A Companion to the War Film

A Companion to the War Film contains 27 original essays that examine all aspects of the genre, from the traditional war film, to the new global nature of conflicts, to the diverse formats war stories assume in today s digital culture. It includes new work from experienced and emerging scholars that expands the scope of the genre by applying fresh theoretical approaches and archival resources to the study of war films. The essays discuss the combat film but then also move beyond those limited confines to cover home–front films, international and foreign– language films, and the uses of alternative media including Internet videos, military recruitment ads, government–produced films, and TV programs across a range of conflicts, nations, and time periods. The essays address complex questions of gender, race, forced internment, international terrorism, and war protest in films such as American Sniper, Good Kill, Grace is Gone, Gran Torino, The Messenger, Snow Falling on Cedars, So Proudly We Hail, Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War, Tender Comrade, and Zero Dark Thirty. Taken together, these essays provide a nuanced vision of war film that brings the genre firmly into the 21 st century and points the way for exciting future scholarship.

Douglas A. Cunningham is Adjunct Professor of Humanities at Brigham Young University and Adjunct Professor of Literature and Film Studies at Westminster College, USA. He is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and taught literature and film at the U.S. Air Force Academy for five years of his 20–year military career. He earned a Ph.D. in Film Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009. He is the editor of The San Francisco of Alfred Hitchcock s Vertigo : Place, Pilgrimage, and Commemoration (2011), and his essays have appeared in Screen, CineAction, The Moving Image, and Critical Survey. He is currently at work on a monograph titled, Celluloid Airmen: World War II, Hollywood, and the Army Air Force s First Motion Picture Unit.

John Nelson is an Academy Professor in the Department of English and Philosophy at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York. He earned a doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington. He has published book chapters on Nobel laureate Derek Walcott s play Pantomime and the use of landscape in contemporary military memoirs. He has taught courses on literature, composition, film, and cultural criticism at West Point for over ten years.