The obsession to the second world war movies

This is a war that will never end - from a film perspective. On september2,1945, Japan held a formal surrender ceremony on the destroyer Missouri. World War II ended, but the war in the film world never stopped. Over the past 80 years, the demand for war movies seems overwhelming and the supply is endless.

Some of the wars in the movies - the Vietnam War, the cold war, the Iraq War - come and go, but they will not disappear in 1939-45. It is impossible for us to give an exact list, but as a comparison, the Wikipedia list of films about the 1914-18 war has a total of more than 130, while the list of war movies (especially World War II films) from the same source has more than 1300, and continues to increase. A decade by decade detailed analysis tells a slightly subtle story: before the end of the war, more than 250 films were filmed, reaching more than 300 by the end of the 1940s; There were more than 200 cases in the 1950s and 1960s respectively, and then they began to decline in the 1970s (more than 130 cases) and 1980s (more than 120 cases). A relatively small number of 86 cases appeared in the 1990s, followed by a recovery (180 cases) in the first decade of the 21st century. So far, there have been more than 50 cases in 2010, which indicates that we will have similar figures in this decade.

There are obvious reasons for the large amount of material in the film and the dominance of Godzilla style war movies. War itself is a huge conflict staged in countless theaters around the world, which has caused trauma to the whole society and triggered earth shaking political, technical and moral upheavals. It has almost unlimited narrative potential: there are little-known military achievements that need to be told, there are re assessments that need to be carried out, and there are new important relationships that need to be described in detail. Frank Cottrell Boyce, the screenwriter and writer of the railman, points out that a large number of war movies have created their own momentum. "It reached a critical point at some point. This war is not only history, but also a metaphor. You can map it in any way you want." Boyce attributed this resonance to the simplicity of the World War II gladiatorial conflict. "We were attracted by its moral certainty. We tried to explain the cold war to the children: it was about a completely disappeared European metaphysical geography. But they fully understood what the Normandy landings were for."

Why there has been a surge of interest in war movies since the (relatively) trickle down in the 1990s is a question to be discussed. Cottrell Boyce believes that since 9/11 and the Iraq war, war is no longer a "distant" issue, but "the way we operate now". Matthew sweet, the radio host and the author of the west end front, believes that this is also related to what he calls "the growing sadness about war". This generation initially ignored their grandparents' war stories, but now they have posters in their office cubicles saying "stay calm and move on" or bought Boden Union Jack bags. This is a kind of sentimentality, which makes people pursue the dream of war and make them fantasize and stereotype about war. I'm afraid this is a very empty appointment. "

In Quentin Tarantino's "shameless asshole", Hitler was killed and a group of wandering Jewish Soldiers mercilessly killed the cynical Nazis. This is a key example of such war movies - according to sweet, this is a "fantasy of how the Holocaust should happen" - but there are many other movies. To some extent, reader is an illusion that camp guards can be unfairly used as scapegoats. The king's speech, as an advantage of character research, means that a simple broadcast can change the course of history. The historic site guard said that searching for looted works of art is a noisy and high-speed activity carried out by drunks and Mavericks. Saving Private Ryan, released in 1998, can be said to be the originator of war movies that meet people's wishes. The conclusion of the film is that the US army fought the war and won the war with its own strength.

Is it a coincidence that these films can be released in the era of regime change, CNN and call of duty? In addition, these films also realized a basic function of war movies: to beat all the previous World War II films, or at least beat them to the ground. "These movies are a way to restore and restore memory," sweet said. "They are trying to revise a concept of war. I suspect that Steven Spielberg's D-Day will become a lingering memory in people's minds 300 years later, just as we think about the Russian Revolution through Eisenstein's films. It is almost like rushing to make an official version."

This is certainly not a new phenomenon: Sweet traces this "nothing touch" war movies back to the war of Britain directed by guy Hamilton in 1969. In fact, we can roughly understand the evolution of World War II movies as a process of redefining the meaning of war. Of course, during the war, the film is often a flag of patriotism and a vague description of heroic acts - in Sweet's words, "this is a way to prosecute the war when the war occurs.". (including everything from where we served to I married the Nazis.) After the war, war movies became a way to try to understand all this - "to establish a narrative way that we can all agree with". This common sense of achievement began to disappear in the late 1950s: films such as Guihe bridge began to undermine the moral certainty surrounding the war, thinking that the picture of the war was more complex. Perhaps the most attractive World War II film - "the great adventure of the eagle" - was considered by sweet as part of the right-wing response to the mainstream anti cultural sentiment in the late 1960s - "all characters may be involved in a conspiracy against haroldwilson"; In addition, you can see that the war movies of the 1960s are the prototype of the action movies of the 1980s.

So can this obsession with war movies - even addiction - come to an end? For decades, war has permeated every field of the movie universe, from cheap porn films (Ilsa, she wolf of the SS), to Retro Black films (good Germans by Steven Soderbergh), to stupid Michael Bay films (Pearl Harbor). Superhero movies also use this method, such as the Auschwitz background prologue of X-Men; Behind the original film of Godzilla is the rumbling menace of Hiroshima.

Sweet believes that war movies will prove to be extremely tenacious. "Vampires never existed, they never disappeared," he said. "Unless there is a new large-scale conflict that can be viewed from the perspective of Manichaeism, the second world war will have its place."

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