Women’s history and women’s television, referring to television made with a discernibly female focus and targeted at a presumed female audience, can both be said to be marginalised within the wider context of their respective fields. The necessity of the “women” prefix imbues them with an otherness which segregates them from mainstream or traditional narratives – both in history and on television. In her 2013 article, Vicky Ball makes a convincing case for female ensemble drama as a space in which women’s screen histories as well as women’s history on screen can be re-examined in a female-centred context. This article examines two female ensemble dramas; Land Girls, created by Roland Moore and first distributed by the BBC in 2009, and The Bletchley Circle, written by Guy Burt and first distributed by ITV in September 2012. Both dramas are located within prime time schedules and pitched towards a presumed, largely female audience, accustomed to consuming conventionally structured popular history dramas.  The article seeks to explore the ways in which these two Second World War dramas offer at once a progressive, centre stage space in which women and their experiences of the Second World War can be explored, whilst at the same time culminating in resolutions which re-situate women within more conventional roles, reasserting implicitly conservative gender norms.

The BBC’s Land Girls follows a group of women recruited to work as members of the Women’s Land Army (WLA) to supplement agricultural labour on Pasture Farm, part of the fictitious Hoxley Manor Estate.^[1] The characters in the BBC series represent a cross section of typical recruits; young women away from home for the first time, living and working with other women from different classes and backgrounds, and  the series derives its narrative from the girls’ attempts to adjust to their new surroundings, new jobs and to each other.

The second series this article will examine is ITV’s drama The Bletchley Circle. Set 7 years after the end of the Second World War, it features four former code breakers at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. The four women apply their analytical and deductive skills to identify codes and patterns in the behaviour of a serial killer. As well as functioning as a standard murder mystery narrative, in which a group of investigators combine their individual skills to tackle previously unsolvable crimes, The Betchley Circle also explores the post-war experience of many women forced to return to the home after wartime service, highlighting their attempts to reconcile their changed identities and wartime experiences with a society seeking to erase both.

These two dramas can be seen to offer a simultaneously progressive, yet clearly delineated space for telling women’s history. In terms of wartime narratives, the removal of men to active service serves as a “narrative device to produce central female protagonists to whom things can happen”.^[2] In their removal from men, the women in these two dramas are rendered available as heroines while their status as wives, sweethearts, mothers confirms them “as being properly feminine (men have wanted them)”.^[3] Ball’s point that the stigma attached to “women’s issues” and “women’s stories” in popular culture results in such dramas being perceived as having little cultural value, has interesting parallels with the status of women’s history and, by extension, women’s history on television^[4]. The discrepancy is particularly acute in the context of war stories. Televisual representations of women’s wartime experience such as Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle are differentiated from “proper” war stories represented in male centred dramas such as Band of Brothers (HBO 2001) or  Dad’s Army (BBC 1968) in which female characters are often incidental and firmly positioned as secondary to the main narrative.

In terms of war films, women have fared similarly. Although, as Penny Summerfield notes, women in British films made during the Second World War itself “were neither insignificant nor lacking in competence, maturity, and independence”, in films made since the 1950s female representation has been somewhat limited.^[5] In the immediate post-war climate, priority in films was given to male experiences of the Second World War, with women taking central roles in just four of the fifty most watched war films of the 1950s and 1960s.^[6] Although this number has certainly increased, with female characters taking prominent roles in big budget war films such as Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007), Charlotte Grey (Gillian Armstrong, 2001) and Suite Française (Saul Dibb, 2015), romantic melodrama remains the dominant medium through which feminine war stories are told in cinemas.^[7]  

The televisual exception to this, perhaps, is Tenko (BBC, 1981),which, as Ball highlights, foregrounds not only ‘marginalised aspects of women’s history in terms of war’ but also marginalised identities, i.e. lesbians^[8]. The setting of Tenko within a female prisoner-of-war camp is conducive to more recognisable wartime narratives.  This removes it from the domestic and elevates it beyond the dichotomy of the masculine front line and the feminine home front.

In a similar manner to Tenko, both Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle situate women in a traditionally male genre and, in positioning them centre stage and granting them narrative agency, place them in typically male roles.^[9] This challenging of gender stereotypes could problematise both texts’ creation of textual realism. However, as well as the historical fact of women taking up such roles, Charlotte Brunsdon notes that “the realism of a television programme is constructed through a range of devices and conventions which derive their significance primarily from generic and textual histories, rather than from any direct relation to the real”.^[10] Thus the sense of reality, and therefore their success in telling these stories, comes not entirely, or even in the majority, from their basis in historical fact, but rather in their successful utilisation of narrative devices from their respective genres to create recognition and familiarity. While deviations from historical accuracy, such as the absence of the blackout in Land Girls and the fact that few women actually worked as cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park (most performed administrative roles), could be seen as problematic in texts ostensibly concerned with the telling of history, there is undeniably validity in the power of such generic devices to “breathe life into the past … and [imbue] … sometimes stale facts with individual power and relevance to a contemporary audience”.^[11] In the case of Land Girls, this generic affiliation is primarily with women’s drama hence its foregrounding of love, relationships and family issues, whereas The Bletchley Circle functions also as a crime thriller, arguably giving it more narrative scope in terms of realism and acceptability. Therefore, despite questions about the authority of television history, the familiarity of generic devices used in both Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle grant them scope to tell unfamiliar and sometimes transgressive stories.

It is also interesting to consider both series in relation to the recent trend of using television as a nostalgic space, a repository of culture in danger of being forgotten. From accusations of cultural amnesia and erasure there seems to be a subtle shift towards the construction of television as both an object of nostalgia, threatened as it is by digital platforms and online streaming services, and a source of nostalgia and collective remembering.^[12] As well as Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle, furtherexamples of this shift can be seen in the expansion of remembrance themed programming on the BBC around Remembrance Sunday and the proliferation of television shows whose primary function is to represent and commemorate specific events, such as the BBC’s 2011 drama United (BBC Two on Sunday 24 April 2011), which represents the events around the Munich Air Disaster. Interestingly, in terms of previous discussion of accuracy and realism in historical television dramas, United was praised by critics for its depiction of 1950s Old Trafford and its evocation of football culture at the time.^[13] However the drama was harshly criticised by relatives of some of the people portrayed, for misrepresenting their characters and omitting altogether some of those who had died in the crash.^[14] Thus the series can be seen to have achieved realism in its aesthetic recreation of the past, but perhaps be lacking in its characterisation of the people involved. Whilst this can be seen as problematic, as people were actively offended by perceived inaccuracies, as with Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle, it does not necessarily affect the success of United as a historical television drama.

Both The Bletchley Circle and Land Girls can be read as nostalgic spaces in which marginalized and largely untold histories can be explored and preserved . Land Girls was created by Roland Moore and commissioned by the BBC in 2007 explicitly to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. As the first period drama commissioned by BBC daytime, controller Liam Keelan hoped the series would “pay tribute, not only to the many lives that were lost in the Second World War, but also to the land girls who played such an important role on the home front.”^[15] The first series, broadcast at 17:15 on consecutive days, beginning on Monday 7th September 2009, was situated as part of a “unique week of programming” designed to celebrate “everyday heroes on the Home Front.”^[16] It was billed alongside The Week We Went To War (BBC1 7 -14th September 2009) presented by Katherine Jenkins and Michael Aspel, who discussed his own experience of being evacuated, and focused on everyday experiences of ordinary people living on the Home Front during the Second World War, placing Land Girls in a context of previously untold stories outside of dominant historical narratives. Creator Roland Moore wanted the series to shine an “overdue spotlight on the land girls” but also to explore some less well known realities of life on the Home Front, such as the use of prisoners of war as agricultural labourers and the treatment of Italian nationals.^[17]

The Bletchley Circle, written by Guy Burt and broadcast on ITV, beginning in September 2012, did not have the same explicit purpose of commemoration, but rather an implicit sense that it was telling previously untold histories. It also provided an innovative take on traditional crime drama. In foregrounding four female characters the series allowed them to appropriate and control the interrogative gaze and discursive authority.^[18] Anna Maxwell Martin, who plays Susan in the series, attributed this as part of the show’s unique appeal; “People enjoyed seeing four intelligent women on TV”.^[19]

Television’s association with marketable nostalgia and the domestic makes it a safe and regulated space in which history can be told. Television shows’ familiar structure and repeating patterns create a controlled space in which marginalised histories, narratives and identities can be represented, but also controlled and defined within specific contextual limits. In both Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle the familiar pattern and seriality of television drama renders the unstable constructions of femininity (unstable insofar as the female characters transgress gender norms and occupy traditionally male narrative spaces) on display in both textssafe in its repetitious and closed nature. Transgressive or problematic storylines, such as unwanted pregnancy, adultery, domestic abuse, rape and sexually motivated murder, are neutralised by the need for closure and resolution at the end of each series.

Both Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle function as narratively complex dramas, with individual stories interweaving with overarching group narratives.^[20] This allows, within the closed structure of both dramas, for continuous resolution and perpetuation of storylines and character arcs. This pattern, familiar to any regular viewer of television drama, allows narratives of social change to be played out in a safe and formulaic way. In this way, storylines perhaps alien to a modern viewer, such as Susan’s struggle to reconcile her past identity as a code breaker with her postwar identity as an “ordinary” housewife in a society struggling to reconcile the wartime need for female labour along with the post war desire to reassert male competency, become a more familiar representation of the struggle of a woman reconciling her career and family life, rendering them visible in soap opera and TV dramas.^[21] The end result is that both series present their audiences with a safe version of female empowerment and emancipation, framed within a post-feminist media discourse. The Second World War, a period of instability and social upheaval, is presented through familiar characters and dramatic structures that reassure the viewer that the outcomes are known and will present no radical challenge to their conceptions of gendered identity. Thus while female ensemble dramas offer a somewhat experimental space, their familiarity downplays any real challenge to hegemonic narratives.

