War Movies
70 videos • 53,216 views • by Donald P. Borchers War Movies is a film genre concerned with warfare, typically about naval, air, or land battles, with combat scenes central to the drama. They deal with the roles of civilians, espionage agents, and soldiers in any of the aspects of war (i.e. preparation, cause, prevention, conduct, daily life, and consequences or aftermath.) The fateful nature of battle scenes means that war films often end with them. Themes explored include combat, survival and escape, camaraderie between soldiers, sacrifice, the futility and inhumanity of battle, the effects of war on society, and the moral and human issues raised by war. War Movies are characterized by combat, which determines the fate of the principal characters. This in turn pushes combat scenes to the climactic ends of war films.[ War films are often categorized by their milieu, such as the Korean War; the most popular subject is the Second World War. The stories told may be fiction, historical drama, or biographical. Critics have noted similarities between the Western and the war film. Nations such as China, Indonesia, Japan, and Russia have their own traditions of war film, centred on their own revolutionary wars but taking varied forms, from action and historical drama to wartime romance. Subgenres, not necessarily distinct, include anti-war, comedy, propaganda, and documentary. There are similarly subgenres of the war film in specific theatres such as the Western Desert of North Africa and the Pacific in the Second World War, Vietnam, or the Soviet-Afghan War; and films set in specific domains of war, such as the infantry, the air, at sea, in submarines or at prisoner of war camps. The director Sam Fuller defined the genre by saying that "a war film’s objective, no matter how personal or emotional, is to make a viewer feel war." Four narrative elements of War Movies are: a) the suspension of civilian morality during times of war, b) primacy of collective goals over individual motivations, c) rivalry between men in predominantly male groups as well as marginalization and objectification of women, and d) depiction of the reintegration of veterans. The public fascination with war films became an "obsession", with over 200 war films produced in each decade of the 1950s and 1960s. Many War Movies have been produced with the cooperation of a nation's military forces. Since the Second World War, the United States Navy has provided ships and technical guidance for films such as "Top Gun". The genre is for the most part well defined and uncontentious, since war films are simply those about war being waged, with combat scenes central to the drama. However, the war film lacks the formal boundaries of a genre like the Western, but some similarities exist. Both genres use opposing concepts like war and peace, civilization and savagery. War films usually frame World War II as a conflict between "good" and "evil" as represented by the Allied forces and Nazi Germany whereas the Western portrays the conflict between civilized settlers and the savage indigenous peoples. Note the similarity between a Western like Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" and war-movie escapades like "The Dirty Dozen". During the First World War, many films were made about life in the war. Topics included prisoners of war, covert operations, and military training. Both the Central Powers and the Allies produced war documentaries. The films were also used as propaganda in neutral countries like the United States. The first popular Allied war films made during the Second World War came from Britain and combined the functions of documentary and propaganda.Feature films made in the west during the Second World War were subject to censorship and were not always realistic in nature. The wartime audience was well aware of friends and relatives who had been killed or who had come home wounded. The Spanish Civil War has attracted directors from different countries. Sam Wood's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" (1943), based on Ernest Hemingway's book of the same name, portrays the fated romance between an American played by Gary Cooper and a partisan played by Ingrid Bergman against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War Few films before the late 1970s about the Vietnam War actually depicted combat. Hollywood avoided the subject because of opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War, making the subject divisive; in addition, the film industry was in crisis, and the army did not wish to assist in making anti-war films. From the late 1970s, independently financed and produced films showed Hollywood that Vietnam could be treated in film. Successful but very different portrayals of the war in which America had been defeated included Michael Cimino's "The Deer Hunter" (1978), and Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" (1979). The Iraq War served as the background story of U.S. movies, like "The Hurt Locker" (2008).