, politics, and US culture and society through a bold critical analysis of the films, TV shows, and documentaries produced in the early 2000s Offers a thought-provoking depiction of Hollywood film as a contested terrain between conservative and liberal forces Films and documentaries discussed include: Black Hawk Down, The Dark Knight, Star Wars, Syriana, WALL-E, Fahrenheit 9/11 and other Michael Moore documentaries, amongst others Explores how some films in this era supported the Bush-Cheney regime, while others criticized the administration, openly or otherwise Investigates Hollywood’s treatment of a range of hot topics, from terrorism and environmental crisis to the Iraq war and the culture wars of the 2000s Shows how Hollywood film in the 2000s brought to life a vibrant array of social protest and helped create cultural conditions to elect Barack Obama

Hollywood and War, The Film Reader

Hollywood and War, The Film Reader
Author: J. David Slocum
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2023-04-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000938565

Discussing such classic films as Sergeant York, Air Force, and All Quiet on the Western Front, as well as more modern blockbusters like Apocalypse Now and Saving Private Ryan, this outstanding volume focuses on Hollywood and its production of war films. Topics covered include: the early formation of war cinema the apotheosis of the Hollywood war film the ascendancy of ambivalence Hollywood and the war since Vietnam war as a way of seeing. For any student of film studies or American cultural studies, this is a valuable companion.

Five Came Back

Five Came Back
Author: Mark Harris
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2014-02-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0698151577

Now a Netflix original documentary series, also written by Mark Harris: the extraordinary wartime experience of five of Hollywood's most important directors, all of whom put their stamp on World War II and were changed by it forever Here is the remarkable, untold story of how five major Hollywood directors—John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler, and Frank Capra—changed World War II, and how, in turn, the war changed them. In a move unheard of at the time, the U.S. government farmed out its war propaganda effort to Hollywood, allowing these directors the freedom to film in combat zones as never before. They were on the scene at almost every major moment of America’s war, shaping the public’s collective consciousness of what we’ve now come to call the good fight. The product of five years of scrupulous archival research, Five Came Back provides a revelatory new understanding of Hollywood’s role in the war through the life and work of these five men who chose to go, and who came back. “Five Came Back . . . is one of the great works of film history of the decade.” --Slate “A tough-minded, information-packed and irresistibly readable work of movie-minded cultural criticism. Like the best World War II films, it highlights marquee names in a familiar plot to explore some serious issues: the human cost of military service, the hypnotic power of cinema and the tension between artistic integrity and the exigencies of war.” --The New York Times

Imperial Affects

Imperial Affects
Author: Jonna Eagle
Publisher: War Culture
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780813583020

"In American culture and history, a feeling of national identity and belonging have often derived from a sense of injury, vulnerability, and loss. Sympathy and aggression operate as twinned affects in such contexts, with representations of an assaulted national body animating identification with nationalist violence and its agents. In Imperial Affects, Jonna Eagle turns to the workings of American cinema to understand the power and persistence of these conjunctions, tracing the shifting dynamics of action and pathos as they structure representations of imperialist motion and violence across the twentieth century"--

Hollywood Remembrance and American War

Hollywood Remembrance and American War
Author: Andrew Rayment
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2020-08-31
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1000171418

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.

War Cinema

War Cinema
Author: Guy Westwell
Publisher: Wallflower Press
Total Pages: 148
Release: 2006
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781904764540

'War Cinema' presents an introduction to and overview of films that take war as their main theme. Framing the era with 'Apocalypse Now' and 'Apocalypse Now Redux', the author initially focuses on Vietnam on film in the 1970s and 1980s and how this divisive war was represented.

Operation Hollywood

Operation Hollywood
Author: David L. Robb
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2011-04-29
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1615924515

Directors of war and action movies receive access to billions of dollars worth of military equipment and personnel, but it comes with a hidden cost. As a veteran Hollywood journalist shows, the final product is often not just what the director intends but also what the powers-that-be in the military want to project about America's armed forces.

Hollywood and the End of the Cold War

Hollywood and the End of the Cold War
Author: Bryn Upton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2014-08-26
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1442237945

From the late 1940s until the early 1990s, the Cold War was perhaps the most critical and defining aspect of American culture, influencing television, music, and movies, among other forms of popular entertainment. Films in particular were at the center of the battle for the hearts and minds of the American public. Throughout this period, the Cold War influenced what movies got produced, how such movies were made, and how audiences understood the films they watched. In the post–Cold War era, some genres of film suffered from the shift in our national narratives, while others were quickly reimagined for an audience with different political and social fears. In Hollywood and the End of the Cold War: Signs of Cinematic Change, Bryn Upton compares films from the late Cold War era with movies of similar themes from the post–Cold War era. In this volume, Upton pays particular attention to shifts in narrative that reflect changes in American culture, attitudes, and ideas. In exploring how the absence of the Cold War has changed the way we understand and interpret film, this volume seeks to answer several key questions such as: Has the end of the Cold War altered how we tell our stories? Has it changed how we perceive ourselves? In what ways has our popular culture been affected by the absence of this once dominant presence? With its focus on themes that are central to the concerns of many historians—including civil religion, social fracture, and the culture wars—Hollywood and the End of the Cold War will serve as a useful tool for those seeking to integrate film into the classroom, as well as for film scholars exploring representations of sociopolitical change on screen.