In the first episode of The Bletchley Circle, Susan expresses her doubt over her role in post war society by asking Millie, “When this is over, won’t we have to be ordinary?”.^[22] Susan’s participation in war work and her place in this new society of women – the huts at Bletchley are depicted as a female-dominated space, while men are acknowledged as being ‘up at the house’ they are not visible – has elevated her beyond the status of an “ordinary woman” and allowed her to fulfil a higher purpose.^[23] As previously discussed, in terms of historical accuracy, this depiction of the huts could be seen as problematic, however in terms of the narrative it is key, as the absence of men renders Susan, and the other women, as viable heroines.  Furthermore, Susan’s war record allows her to enter into the male dominated public sphere to present her ideas on the murders and have her theories accepted as credible by the police.^[24] Susan’s desire to cling on to her wartime identity positions her in direct contrast to her husband, Timothy, a former soldier who has had his “fair share of excitement for one lifetime”.^[25] Thus the usual gender roles are reversed with Timothy representing the domestic ideal upon which Susan is turning her back. Similarly, Land Girls’ Annie has achieved liberation from her status as both victim of domestic abuse and unhappy wife through her service in the Women’s Land Army. The WLA presents her with an alternative space in which she can be free of her father without relying on her husband.

Both women make a conscious choice to remove themselves from the safe, feminine domestic sphere and place themselves in a new context defined by the women around them. Annie’s sense of freedom within this new community of women, is made absolute when news reaches her that her husband is missing presumed dead.^[26] Within the safety of the group Annie is able to confess her guilt over feelings of relief, and the new, liberated Annie is ultimately able to break out of the role of the unhappy wife/grieving widow and find love with another man.^[27]

Bea in the BBC series seeks to shed her innocence and achieve sexual liberation. She wants to grow up and experience the world her sister Annie has been attempting to protect her from. Through the WLA she becomes aware of and engages with social issues, such as segregation in the US army, from which she would otherwise have been sheltered.^[28] She also, through encountering Italian POWs labouring on the farm, imagines the possibility of travelling, seeing the world and moving beyond the role prescribed for her by society.^[29]

However, this transcendence, for all of the women, is limited and – once achieved and acknowledged by patriarchal figures such as husbands, farmers, authority figures-  it is willingly relinquished. The matriarchal communities they find themselves in as a result of the war, i.e. the Women’s Land Army and the female-dominated space depicted within the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, create a space within which the women can find liberation and self-discovery. Once removed from these communities, they fall back into their various dysfunctional tropes. For instance, Millie’s natural charisma and talent for languages allow her to be useful and vital in her work for the British Government; outside of it she is reduced to an ageing socialite, working at first as a translator for the German enemy she once fought against and later as a black market fence.^[30]

Having also removed themselves from the physical safety of the traditional, domestic, feminine sphere, the women in both series face considerable physical and emotional danger. The experience of war has removed them from the safe parameters of normal society and they must now define themselves in relation to each other and find safety within their new community.

Whilst Bea’s (Land Girls) physical safety is never placed in jeopardy, her desire for sexual liberation makes her vulnerable to emotional dangers. In seeking out GI Cal at a village dance, she removes herself from the protective gaze of her older sister and separates herself from the rest of the Land Girls. After sleeping with Cal, Bea becomes pregnant, jeopardising her place in the WLA and opening her up to shame, disgrace, and the possibility of being sent back to her abusive father.^[31] Esther (Land Girls) refuses to confide in the rest of the girls about her inability to pay for an operation for her son and is reduced to selling her body while opening herself up to shame and ridicule.^[32] Susan is exposed to physical danger when she confronts a serial killer, whom she has tracked down with the help of the other women, and to emotional damage when she witnesses the  realities of death and violence that must be confronted in the traditionally male space of war.^[33] Moreover, Susan faces the danger of failing as a wife and mother. At several points in the series she is forced to consider the consequences of her actions, such as tracking down and confronting a murderer alone, and the real possibility that her children will be left without a mother.^[34] This is symptomatic of the traditional division of wartime labour, as hundreds of thousands of men faced the possibility of leaving their children without a father and yet their duty to fight was privileged as a higher calling.

Transcendence of traditional gender roles and societal positions is fraught with danger for all of the women and, like wartime reality, understood to be a temporary state, limited to a finite period of time. Although the two series are set in different time periods, Land Girls taking place during the Second World War and The Bletchley Circle beginning some seven years after its end, both place their narratives of social liberation within a context of exceptional circumstances.

Familiarity in terms of characters, narrative structure and historical content is key to the success of both series as television dramas and serves to make the past relevant and recognizable to the present.^[35] Familiarity is reinforced in both series by their deployment of a cross section of recognisable and relatable female tropes, a common characteristic of female ensemble dramas, which appeal to the broadest possible female fan base. It is by coming together as an alternate community removed from men that these arrays of women are able to transcend fixed identities and escape the limits of the patriarchal structure within which they operate. Familiarity is also achieved through the type of history being told. Both series use familiar imagery to imply that what they are imparting are new aspects to a known story. In this way the series “invite the viewer into the text ‘as knowledgeable citizen’”, and foreshadow the ultimate re-positioning of the female characters back into traditional gender roles and maintenance of the status quo.^[36] The use of recognisable archival footage and historical imagery create, in both series, a “naturalistic recognition effect” which helps to situate the drama in the past and bolster realism.^[37] In the same way that the series draw on familiar generic devices, the use of recognisable war time news footage (a prominent feature of the visual culture of the Second World War) adds authenticity to both series and contributes to the wartime aesthetic, giving them greater authority to tell their stories.

In foregrounding human relationships both series seek to make female social experience of the Second World War immediate and personable to their target audiences. The Female Ensemble Drama format and women’s issue themes lend emotional realism to situations that would otherwise seem historically/temporally distant and unrelatable. In the industrial context of prime time drama, Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle do not primarily seek to document history, but rather to dramatise it, providing enough cultural capital and recognisable history to appeal to those who want to consume the series as an educational vehicle, without alienating others who simply wish to enjoy the story and broad nostalgia.^[38] In this way neither series could be described as radical, or even particularly challenging in their retelling of history, and nor could they be if they are to function as viable, primetime family drama. While they go some way towards foregrounding marginalised narratives, both frame their stories within dominant, white, heteronormative structures, with the eventual upholding of the status quo largely predetermined by the historical subject matter and the narrative form. In their similar characters, narratives and plot lines The Bletchley Circle and Land Girls create a sense of sameness which is consistent with other female ensemble dramas, soap operas and women’s television in general and serves to de-historicise them as women’s issues. Thus historical distance is eliminated and the quest for love, romance, marriage, a family and home are eternalised as the things with which women always have and will be primarily concerned with.

This follows the move in the 1980s towards a post-feminist, new traditional, ideology in women’s television. Vicky Ball and Elspeth Probyn both emphasise the connection between images of the home and discourses of post-feminism and re-traditionalisation.^[39] The proliferation of a “post-feminist vision of the home to which women have ‘freely’ chosen to return” re-asserts maternal and domestic imperatives for women and re-locates the home as a woman’s natural place.^[40] New traditionalism marked the gender-political landscape of the late 80s and saw “the categories of ‘mothers’, ‘kids’, ‘love’ … presented as immutable truths”, the rejection of which marked a woman as deviant and other. Probyn argues that, while Post-Feminism does not challenge this ideal of the home as the natural source of a fulfilment for women, it does at least offer women the option of seeking fulfilment in careers, however always with the option of returning home.^[41] The home is privileged as a space of return and safety guaranteeing fulfilment rather than requiring women to fight for it.

The image of the home is particularly important in both Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle, because of its connotations as reward, safe place, as point of return once the danger and upheaval of war have passed, and, ultimately, the thing for which one is fighting. In both series the home functions as a neutralising/naturalising space to which women can return in order to reclaim their pre-war identities, or, alternatively, to contrast and confirm newly realised identities against pre-war conceptions of themselves. Thus the home is conversely presented as the place from which women have been liberated and the space to which they freely choose to return once their war work has been completed and their liberation acknowledged. For Susan in The Bletchley Circle her home is both her sanctuary and her prison. Encapsulating her identity as a wife and mother as the place where she can be with her husband and children, it also contains the hidden parts of herself in the newspaper clippings she keeps behind her mirror. It is the place she longs to escape, but also where she retreats after her ordeal at the hands of the killer and where she rediscovers herself as a wife and mother.  For Bea and Annie (Land Girls), home is the place they seek to escape as a result of an abusive and violent father. The space of the WLA at Pasture Farm offers them liberation, but it is a temporary one, to be occupied until both women can find a new home in which to reclaim the identities of wife and mother. Joyce’s (Land Girls) home, destroyed by German bombs, can no longer anchor her identity, therefore her sense of self becomes heavily dependent on  her husband John. Her point of reference is her identity as his wife and the prospect of the home they will make together in the future. Thus while the concept of home in both series is destabilised by the experience and dislocation of war, it is constructed instead as the goal or reward for properly conducted femininity to an even greater extent within the two works.

In this dislocation and de-stabilising of the home and the foregrounding of women as heroes which is fundamental to the female ensemble drama, women are required to occupy the non-traditional narrative space of ‘those who do, rather than those who are done to.’^[42] This inevitably raises questions regarding the “femininity and competence contradiction” which Brunsdon describes as “mutually exclusive terms outside certain limited spheres.^[43] By showing women working the land or women solving crimes using mathematical techniques and deductive logic, all traditionally male traits and occupations, both series are required to reassert the femininity of the characters through narrative devices and the reliance on recognisable feminine tropes and characteristics. Whilst carrying out their transgressive identities, all of the women are also required to carry out traditional performances of femininity. Preparations to attend a local dance, tableaux of domesticity such as cooking and knitting, singing, or a love of fashion are all examples of such devices within the two texts. Thus an unstable time for gender roles is rendered stable in another way by its translation through stable gender stereotypes.

