New Perspectives on the War Film

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

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2. Introduction

   • Clémentine Tholas, Janis L. Goldie, Karen A. Ritzenhoff

   Pages 1-16

3. Women and Nation in Films of the Great War

   • Thomas J. Saunders

   Pages 17-38

4. Vamps and Virgins: The Women of 1920s Hollywood War Romances

   • Liz Clarke

   Pages 39-57

5. Rafi Bukaee’s Avanti Popolo : Telling the War from the Traumatized Perpetrator’s Perspective

   • Yael Munk

   Pages 59-74

6. The Other Fights Back: Indigenizing the War Film

   • Jennifer L. Gauthier

   Pages 75-105

7. Shoulder Arms (1918), What Price Glory (1926), Wings (1927): How Silent War Films Discuss Homosexuality and Gender Representations During World War One

   • Clémentine Tholas

   Pages 107-130

8. Black Skin, White Faces: Dead Presidents and the African-American Vietnam Veteran

   • Kathleen McClancy

   Pages 131-158

9. “So Long as They Are Maintaining a Bona Fide Family Relationship in the Home”: Women in World War II American Film Propaganda

   • Zachary Baqué

   Pages 159-177

10. Post-socialist Hauntings in Vietnamese Revisionist Cinema

    • Thong Win

    Pages 179-202

11. The New Face of Fear: How Pandemics and Terrorism Reinvent Terror (and Heroes) in the Twenty-First Century

    • Dahlia Schweitzer

    Pages 203-221

12. Rebelle Rebel: African Child Soldiers, Gender, and the War Film

    • Janis L. Goldie

    Pages 223-244

13. Sisters in Arms: Epic Narratives in United Red Army (2007) and The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008)

    • Elena Caoduro

    Pages 245-263

14. The Form of the White Ethno-State: Dunkirk (2017) Omits Indian Soldiers for White Vulnerable Bodies

    • Zachary Michael Powell

    Pages 265-292

15. Back Matter

    Pages 293-301

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New Perspectives on the War Film addresses the gap in the representation of many forgotten faces of war in mainstream movies and global mass media. The authors concentrate on the untold narratives of those who fought in combat and were affected by its brutal consequences. Chapters discuss the historically under-represented stories of individuals including women, African-American and Indigenous Soldiers. Issues of homosexuality and gender relations in the military, colonial subjects and child soldiers, as well as the changing nature of war via terrorism and bioterrorism are closely analyzed. The contributors demonstrate how these viewpoints have been consistently ignored in mainstream, blockbuster war sagas and strive to re-integrate these lost perspectives into current and future narratives. 

• war film
• marginalized perspectives of war
• cinematic war narratives
• international war film
• children and war film
• women and war film
• race and war film

“In this provocative volume, the authors urge a critical re-evaluation of the war film by highlighting the range of stories it recounts—as well as those it ignores—and the diversity of subjects it brings into focus. The collection encourages a renewed engagement with the genre through attention to perspectives and experiences often imagined to fall outside the frames of war and to conflicts that exceed the conflation of war with state-sponsored combat. In pushing past conventional conceptions of the war film, the book makes a timely and important intervention into our understanding of the complexities of violence both on the screen and beyond it.” (Jonna Eagle, Associate Professor of Film/Media, Department of American Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa, USA)

• CREW Center for Research on the English, Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris, France

  Clémentine Tholas

• Communication Studies, Huntington University, Sudbury, Canada

  Janis L. Goldie

• Department of Communication, Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, USA

  Karen A. Ritzenhoff

Clémentine Tholas is an Associate Professor of American Studies at Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle University, France. Her research interests focus on early motion pictures in the US, namely on WWI cinematic propaganda and the role of silent films as tools of progressivism. Clémentine Tholas published Le Cinéma américain et ses premiers récits filmiques (2014) and co-edited with Karen A. Ritzenhoff a collective volume entitled Humor, Entertainment, and Popular Culture during World War I (Palgrave, 2015). 

Janis L. Goldie is Associate Professor and Chair of the Communication Studies Department at Huntington University at Laurentian, Canada. Her research focuses on the Canadian war film genre and the constructions of the Canadian military in media culture products such as video games, graphic novels and television advertisements. She co-edited with Karen A. Ritzenhoff, “The Handmaid’s Tale:” Teaching Dystopia, Feminism, and Resistance Across Disciplines and Borders (2019).

Karen A. Ritzenhoff is Professor, Department of Communication at Central Connecticut State University, USA. She is affiliated with the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program and cinema studies. She recently co-edited with Janis L. Goldie, “The Handmaid’s Tale:” Teaching Dystopia, Feminism, and Resistance Across Disciplines and Borders (2019). In 2015 she coedited The Apocalypse in Film with Angela Krewani; Selling Sex on Screen: From Weimar Cinema to Zombie Porn with Catriona McAvoy, and Humor, Entertainment, and Popular Culture during World War I with Clémentine Tholas (published by Palgrave, 2015). Ritzenhoff is also co-editor of Heroism and Gender in War Films (Palgrave, 2014) with Jakub Kazecki.

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