Furthermore, consistent with the requirements of serial prime time drama, both series provide resolution and an ultimate relocation back into more traditional feminine roles for their female leads. In taking on the role of the investigator in The Bletchley Circle, Susan’s appropriation of agency and “occupation of public space” exposes her to danger, but also alienates her from her husband. She is ultimately forced to violate the Official Secrets Act, the tangible bond of secrecy that tied her to the other women, and reveal her wartime identity to her husband. In his acknowledgement of her past, Susan is able to reconcile with her postwar identity and fully assume the role of wife and mother. Bea’s (Land Girls) marriage to farmhand Billy saves her from being sent home and the shame of living as an unwed mother.^[44] However, her time as a liberated woman is cut short as she becomes a wife and a mother. Joyce’s (Land Girls) constancy is rewarded when her husband is returned to her and she is allowed to reclaim the identity of wife.^[45]

Charlotte Brunsdon, in her 1987 analysis of Widows, a seminal female ensemble drama featuring a group of women whose husbands are killed during an armed robbery and who then decide to team up and carry out the crime themselves, noted a similar process of relocation, with the culmination of the second series seeing “come-uppances … ‘get’ the women, and push them back to much more traditional feminine narrative roles.”^[46] Widows, Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle are alllimited by the requirements of prime time television drama, dwindling conceivable storylines once the initial premise has been exhausted and the need to provide a resolution that would sit well with the show’s audience.^[47] Brunsdon argues  that “in order to conclude this rather unfamiliar story, the unfamiliar element -women as heroes – must be transformed.”^[48]In the same way as Lynda La Plante’s Widows, the Land Girls and women of The Bletchley Circle can only find resolution when they have been transformed, when they have completed the work which removed them from their normal place in society and returned, willingly, to their traditional roles. Their achievements are acknowledged and celebrated, both within the texts and by their audiences but their transcendence was only ever to be temporary. As well as the limitations of generic structure, Land Girls and The Bletchley Circle are limited by their historical subject matter, which dictates a limited scope of narrative resolutions.

This is not to downplay the potential of female ensemble drama in representing marginalised aspects of women’s history such as women’s social experience of the Second World War. Clearly the location of female ensemble dramas outside of mainstream television narratives and consumption, even within the context of television as a feminised medium, affords them greater freedom in terms of representation of women. However, these representations must be translated through recognisable tropes and often stock characters. Whatever its limitations, female ensemble drama clearly offers a beneficial and exciting space in which untold stories and marginalised identities can be explored.

^[1] Commonly referred to as “land girls”, members of the WLA were billeted on farms or in hostels around the country as required to supplement male farm labourers lost to the armed forces. Often with little to no prior experience or training, the land girls performed a huge variety of tasks on the farms, most of which were highly physically demanding and sometimes dangerous.

^[2] Charlotte Brunsdon, “Men’s Genres for Women” in Boxed in: Women and Television, edited by H. Baehr and G. Dyer(London: Pandora Press, 1987), 187.

^[3] Brunsdon “Men’s Genres” p. 187.

^[4] Vicky Ball, “Forgotten Sisters: The British Female Ensemble Drama” Screen 54:2 (2013), 245.

^[5] Penny Summerfield, “Public Memory or Public Amnesia? British Women of the Second World War in Popular Films of the 1950s and 1960s” The Journal of British Studies, Vol. 48:4 October 2009p. 936, accessed January 27 2015 doi: 10.1086/603598.

^[6] Summerfield “Public Memory”, 938.

^[7] Marcia Landy “Melodrama and Femininity in World War II British Cinema” in The British Cinema Book, edited by R. Murphy(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) 232.

^[8] Ball,”Forgotten Sisters”, p. 246.

^[9] Discussion of women in men’s genres in Brunsdon, “Men’s Genres”, p.184 – 203.

^[10] Brunsdon, “Men’s Genres”, p. 187.

^[11] Glen Creeber, Serial Television; Big Drama on the Small Screen (United Kingdom: BFI Publishing 2005), p. 27.

^[12] For further discussion of this see Amy Holdsworth Television Memory and Nostalgia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and Andreas Huyssen Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995).

^[13] Jim White, “Jimmy Murphy’s central part in the resurrection of Manchester United as the key reason to watch United” Daily Telegraph, April 22^nd 2011, accessed May 5, 2015: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/manchester-united/8467086/Jim-White-Jimmy-Murphys-central-part-in-the-resurrection-of-Manchester-United-is-the-key-reason-to-watch-United.html.

^[14] Jim White, “Sir Matt Busby’s son ‘disgusted’ at United TV film” BBC New Online Manchester, April 24th 2011, accessed May 5, 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-13181651.

^[15] BBC Press Packs, Land Girls Introduction, accessed March 13, 2015. http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/08_august/18/land_girls.shtml

^[16] BBC Press Packs, Land Girls Introduction, accessed March 13, 2015. http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/08_august/18/land_girls.shtml

^[17] BBC Press Packs, Land Girls Introduction, accessed March 13, 2015. http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/08_august/18/land_girls.shtml

^[18] S.Thornham and T. Purvis, Television Drama: Theories and Identities (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 122.

^[19] ITV Press Pack The Bletchley Circle Series 2, accessed March 13, 2015.http://www.itv.com/presscentre/press-packs/bletchley-circle-s2.

^[20] Trisha Dunleavy, Television Drama: Form, Agency, Innovation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 149.

^[21] Christine Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’ (Communication and Society) (London: Routledge, 2000), 195.

^[22] The Bletchley Circle, Episode 1, Cracking a Killer’s Code Part 1, ITV, 6 September 2012.

^[23] The Bletchley Circle, Episode 1, Cracking a Killer’s Code Part 1, ITV, 6 September 2012.

^[24] The Bletchley Circle, Episode 1, Cracking a Killer’s Code Part 1, ITV, 6 September 2012.

^[25] The Bletchley Circle, Episode 1, Cracking a Killer’s Code Part 1, ITV, 6 September 2012.

^[26] Land Girls, Series 1, Episode 2: Secrets, BBC1, 8th September 2009.

^[27] Land Girls, Series 1, Episode 5: Destinies, BBC1, 11th September 2009.

^[28] Land Girls, Series 1, Episode 1: Childhood’s End, BBC1, 7th September 2009.

^[29] Land Girls, Series 2, Episode 2: Displaced Loyalties, 18th January 2011.

^[30] The Bletchley Circle, Series 2, Episode 3: Unaccustomed Goods, ITV1, 27th April 2014.

^[31] Land Girls, Series 1, Episode 2: Secrets, BBC1, 8th September 2009.

^[32] Land Girls, Series 2, Episode 3: Final Reckoning, BBC1, 19th January 2009.

^[33] The Bletchley Circle, Series 1, Episode 3: Cracking a Killer’s Code Part 3, ITV1, 20th September 2012.

^[34] The Bletchley Circle, Series 1, Episode 3: Cracking a Killer’s Code Part 3, ITV1, 20th September 2012.

^[35] For further discussion of this idea see Glen Creeber: Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen (London: BFI Publishing, 2005) and Colin McArthur: Television and History (London: BFI, 1978).

^[36] S. Cunningham quoted in John Tulloch: Television Drama: Agency, Audience and Myth (London: Routledge,1990), p. 92.

^[37] Tulloch Television Drama, p. 93.

^[38] Creeber, Serial Television, 20.

^[39] Vicky Ball, ‘The “Feminization” of British Television and the Re-Traditionalization of Gender” Feminist Media Studies 12:2, 248-264 and Elspeth Probyn, “New Traditionalism and Post -Feminism: TV Does the Home” in Feminist Television Criticism A Reader, Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D’Acci, Lynn Spigel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 128.

^[40] Probyn, “New Traditionalism,” 128.

^[41] Probyn, “New Traditionalism,”131.

^[42] Brunsdon, “Men’s Genres,” 188.

^[43] Brunsdon, “Men’s Genres,” 189.

^[44] Land Girls Series 1 Episode 5 Destinies BBC1 11th September 2009

^[45] Land Girls Series 3 Episode 5 Last Days of Summer BBC1 11th November 2011

^[46] Brunsdon, “Men’s Genres” 190.

^[47] Discussed in Brunsdon “Men’s Genres”.

^[48] Brunsdon, “Men’s Genres” 198.

Notes on Contributor

Cat Mahoney is a first year PhD student in the Department of Media and Communications at Northumbria University. Her research focusses on depictions of female participation in the Second World War on British Television and role of television in preserving and re-imagining women’s history.

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—-“Forgotten Sisters: The British Female Ensemble Drama.” Screen 54:2 (2013): 244–48.

Bignell, Jonathan, etc., and Stephen Lacey. 2000. British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.

Brunsdon, Charlotte. “Is Television Studies History?” Cinema Journal 47:3 (2007): 127–37.

Brunsdon, Charlotte, Julie D’Acci, and Lynn Spigel. 1997. Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader. 1st ed. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

Caughie, John. 2000. Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

Christine Geraghty and David Lusted. 1998. The Television Studies Book. New York: Distributed exclusively in the USA by St. Martin’s Press.

Cooke, Lez. 2003. British Television Drama: A History. United Kingdom: BFI Publishing.

Creeber, Glen. 2005. Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen. United Kingdom: BFI Publishing.

Creeber, Glen, Toby Miller, and John Tulloch. 2001. The Television Genre Book. United Kingdom: British Film Institute.

Dunleavy, Trisha. 2009. Television Drama: Form, Agency, Innovation. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.

Geraghty, Christine. 2000. British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the ‘New Look’. United States: Routledge.

Harris, Geraldine, 2007. Beyond Representation:Television Dra: Beyond Representation Hb: Television Drama and the Politics and Aesthetics of Identity. United Kingdom: Manchester University Press.

Holdsworth, Amy. ‘“Television Resurrections”: Television and Memory’. Cinema Journal 47:3(2007): 137–44.

———. 2011. Television, Memory, and Nostalgia. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hughes, Steve, Daniel Wilson, Ian Barber, Paul Gibson, and Matt Carter. 2015. Land Girls (TV Series 2009– ). BBC. Accessed March 15, 2015.

Huyssen, Andreas. 1995. Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. London: Routledge.

Landy, Marcia. 2009. “Melodrama and Femininity in World War II British Cinema” in The British Cinema Book, edited by Robert Murphy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lowry, Brian, Brian Lowry TV Columnist @blowryontv. 2013. “TV Review: ‘The Bletchley Circle”’, April. Variety. http://variety.com/2013/tv/reviews/tv-review-the-bletchley-circle-1200369763/.

Masterman, Len. 1984. Television Mythologies: Stars, Shows and Signs. United Kingdom: Comedia Pub. Group/MK Media Press.

McArthur, Colin. 1978. Television and History. United Kingdom: British Film Institute, London.

Murphy, Robert 2009. The British Cinema Book. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

‘Press Office – Land Girls Press Pack: Introduction’. 2015. BBC – Press Office. Accessed March 13, 2015. http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/08_august/18/land_girls.shtml.

Probyn, Elspeth. 1997. “New Traditionalism and Post -Feminism: TV Does the Home” in Feminist Television Criticism A Reader, Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D’Acci, Lynn Spigel. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Richardson, Niall, Clarissa Smith, and Angela Werndly. 2013. Studying Sexualities: Theories, Representations, Cultures. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sobchack, Vivian. 1997. The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Modern Event. 1st ed. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, Inc

Summerfield, Penny. “Public Memory or Public Amnesia? British Women of the Second World War in Popular Films of the 1950s and 1960s.” The Journal of British Studies 48:04 (2009): 935–57.

Thornham, Sue, and Tony Purvis. 2012. Television Drama: Theories and Identities. United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan.

Tulloch, John. 2005. Television Drama: Agency, Audience and Myth. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, Inc.

White, Jim. “Jimmy Murphy’s central part in the resurrection of Manchester United as the key reason to watch United.” Daily Telegraph, April 22^nd 2011. Accessed on May 5, 2015.  http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/manchester-united/8467086/Jim-White-Jimmy-Murphys-central-part-in-the-resurrection-of-Manchester-United-is-the-key-reason-to-watch-United.html

—-“Sir Matt Busby’s son ‘disgusted’ at United TV film.” BBC New Online Manchester, (April 24th 2011). Accessed on May 5, 2015. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-13181651

Filmography

Atonement (Joe Wright, 2007).

Band of Brothers ( 2001). TV Mini-Series, HBO.

The Bletchley Circle. (Andy De Emmony, Sarah Harding, and Jamie Payne, 2012, 2014). TV Series, ITV.

Charlotte Grey (Gillian Armstrong, 2001).

Dad’s Army (Jimmy Perry (creator),1968-1977). TV Series, BBC.

Land Girls. (Roland Moore (creator), 2009-2011). TV Series, BBC.

Suite Française (Saul Dibb, 2015).

Tenko (Lavinia Warner (creator), 1981). TV Mini-Series, BBC.

United (James Strong, 2011).

WWI in Belgian Cinema

La bataille de’lYser/ The Battle of Yser, shot prior to 1918 (no exact data is known) is an important war document made by the SCAB (Service Cinématographique de l’Armée Belge / Cinematographic Service of the Belgian Army).^[1] This short documentary of less than 19 minutes portrayed the bravery of Belgian soldiers defending, until the end of the war, the last patch of free Belgian territory at the Yser Front. During the interwar years sequences from this film were constantly reused in documentaries and features, sometimes in accordance with the initial intentions of its makers, sometimes totally against them.

In terms of cinema history, I will discuss the question of how these recycled pictures have been used in accordance with the intention of their makers, or against it. In terms of theory, I will focus on the question of how far the initial material can determine the meanings of secondary films, which recycle it. The argument will be presented on the examples of two documentaries: A la gloire du troupier belge/ To the Glory of the Belgian Soldier (SCAB, 1922) and Met onze jongens aan de Ijzer / With Our Boys at the Yser (Clemens De Landtsheer, 1928-1929), as well as two feature films:  La petite martyre belge / The little Belgian Martyr (Martin, 1928) and its voiced remake La Tragédie de Marchienne / The Tragedy of Marchienne (Martin, 1937).^[2]

By looking closely at the four films, made by recycled material from La bataille de l’Yser and other original war documentaries, I will try to show different approaches to this visual material, which in peacetime served different, sometimes contradictory political and social purposes, and formed an important part of the Belgian national debate.

To illustrate different types of palimpsestic use of the war documentaries I will refer to the concept of palimpsest by Gérard Genette and the concept of bricolage, as defined by Claude Lévy-Strauss. These structuralist concepts, also used in film studies,^[3] will help to understand how the heterogeneous pictorial material of mixed origin, used for different, sometimes opposing purposes, formed a visual basis for national mythology needed in interwar Belgium, a country that was insecure about its international status, and torn apart by internal conflicts between the Flemish and the Walloon populations.

La bataille de l’Yser: The Original Propaganda Film

La bataille de l’Yser, the starting point of my further comparisons, is remembered as one of the eldest Belgian films, and probably the eldest Belgian war documentary. It was made by the already mentioned SCAB, a cinematic unit of the Belgian Army, formed in 1916, and staffed mostly by film amateurs. Historically, the material shot by the SCAB is of unique value, as it focuses on the most glorious episode of Belgian participation in WWI.^[4]

Although the SCAB lacked experience, and was only allowed to work in a relatively small area near the static front on the Yser, the team managed to deliver some iconic pictures that would live many new lives in later productions. The area of the Yser Front was of great importance for Belgian propaganda. It was the place where, in the autumn of 1914, the Belgian Army succeeded in stopping a German offensive called “The Race to the Sea,” and keeping a small portion of free Belgian territory between the Yser river and the North Sea–for four long years.

The Yser Front, apart from its military and political meaning, became a symbolic site of Belgian war effort, and also of conflicting Belgian identities. The Kingdom of Belgium is populated in the northern part by the Dutch-speaking Flemish population, and by the French speaking Walloons in the South. Belgium became an independent state in 1838, and since then the governmental, administrative and military structures had used only French language. Although Flemish intellectuals were striving to achieve equal rights and privileges for the Dutch speakers, at the eve of WWI the Dutch-speakers were factually excluded from government positions. Apparently, at that time it was difficult to define a common Belgian identity that would appeal to the two conflicted groups.

The German invasion strengthened patriotic feelings and the sense of unity, but it did not save the divided nation from internal conflicts, which sprang from the unequal status of Flemish and Walloon populations. Importantly, most of the rank-and-file soldiers were of Flemish origin, while the majority of officers represented the Francophone Walloon population. The Flemish soldiers believed strongly that their military effort would help the Flemish population to gain equal rights with the Walloons. After the war, when their situation not only did not improve, but actually deteriorated because some Flemish activists had openly collaborated with the Germans, the Yser Front became a symbolic site of Flemish martyrdom and political injustice.

La bataille de l’Yser is an important film not only because it immortalizes the illustrious defence of the Yser Front, but also because it is the longest original Belgian documentary from WWI, as most of the original SCAB material was lost; it was probably destroyed by aerial bombardment in 1940.^[5] The catalogue of the OPB (Office de Propagande Belge / Office of Belgian Propaganda) mentions about 124.000 meters of film, divided into 1637 titles, made by the SCAB in 1917 and 1918. This impressive amount of titles is somehow misleading, as they were merely very short pieces of documentary material, meant to be further pasted into newsreels or larger documentaries. Today, the original SCAB wartime material exists almost entirely as incorporated fragments in documentaries and features which recycled older footage in the interwar period.

La bataille de l’Yser is a good example of limitations faced by the SCAB team in their coverage work. The film consists mostly of photos, animated maps and intertitles, explaining military movements and the overall situation in occupied Belgium. The documentary sequences amount to about 25 percent of the screening time. The film opens with intertitles describing the retreat of Belgian Army in August and September of 1914, and the concentration of the army on the Yser at the beginning of October. The concentration is shown by means of an animated map. Then comes the information about “our injured, decimated, almost despairing army” reaching the Yser, without losing a single cannon, followed by documentary footage of troops marching through Veurne, a city in the Yser area, where Belgian headquarters were located.

Pic. 1. The Belgian troops in Veurne. From La bataille de l’Yser.

The four phases of the campaign on the Yser are illustrated with animated maps and documentary shots from the front area. The most dramatic sequence in the film is the flooding of the Nieuwpoort area. By opening sluices in drainage canals, the Belgians managed to stop Germans on the other shore of the Yser and to keep them there until the offensive in 1918. This was the first time during WWI when German armies were stopped. Although the victory was achieved by non-military means, it was presented as a great triumph of Belgian army. La bataille de l’Yser shows the damaged sluices and the flooded landscape.

Pic. 2. The flooding of Nieuwpoort area from La bataille de l’Yser.

These pictures, along with the shoots of Belgian army marching through Veurne, became iconic and reappeared in many later films. Subsequent intertitles inform about the German panic and retreat, shown on the animated maps. The documentary ends with the anticipation of victory, by quoting from an unidentified, presumably French, newsreel showing a victory parade passing the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, as a promise of future Allied triumph in the war.

The flooding sequence became palimpsestic due to its canonical function in Belgian national imagery. In the following two examples I will show how the sequence functioned in two documentaries. The first one, A la gloire du troupier belge (1922), was evoking the sense of Belgian heroism and military glory and propagating the picture of a homogeneous nation, united in struggle against the enemy. The second one, Met onze jongens aan de IJzer / With Our  Boys at the Yser (Clemens De Landtsheer, 1928-1929), citing both the original SCAB documentary La bataille de l’Yser, and the footage from the 1922 A la gloire du troupier belge, was made to support and justify the Flemish movement, a separationist tendency within the Belgian unitary state.^[6] By questioning the sense of Flemish bloodshed, the documentary operated with the well-known pictures in a different context, and was travestying the earlier films for a more recent political purpose.

A la gloire du troupier belge: Affirmation of Belgium’s Unity and Belgian War Effort

A la gloire du troupier belge/ To the Glory of the Belgian Soldier, made by the SCAB team in 1922, was a five-part documentary showing the Belgian war effort from the mobilisation until the end of the war and included foreign material and acting sequences. The film opened and closed with a fictional story of a young soldier, leaving his mother to join the army and coming back alive and telling the story of the heroic death of a neighbour’s son. This story of an individual fate set a framework for the larger national story of common effort and triumph over the enemy.

Pic. 3. The staged final reunion scene from A la gloire du troupier belge.

The heterogeneous film, combining animation, acting, and footage from Belgian, Allied and German war documentaries was a good example of bricolage, that is, “of molding different ingredients into a new form.” At that stage of film history, according to Nanna Verhoeff, bricolage was crucial for the development of longer films and the creation of new film genres.^[7] In 1922, A la gloire du troupier belge was the longest Belgian documentary ever made, and therefore a milestone in developing the Belgian narrative about WWI.

On an ideological level, the documentary contested the British concept of “poor little Belgium”, invaded, raped and mutilated by the Huns. The concept originated in Britain; it was introduced in Robert Bryce’s “Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages,” and made popular worldwide by the cartoonist Louis Raemakers (both were working for the British Department of Propaganda).^[8] For Belgians, hoping to establish an important position of their country in postwar Europe, the concept was important for the creation of a convincing picture of Belgian military achievements and fortitude. ^[9]

For the purposes of Belgian internal politics the film was spreading a picture of a homogeneous Belgian army, and avoided any form of distinguishing between Flemish and Walloon soldiers. The intertitles appeared in both languages, French and Dutch, so that both populations, the Walloon and the Flemish, could be addressed as one nation.

The main goal of showing Belgian military effort required some borrowings, not only from SCAB’s own production, La bataille de l’Yser, but also from foreign newsreels. The recycling of material shot by the Allied can be perceived not only as a necessity but also as a form of manifested participation in the Entente’s military struggle against the Germans, entitling Belgium to share the profits reserved for the winning side. ^[10]

The German invasion was pictured in a partly acted, partly animated sequence of an anonymous hand, reaching from German territory deep into Belgium, and a symbol of a spiked helmet set over the city of Liege and marking Belgium’s great defeat. German progress was depicted on the map with change of colour, so that the small area on the other side of the Yser was easily recognizable by remaining dark, while the rest of the country went brighter, as if incorporated in the territory of the German Empire.

Pic. 4 and 5. Symbolic sequences from A la gloire du troupier belge.

This rather unsophisticated sequence is worth mentioning, as it is a good example of palimpsest. The sequence creatively compiles two ideas presented in an earlier feature, La Libre Belgique / Free Belgium (Armand Du Plessy, 1920-1921), telling a thrilling story of collaborators of an authentic Belgian independent newspaper, published and distributed secretly under the German occupation. La Libre Belgique was a hybrid film, combining footage from Allied and German newsreels, British propaganda cartoons, and staged scenes.

One of the ways of showing the German invasion was a picture of Belgian territory changing colour and being incorporated into Germany, followed by scenes from German newsreels. The second one was taken directly from the propaganda cartoon Britain’s Effort (Lancelot Speed, 1918) with a staged scene of an anonymous German soldier wearing a spiked helmet, reaching with both his hands over Belgium’s territory and incorporating it into Germany. The scene, which in La Libre Belgique was pasted from the British film, was transposed into the SCAB documentary and became a palimpsest of higher degree by recalling the Belgian feature and the British cartoon at the same time.

Pic. 6. Original scene from La Libre Belgique.

Pic. 7. Scene from Britain’s effort, incorporated into La Libre Belgique.

A German documentary, showing the advance of German infantry and cavalry, used in A la gloire du troupier belge to illustrate the fall of Liege, served another important purpose. By including this piece of enemy propaganda, Belgian production disarmed the piece of German newsreel, and used it against its original meaning. Originally intended to serve t as proof of German supremacy over Belgium, it had been re-used as a testimony of a final Belgian triumph, extending into the area of pictorial memory, and giving the winner the right to re-shape it according to their needs and wishes.

Pic. 8. A German newsreel used in A la gloire du troupier belge.

A la gloire du troupier belge was the first Belgian documentary combining SCAB’s own material with foreign newsreels, without differentiating or marking the quotes. An earlier example was a feature film, La Libre Belgique. The wide use of bricolage, using fragments of documentaries, photos, letters, staged scenes, scenes from foreign propaganda films, prepared ground for the practice of using sources against their original intention and purpose. Initially the practice was limited to the use of German newsreels in A la gloire du troupier belge. A few years later, however, the SCAB documentary footage, derived from films that affirmed Belgian unity in battle and neglected the issue of Flemish soldiers, had been reused in a strongly propagandist picture serving the Flemish cause.

Met onze jongens aan de IJzer: Questioning the Official War Narrative

A la gloire du troupier belge, a hybrid documentary, quoted from La Bataille de l’Yser, setting the well-known pictures in a wider national context and prolonging their life within collective memory. This SCAB documentary, glorifying Belgium’s war effort and the heroism of Belgian soldiers, had served as a palimpsest for another documentary, made by Clemens De Landtsheer, a Flemish activist who questioned the loyalty of the Belgian state to its Flemish citizens.

De Landstheer was representative of a larger movement, claiming equal rights for the citizens of Flanders, the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. In remembering the war, it was widely believed that there were more casualties among the Flemish soldiers than among the Walloons, and that all the commanding postings were supposedly given to French-speaking officers, recruited from the Walloon part of the country. During the wartime occupation, Flemish Belgians were subject to intense German propaganda appealing to their supposed sense of Germanic origin. However, the Belgian king Albert I was also trying to win the Flemish over by promising them equal treatment. None of the promises were fulfilled after the war, and the Flemish Movement, a fiercely nationalist organisation, assumed an increasingly separatist agenda. The war effort, seen from this ideological position, was pointless, and the hard won freedom only led to bitter disappointment and injustice.

De Landtsheer’s film, circulating beyond the official cinema circuit, became an important statement in the Flemish cause. The documentary, based on Belgian and French material which De Landstheer purchased from the SCAB and studied thoroughly, can be seen as another example of bricolage, combining Belgian and foreign newsreel footage with some added acting scenes. The film, described as “highly subversive, unintentionally parodist” ^[11] in its citations from A la gloire du troupier belge and other sources, provides a perfect example of palimpsest as travesty and persiflage.

The filmmaker’s statement in the opening titles reads: “This film is made of genuine undoctored material and film shot in the trenches of Yser. Not one image was tampered with. Everything you will see is an original war document taken from actuality.” However, already in the first minutes it quotes from the acted sequence of the soldier’s farewell in A la gloire du troupier belge. This frame device, known from the earlier film, is being distorted and destroyed by the final sequence. Instead of the soldier’s return, the film ends with a picture of a young widow mourning at an anonymous grave in no-man’s land, consoled by a child.

Pic. 9. Staged final scene from Met onze jongens aan de IJzer.

This last sequence, playing at the ambiguity of despair and hope, is followed by the closing picture of the IJzertoren / Yser tower, a colossal monument erected to commemorate the fallen Flemish countrymen. The pilgrimage to this symbolic place, co-organized yearly by De Landtsheer, was an important event, unifying Flemish combatants. In De Landtsheer’s documentary the IJzertoren appears as the last future hope for the Flemish cause.

The way De Landtsheer manipulates the sources deserves detailed scrutiny. He added new complexity to Belgian national film imagery by using sequences from the Nieuwpoort and Veurne documentaries, which already had an iconic status, and the well-known opening scene from of A la gloire du troupier belge as well as other archival material used in this documentary of Belgian national history. De Landtsheer tells the story of “our” Flemish boys, betrayed by the Belgian state, using the pictures reserved, until then, for the great unifying national narrative. In this sense, his use of canonized pictures of national history is highly subversive as it questions the value of the Flemish sacrifice and problematizes the Belgian victory, which had been bought, in his view, with Flemish blood.

The comparison of A la gloire du troupier belge and Met onze jongens aan de IJzer clearly shows that the same footage, which consisted of fragments from La bataille de l’Yser, and sequences from mostly French, sometimes British and German newsreels and propaganda films, could be used for totally different purposes. Both films are telling the story of a heroic fight against the mighty and cruel enemy, and yet, while the SCAB’s documentary affirms Belgium as a homogeneous entity, participating in the Entente victory as an equal partner of the Allies, the De Landtsheer film deals with internal Belgian issues and goes as far as questioning the sense of the struggle against the German invader, and requiring an immediate compensation to soldiers from their own Belgian government.

In the following sections I will take a look at the second life of documentaries, both Belgian and foreign ones, in the interwar feature films. I have deliberately decided to focus on two films, which are variants of the same story, and which make a similarly free use of war documentary material. Unlike De Landtsheer’s film, they focus on the Walloon community and its wartime heroism, which is typical for the entire interwar film production. While the first film (1928) was summarizing Belgian sufferings during WWI, the second one (1937) hinted indirectly at the imminent danger of future war: La petite martyre belge / The Little Belgian Martyr (Francis Martin, 1928) and its voiced remake La tragédie de Marchienne / The Tragedy of Marchienne (Francis Martin, 1937).

Feature films: La petite martyre belge and La tragédie de Marchienne

La petite martyre belge is a hybrid film, combining acting scenes with newsreel footage. The tragic story of Yvonne Vieslet, a ten-year-old Walloon girl shot accidentally by a German soldier while trying to give some food to French captives,^[12] was used in both cases as a framing device for a patriotic film, portraying the individual sacrifice as part of the national war effort.

Pict. 10. German soldier threatening Yvonne, La tragédie de Marchienne.

While the original production from 1928 uses the acting scenes as a proper framework, opening and closing a long documentary section, the 1937 remake combines documentary war footage with scenes from Yvonne’s life and a fictional story of a young Belgian woman helping French soldiers by hiding them from Germans. The original material in the first film takes about half of the screening time, and the story of Yvonne is reduced to commonly known facts. La petite martyre belge mostly cites newsreels, combining material of various origins, which is sometimes astonishingly or comically incongruent. Along with the essential images of Nieuwpoort and Veurne, it shows, for instance, shots of French and British colonial troops charging (separately) through unspecified landscapes to rescue Belgium.

Pic. 11 and 12. Colonial troops appearing in La petite martyre belge.

This somewhat awkward combination of global and local elements can be interpreted as an attempt to integrate the story of a little Belgian martyr into the general history of WWI, or as a reminder of the Belgian share in the victory. While re-cycling the popular image of innocent Belgian suffering, the film accentuates the redemptive aspect of martyrdom and death.

The religious metaphor, suggested in the earliest documentaries, is permanently present in La petite martyre belge. The girl is presented as a modern saint, her emblem is a white lily that bleeds after her death. Her readiness to share her bread with a starving French captive, enables her to give her life away for his sake. In the original version Yvonne’s death remains unpunished, while in the 1937 remake it causes a rebellion among the POWs and, after a questioning by a German officer, leads to the execution of the German soldier who shot and killed her.

The former film belongs to an earlier stage of Belgian productions with an uncompromising image of German oppressors, while the latter represents a subsequent, openly reconciliatory tendency towards Germany, a result of Belgian acceptance of the pacifist turn in international politics and the sensibility of German diplomats towards critical pictures of their countrymen. “The war films of the late 1930s were paradoxical in nature: on the surface, they seemed to point to cultural demobilization, but on a deeper level they testified to intensify political tension and remobilization of war culture”^[13].

In La tragédie de Marchienne this deeper level is constructed by archival features, reaching from typical Belgian war pictures to valuable and well known shots from foreign films. Among other sources, the film quotes from American newsreels showing global mobilisation, and features the most famous images from The Battle of the Somme (Charles Urban and Geoffrey Malins, 1916), including the ‘going over the top’ sequence, as well as the sinking of a cruiser, taken, most probably, from the American feature The Little American (Cecil DeMille, 1917).

Pic. 13. The legendary shot from Battle of the Somme, reused in La tragédie de Marchienne.

The selection of ideologically powerful pictures sends a clear signal to the audience. While watching a melodrama telling the story of Yvonne, and the story of the soldier she was trying to help (who was married to a Belgian woman and wanted to name his child after Yvonne), the audience also watched documentary images of the most brutal moments of war. The intertextual layers made of war footage were thus undermining the reconciliatory message of the feature film. The audience was actually watching two films of contrary meanings and was invited to make its own choices.

Conclusion: Bricolage and Palimpsest in Belgian Interwar Films

La tragédie de Marchienne is a good summary of the development of Belgian historical cinema in the interwar period, with its the subversive potential discovered and used frequently by Belgian bricoleurs, combining different genres, documents of different origin, and playing skilfully with commonly shared images of war. Using the potential of collective memory, they were repetitively creating and re-creating the First World War. This narrative strategy enabled them to illustrate subversive, controversial ideas with well-known images, considered as common heritage.

The 1.637 titles, made by the SCAB during the First World War and burnt during the Second, are now accessible only through other films, but even in the interwar period they could not be seen separate from the historical, political and sociological context of their many re-cycled lives. This seems paradigmatic for the functioning of original, ‘real’ pictures of historical events in general. Most of such images have been recycled so many times and loaded with so many additional meanings, that they now exist more as palimpsests than as originals. The Belgian war footage, in its ghostly existence within other films, functions within the network of permanently changing culture and is still part of recent debates.

The permanent recycling of Belgian war documentaries demonstrates a wider problem: the factual non-existence of an image without an ideological narrative frame. The urge to reuse and recreate well-known heroic images seems also characteristic for a society in need of common lieux de memoire, mnemonic pictures, translating the traumatic war experience into commonly accepted and understandable visual imagery, which, in the process of bricolage, could be applied to various, contradicting narratives, and which could be charged with constantly changing meanings.

^[1] For the SCAB history and activity, see: Bénédicte Rochet, “Plongée au coeur des prises de vues du service cinématographique de l’armée belge : un matériel visuel de la Grande Guerre à multiples usages”, in La petite Belgique dans la Grande Guerre: une icône, des images: actes du colloque de Namur, 24, 25, 26 et 27 novembre 2010, Facultés universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, ed. Bénédicte Rochet, Axel Tixhon, (Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur. 2012), 111-125; Leen Engelen, “Film/Cinema (Belgium)”, in 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. http://dx.doi.org/10.15463/ie1418.10320, accessed 3 February 2015); Michël Amara, “Une icône… des propagandes – Au coeur du conflit – Les grands défis de la propagande belge durant la Première Guerre mondiale”, in La petite Belgique dans la Grande Guerre : une icône, des images: actes du colloque de Namur, 24, 25, 26 et 27 novembre 2010, Facultés universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, ed. Bénédicte Rochet and Axel Tixhon, (Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur. 2012), 21-35; Guido Convents, “Van gefilmde actualiteiten tot bioscoopjournaal in België: De ontwikkeling van het nieuws op het witte doek (1896-1918)”, in Revue belge d’Histoire contemporaine, 1-2 (2009), 27-52

^[2]All the films I am writing about are available online at europeanfilmgateway.eu

^[3] For the key definitions see: Gérard Genette. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997) and Claude Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind. (Letchworth: The Garden City Press Ltd, 1966). For an elaboration on the position of palimpsest see: Bruno de Weever, “Prologue: Historical Film as Palimpsest” in Perspectives on European Film and History, ed. Leen Engelen, Roel Vande Winkel, (Gent: Academia Press, 2007), 5-11.; Gordon E. Slethaug, “Palimpsest and Bricolage: Playful and Serious Citations in Broken flowers and Snow White’s offspring”, in Adaptation Theory and Criticism: Postmodern Literature and Cinema in the USA, (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014), 191-246.

^[4] For a general history of Belgium in WWI see: Sophie De Schaepdrijver, The Great War. The Kingdom of Belgium during the First World War (Amsterdam: Atlas, 1997). For the Yser Front see: Paul van Pul, In Flanders’ Flooded Fields: Before Ypres there was Yser. (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2006).

^[5] Rochet, “Plongée au coeur …”, 112.

^[6] For history and meaning of the Flemish Movement see: Karen Shelby, Flemish Nationalism and the Great War: The Politics of Memory, Visual Culture and Commemoration (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

^[7] Nanna Verhoeff, The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006), 184; see also Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 29, 48-49.

^[8] For the usage of the figure of “poor little Belgium” see: Bernhard Liemann, “Transformation of Local Public Spheres: German, Belgian and Dutch Border Towns during the First World War Compared”, in Other Fronts, Other Wars?: First World War Studies on the Eve of the Centennial, eds. Joachim Bürgschwentner, Matthias Egger, Gunda Barth-Scalmani, (Leiden: Brill), 349-369.

^[9] Engelen, “Film/Cinema (Belgium)”.

^[10] Directly after the armistice Belgium hoped for some territorial gains and financial contributions. These hopes had not been fulfilled.

^[11] Rochet, “Plongée au coeur …”, 121.

^[12] Heather Jones, Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 206.

^[13] Engelen, “Film/Cinema (Belgium)”.

Notes on Contributor

Natalia Stachura (MA Dutch and German Studies, PhD in South African Studies) is researcher at the Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU) in Poznań. In the framework of the HERA project Cultural exchange in a time of global conflict: Colonials, Neutrals and Belligerents during the First World War (CEGC), she is writing a monograph about film propaganda in the Netherlands.

Bibliography

Amara, Michël, “Une icône… des propagandes – Au coeur du conflit – Les grands défis de la propagande belge durant la Première Guerre mondiale”, in La petite Belgique dans la Grande Guerre : une icône, des images: actes du colloque de Namur, 24, 25, 26 et 27 novembre 2010, Facultés universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, ed. Bénédicte Rochet, Axel Tixhon, 21-35. Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur, 2012.

Best, Brian. Reporting from the Front: War Reporters during the Great War. Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2014.

Convents, Guido, “Van gefilmde actualiteiten tot bioscoopjournaal in België: De ontwikkeling van het nieuws op het witte doek (1896-1918)”, in Revue belge d’Histoire contemporaine 1:2 (2009): 27-52

Engelen, Leen. “Film/Cinema (Belgium)”, in 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. Accessed 3 February 2015.  http://dx.doi.org/10.15463/ie1418.10320.

—–.  “Cinematic Representations of the Enemy in Belgian Silent Fiction Films”, Warfare and Belligerence. Perspectives in First World War Studies, ed. P. Purseigle, 359-378. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005.

Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997[1982].

Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Jones, Heather. Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War: Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Letchworth: The Garden City Press Ltd, 1966[1962].

Liemann, Bernhard. “Transformation of Local Public Spheres: German, Belgian and Dutch Border Towns during the First World War Compared”, in Other Fronts, Other Wars?: First World War Studies on the Eve of the Centennial, eds. Joachim Bürgschwentner, Matthias Egger, and Gunda Barth-Scalmani, 349-369. Leiden: Brill, 2014.

Rochet, Bénédicte. “Plongée au coeur des prises de vues du service cinématographique de l’armée belge : un matériel visuel de la Grande Guerre à multiples usages”, in La petite Belgique dans la Grande Guerre : une icône, des images: actes du colloque de Namur, 24, 25, 26 et 27 novembre 2010, Facultés universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix, ed. Bénédicte Rochet and Axel Tixhon, 111-125. Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur, 2012.

Slethaug, Gordon E. “Palimpsest and Bricolage: Playful and Serious Citations in Broken Flowers and Snow White’s Offspring”, Adaptation Theory and Criticism: Postmodern Literature and Cinema in the USA, Gordon E. Slethaug, 191-246. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.

Verhoeff, Nanna. The West in Early Cinema: After the Beginning. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.

Weever, Bruno de. “Prologue: Historical Film as Palimpsest”, in Perspectives on European Film and History, ed. Leen Engelen and Roel Vande Winkel, 5-11. Gent: Academia Press. 2007.

Filmography

La Bataille de l’Yser (SCAB, <1918).

The Battle of the Somme (Charles Urban and Geoffrey Malins, 1916).

Britain’s Effort (Lancelot Speed, 1918).

A la gloire du troupier belge (SCAB, 1922).

La Libre Belgique (Armand Du Plessy, 1920-1921).

The Little American (Cecil B. DeMille, 1917).

Met onze jongens aan de IJzer (Clemens De Landtsheer, 1928-1929).

La petite martyre belge (Francis Martin, 1928).

La tragédie de Marchienne (Francis Martin, 1937).

War Requiem, the film adaptation of Benjamin Britten’s musical piece directed by British film director Derek Jarman, is a case study in the politics of the memory of war, with WWI as its focal point. Made in 1988, the film does not coincide with any specific commemoration, and while being a significant cultural venture in an ambition to challenge consensual memory about war, it is also, I argue, the director’s personal endeavour to understand how history and his family’s past have impacted the development of his own self and his artistic expression.

This work will demonstrate how Jarman’s imaginative representation of WWI takes the form of an accumulation – rather than a confrontation or contradiction – of past representations of this historic moment. Through an unusual interplay between text (the poetry of Wilfred Owen), images (wordless re-enactments of Wilfred Owen’s life events and terrifying archival images of war), and music (the War Requiem by composer Benjamin Britten), the film deconstructs in an experimental fashion the conventionality and illusion of commemorative representations of war as well as their different sites and practices. The film uses a variety of material and sources which are very distinct regarding the level of distance at which they engage with the reality of the atrocities, or the different layers of mediation and vision interposed between beholder and signifier. In this respect, the film questions the memorialisation value and impact of different commemorative tropes, such as poetry, moving images (both documentary and fictional), and music. Through these mechanisms, I will examine how the film appeals to the viewers’ consciousness and criticality as regards these representations, and generates a profoundly significant engagement with the event and the artistry of its re-presentation.

By the time Jarman directed War Requiem, he was an established director of experimental films and had already been involved in the making of several music videos for prestigious singers and musical groups. His engagement with Britten’s musical masterpiece can thus be seen as his desire to bring it to life. In addition, written in the aftermath of WWII, the requiem could be said to echo Jarman’s own traumatic experience of a military hospital, where he spent a few days as a child (he was born in 1942), alongside the wounded of WWII. Moreover, made at the beginning of post-modern theory and aesthetics, the requiem and its anti-war message provided a perfect platform for the development of a subject matter to which Jarman felt personally and politically very close, while exploring the complex interaction between film, music, and poetry. There are indeed few WWI battle scenes in the film, and they occupy the same hierarchical position as scenes from other wars, such as the Angolan Civil War (1975-2002), the Cambodian Civil War (1970-75), and the Vietnam War (1955-75), as well as the bombing of Hiroshima (6 and 9 August 1945). The geographical and temporal scope of documentary extracts demonstrates that Jarman’s film is indeed a plea for world peace.

Lacking simple narrative and continuity, the collage of poetry, images, and music in Jarman’s film does not lead to any real understanding of the historical and political specificities of the wars to which it refers, but this is beyond the point. Through artistic experimentation regarding suffering and violence, Jarman modulates different forms of affects engaging the viewer sensorially to make them experience emotions ranging from intense passion and anger to deeply-felt pity, thus demanding and provoking a moral response. In the words of Judith Butler, “[t]here is no thinking and judgement without the senses, and there is no thinking and judgement about war without the senses assuming a social form […]. Waging war in some ways begins with the assault on the senses; the senses are the first target of war.”^[1]

This essay will first look at the different formal and aesthetic strategies used by Jarman to engage the viewer. These include the film’s contrasting structure between documentary and fiction as well as between past and present; its narrating devices, such as the portrayal of fictive characters located in both time periods in the film and Owen’s poem “Strange Meeting”; and the use of photographic pathos in archival stills. In its second section, the essay will examine how the notion of the “re-framing of war” is developed in Jarman’s film in opposition to state propaganda and consensual memory of war through an exploration of Owen’s biography and poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, ultimately questioning the notion of war as being a part of human nature, and therefore its necessity. Drawing on this distinction between “good and evil”, the third part will highlight Jarman’s juxtaposition of Britten’s music, Owen’s poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, and a complex portrayal of religion, thus establishing a tension between the atrocities of war and religious aspirations. The fourth part of the essay will look at the film as part of a cathartic process for Jarman on a personal, familial, and artistic level.

On a visual level, the structure of War Requiem alternates past and present through flashbacks and flashbacks-within-flashbacks, as well as through spatial and temporal jumps. There is archival material related to the conflict – such as WWI newsreel footage, alongside images of 20th-century wars – on the one side; the fictional love story between British soldier and poet Wilfred Owen (Nathaniel Parker) and the army nurse (Jarman’s muse Tilda Swinton), on the other. This crosscutting creates a contrasting pattern between black and white documentary and the vividly colourful fiction of the love story which highlights the constructed meaning of both types of images for the viewer, who finds him/herself at the centre of a mediated, yet individual, experience of the past.

The use of archival material within the fictional love story in War Requiem recalls a post-modern use of the cuttings of paper and fragments of other material in Pablo Picasso’s and Georges Braque’s late Cubist collages. Such fragments not only act as a reminder of reality and its materiality, but they also make the viewer aware of the artificiality of the film as an artistic construct. According to John Golding, “we identify [the collaged items] without effort, and because they form part of our experience of the material world around us, they make a bridge between our customary modes of perception and the artistic fact as it is presented to us by the artist. […] In Braque’s own words, he introduced foreign substances into his paintings because of their ‘materiality’, and by this he was referring not only to their physical, tactile values, but also to the sense of material certainty they evoked.”^[2] In this perspective, Jarman could be said to use archival material within the film as an intellectual and visual device to assert the reality of his vision. As the pseudo-narrative of the film is interrupted by archival footage, we know as viewers that we are confronted with a constructed reality whose deconstructed montage we are required to re-address, like we would the destruction of the world. The archival material also acts as clues to a greater library of horrific imagery, the specificity of which is left to our imagination, an imagination which is sadly guided by the accumulation of images repeatedly viewed in the media.

On a more fundamental level, the contrasting pattern between the archival material and fictional love story brings into play the tension between past and present, the horrors of war and the beauty of love, and life and death. Personal and spectatorial engagement is at its strongest in the sections of the film which focus on the love story between Owen and the Nurse. At the beginning of the film, set in contemporary England, a nurse (Tilda Swinton) pushes the Old Soldier in a wheelchair, a WWI veteran (Laurence Olivier in his final screen appearance). After he has shown her the Edwardian photograph of his departed beloved, to whom the Nurse bears a strong resemblance, the Old Soldier narrates his war memories. Thus the story unfolds through his eyes, as he begins his tale with a stanza from Owen’s poem “Strange Meeting”.

This choice of poem seems to introduce the spectator into a dream-like world of craters, caves, and tunnels, whose Hell is convincingly reflected in the Gothic labyrinth of Dartford’s Darenth Park Hospital where the film was shot. “It seemed that out of the battle I escaped/ Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped/ Through granites which titanic wars had groined”.^[3] The poem’s introduction not only sets the scene of conflict on a gigantic scale, but also puts two narrators on stage: Owen himself and the person who delivers his message. The oscillation between the internal first-person perspective and the external third-person perspective in the poem is echoed in the film with the Old Soldier telling the viewer the story of the Owen character, which in turn creates a mise-en-abyme between images and commentary. These devices conduct the viewer to embrace several perspectives and become very active in the constructive process of the story. Jarman’s choice of “Strange Meeting” as the introductory voice to his film therefore denotes a conceptual and formalist approach.

In the documentary part of the film, however, Jarman explores a different aspect of sorrow and relies on a different type of empathy on the part of the viewer. The palpably faded and blurred nature of the archival stills of WWI places the viewer’s position away from a collective commemoration of the past to a mediated, yet individual experience, which eventually results in a lesser distance from the very idea of death. According to Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, the photographic image is already beyond the present moment to convey the pathos of past times. It “does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been” (author’s emphasis).^[4] It is, by its very nature, located in history, but in this very specific instance, it is also looking implicitly at the perspective of death. This point is also made by Susan Sontag in Regarding the Pain of Others: “Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading towards their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people”.^[5] This haunting resonance, it would seem, would produce in the viewer an understanding of the vulnerability and finite nature of human life. This characteristic of Jacques Derrida’s concept of “absolute pastness”, to be applied here to the archival footage, would then be the condition for the grievability of its subjects, whose lives are in the process of non-being, and would therefore lead to a compassionate engagement of the viewer.

Having examined Jarman’s use of different formal and aesthetic strategies to engage the viewer in the cinematic process, the essay will turn its attention to his “re-framing of war” through a filmic exploration of Owen’s biography and appropriation of his anti-war poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth”. In the film, the Old Soldier’s wartime memories commence in 1918 with the Nurse weeping over the dead body of Wilfred Owen, whom we then see in his  younger days hanging out the washing with his mother while a young woman arranges a bouquet of flowers in a vase. He is then drafted and goes to fight in the war. Immediately after this scene, we witness the Nurse reading “Anthem for Doomed Youth” over his grave.

These few minutes of the film, a condensation of Owen’s life, summarise the small chances of survival once enlisted: in 1917, the year of Owen’s conscription, the life expectancy of an officer on the front line was measured in days. Indeed, Owen died a year later, at the age of twenty-five. Like all his comrades, he had been completely unaware of the reality of trench warfare, as the newsreels shown of the Front were heavily censored. Indeed, according to Laurent Gervereau in Les Images qui mentent, WWI marks the beginning of what will become “image propaganda”.^[6] It is therefore as a reaction against the legitimation and “romanticisation” of warfare by the British nation state and its persuasive military power of the time, to which he had succumbed, that Owen’s poetry developed. After his one-year stay at Craiglockhart Hospital due to shell-shock, where he met anti-war poet Siegfried Sassoon, Owen considered the function of poetry as testimony more important than ever before, because it counteracted state propaganda with what he saw as a necessary anti-war message.^[7]

When considering “image propaganda”, it is interesting to note that Owen’s poetry locates itself firmly outside its parameters, as it is sometimes very descriptive of the specificity of war, its weapons, both mechanical and chemical, their effects on the human body and psychology. This is potently the case of “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, which Jarman has directed the Nurse to read over Owen’s grave. Written between September and October 1917 at Craiglockhart Hospital, the sonnet is indeed a mournful elegy to young soldiers, dignifying and celebrating their courage and suffering, whose lives were unnecessarily lost in WWI for the sake of wealthy bankers – which are represented in the film as heavily made-up men. More specifically, the octet consists of a list of deafening sounds of trench warfare – “monstrous anger of the guns”, “stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle”, whose alliteration echoes the sound itself, and “wailing shells”.^[8] In his film, Jarman counteracts the absence of the harsh realities of war from state propaganda by presenting the viewer with archival footages of soldiers digging tunnels in the snow, burning cities, and soldiers marching over hills and preparing for battle. According to Judith Butler, the state regulates the public reception and understanding of violence by framing a certain version of reality. In this perspective, she suspects that the framing act becomes a part of “the materiality of war and the efficacy of its violence”.^[9] In the film, I would argue, Jarman proposes an alternative re-framing of the war, and like Owen, directs the beholder towards a greater understanding of the materiality and violence of war, thus counteracting past and future state propaganda.

Moreover, in addition to re-framing the consensual version of the reality of war, these images have an immediate poignancy, encompassing both life and death at the same time. In several scenes of the film’s fictional part, this tension between life and death is drawn upon  the juxtaposition of childhood innocence and the traumas of war, in particular with the inclusion of Owen’s idyllic childhood sequences, shot on Super-8, albeit reminiscent of his earlier feature film The Last of England (1987): three young children emerge, dressed up in army uniforms, and bury a teddy bear; the Nurse, caring for a wounded soldier at night, observes a young Owen outside the window of the army hospital; the young Owen plays drums and dances with a group of soldiers in drag against a backdrop of the Union Jack; young Owen and his Mother decorate a Christmas tree. Set against the cruelty of war, the images of carefree innocence and everyday gestures explore the human relationship with nature and culture, reminiscent of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s concept of the primordial state of human beings which contains their essential characteristics, the ones that culture will eventually repress or pervert.^[10] In this respect, it could be argued that these images of childhood might act as a reminder of men’s primordial goodness which war only perversely subverts.

Following from Jarman’s re-framing and questioning of the war, the third part of the essay will now show how Jarman establishes a tension between the atrocities of war and religious aspirations in his film through a complex juxtaposition of Britten’s musical piece, the final section of Owen’s poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, and a subversive portrayal of religion, ultimately evading the reductive notion of “good versus evil”. The film’s soundtrack does not contain any spoken dialogue, but instead uses the choral music and lyrics of Britten’s War Requiem. This includes the “Latin Mass for the Dead” and some of Owen’s poems reflecting the atrocities of war: “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, but also “But I was Looking at the Permanent Stars,” “The Next War”, “Sonnet On Seeing a Piece of our Heavy Artillery Brought into Action”, “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”, “The End”, “At a Calvary near the Ancre”, and finally “Strange Meeting”.^[11] While Jarman establishes a correspondence between archival images and the message of the poetic text, he facilitates a similar dialogue between the final section of Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and the music performed in the film. In the poem, the sounds of trench warfare are all set against the restrained atmosphere of the church, with an abundance of religious imagery, symbolic of the sanctity of life and death: the “passing-bells” tolled to announce someone’s death, the “orisons” or funeral prayers, “voice of mourning”, “choirs”, “candles” – which are lit in the room where a body lies in a coffin, “holy glimmers of goodbyes”, “pall” – or a coffin cloth.

This juxtaposition in Owen’s poem suggests the inadequacy and pointlessness of institutionalised religion when confronted with such butchery: the expression “die as cattle” conjures up the image of a slaughterhouse. In particular, the word “mockeries” and the expression “patter out their hasty orisons” seem to articulate such a tension, while “choirs of wailing shells” is an astonishing metaphor uniting both God’s and the Devil’s world. As such, the poem is a clear rejection of religious structures in which Owen was brought up.

Progressively, the poem moves away from the fighting front to funeral rituals with “bugles” commonly played at military funerals conducted by the families of the dead “from sad shires”, the English counties and countryside from which a large proportion of the soldiers came. Tone and pace change from harsh fervour to regretful and solemn reflection, until the poem quietly closes with the “drawing down of blinds”, whose corresponding dimming of the light is echoed in the dusk descending onto earth in a slow, finite gesture, as though to let the dead person lie in peace.^{[12] [13]} This tension between the atrocities of war and religious aspirations can also be found in “Britten’s War Requiem” as described by Peter Evans in the following manner:

The change here is more radical than before, to a new tonal perspective and a new urgent pulse, to the immediacy of solo voice and instruments and the unequivocal directness of the vernacular-Owen’s poem, Anthem for Doomed Youth. The effect is dramatic but not melodramatic: both poet and composer offer a challenge to the luxury of opulent mourning, ‘mockeries from prayers or bells’, that implies a conflict between this and the preceding sections. The athleticism and wiry textures of the new, but related, theme (bass of Ex. 3-also another distant relation of the Sinfonia’s Lacrymosa) seem like a reproach to the heavy propulsion of Ex. i, even though they depict the rifle’s rattle and the wailing of shells.^[14]

Just like in Owen’s poem and Britten’s music, Jarman does not seem to find an outlet for human suffering in religion. Accordingly, he shows images of burning cities simultaneously with the choir singing Britten’s Requiem. Moreover, although using oratorios of Britten’s War Requiem sung in Latin as soundtrack and an elaborate Christian iconography, the film inserts interesting twists into Christian motifs and stories, such as the comparison between Owen’s and his fellow soldiers’ fates to Christ’s martyrdom. For instance, when the Unknown Soldier is buried, Owen imagines himself as the Biblical Isaac, whose life, according to the Genesis narrative, had been about to be sacrificed by his own father Abraham in order to prove the latter’s faith to God. In the film, however, he is portrayed lying on an altar with his throat slit by his father, while a group of grotesque-looking men are laughing.

The appropriation of the notion of the grotesque, if associated with the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, reveals this scene as a transgressive one in that it presents a metaphor for a temporary reversal of order in which the constructed boundaries between symbolic categories of political and religious hierarchy and values are blurred. Rather than presenting an inversion of the status quo, the grotesque thus enables a transgression of the established binary system of representation, as it is a hybrid form containing all these sets of oppositions together.^[15] This is why Jarman’s use of Christian iconography appears to be a complex one: while using its aesthetic motifs, it subverts its content. The same subversive process is at play in the cumulative power of two scenes. In the first of these scenes the Nurse, in a white, yet mud- and blood-covered dress, puts a crown of thorns onto the head of the Enemy Soldier, who carries the body of the Unknown Soldier. In the final scene, he himself appears as Christ holding the body of Owen. In a true Nietzschean fashion, these blatantly opposite scenes demonstrate Jarman’s bypassing of the idea of “good and evil” to reveal the destructive impact of war on both sides of the front. This idea is forcibly expressed in the film through the archival footage of conflicts in Cambodia and the nuclear attack on Hiroshima, followed by the image of a large field of skulls.

From the outset of Jarman’s oeuvre, Death had been a guiding philosophical concept developed within a diversity of historical backgrounds, but in War Requiem, I would argue that it took on a personal dimension, as this was Jarman’s first artistic project since he had learnt he was HIV positive (he died six years later). The fourth part of the essay will therefore look at the film as part of a cathartic process for Jarman on a personal, familial, and artistic level.

Jarman’s own father was a Lancaster bomber pilot in the Second World War, and the artist believed that his father’s despair, depression, and violence impacted greatly on his own artistic vision and sense of self. The depression from which his father suffered had been attributed to the feeling that a bomber would experience when surviving his brothers-in-arms and killing innocent civilians. Such notion of survival guilt is explored, I would argue, by Jarman in War Requiem through Owen’s poem “Strange Meeting”, which concludes the film and is the last poem to be quoted in Britten’s Requiem. In Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud deals with such notion, allocating the role of the super-ego to the process of internalising and transforming the lost other as a recriminating voice. This voice then speaks out exactly what the ego would have said to the other if the latter had stayed alive.^[16] This dialogue is precisely what is exerted in “Strange Meeting”. The following lines exemplify this point:

“Strange friend,” I said, “Here is no cause to mourn.”
“None,” said the other, “Save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world,
Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
But mocks the steady running of the hour,
And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here”.^[17]

The sense of guilt is also what seems to be at play in the fictional part of the film when the Unknown Soldier is playing the piano while the Enemy Soldier playfully throws snowballs at him, but Owen misinterprets the Enemy Soldier’s behaviour and shoots him. Before the Enemy dies, he stabs the Unknown Soldier.

This remembering of the past recalls Slavoj Žižek’s idea that “the true choice apropos of historical traumas is not the one between remembering and forgetting them: traumas we are not ready or able to remember haunt us all the more forcefully. We should therefore accept the paradox that, in order to really forget an event, we must first summon up the strength to remember it properly.”^[18] Re-enacting a psychoanalytical process in his film, Jarman can only come to terms with his family’s past through the compulsive telling of painful and repressed memories, which are integrated in the film in the present, thus forming an integral part of his identity and sense of self.

This psychological process has been explained by Jacques Lacan in his seminal “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis”:

Let us not forget that when Freud presents the concept of transference to us, he says – what cannot be remembered is repeated in behaviour. This behaviour, in order to reveal what it repeats, is handed over to the analyst’s reconstruction. § One may go as far as to believe that the opacity of the trauma – […] in my terms, its resistance to signification – is then specifically held responsible for the limits of remembering. And, after all, it is hardly surprising, given my own theorisation, that I should see this as a highly significant moment in the transfer of powers from the subject to the Other, […], the locus of speech and, potentially, the locus of truth.^[19]

One cannot but deduce that, through the film, Jarman was attempting to come to terms with his own family’s past, and, through a Surrealist use of the collage technique, to artistically explore his unconscious.

This, I think, is the crux of the matter: while the documentary part of the film brings into play the process of seeing, the fictional narrative exploits the process of telling. Together with the sensuous experience of poetry and music, the act of vision and that of narration on the part of the beholder are two complementary forms in the questioning and understanding of the past and its necessary integration in the development of identities for both the artist and viewer.^[20] The remembering of internalised traumatic experiences is thus instrumental in the psychological development and recovery of all involved, be it through musical, literary, or filmic processes. It is by making the mechanism of the constructiveness of the past apparent that Jarman’s venture remains contemporary, as the viewer can apply this process of deconstruction to all social, political, historical, and cultural constructs, thus showing a critical engagement far beyond the film and WWI. The use of archival footage of WWII and the wars in Vietnam and Angola is a case in point. Set amidst the general context of Britain in the 1980s, with “the rise of the City and the fall of the unions, the wider retreat of the left and the return of military confidence, the energy of a renewed entrepreneurialism and the entropy of a new, entrenched unemployment, […], the property bubbles, the beleaguered 1984-5 miners’ strike, the 1986 deregulatory Big Bang in the City,” and, last but not least, the Falklands War of 1982, Jarman’s War Requiem is one of the most compelling appeals for peace in cinema.

^[1] Judith Butler, Frames of War – When is Life Grievable? (London and New York: Verso, 2009), xii–xiii.

^[2] John Golding, “Cubism,” in Concepts of Modern Art, ed. Nikos Stangos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 62.

^[3] Wilfred Owen, The Poems (New York and London: Norton, 1985), 125.

^[4] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 85.

^[5] Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003), 70.

^[6] Laurent Gervereau, “Le Vrai contre le Faux,” in Les Images qui mentent (Paris: Seuil, 2011), 91.

^[7] As a recognised poet and officer decorated with the Military Cross, Sassoon publicly condemned the ongoing conflict as a “war of aggression and conquest” in his Public Statement of Defiance in July 1917. In order to avoid court-martial, he was transferred to Craiglockhart. Sassoon was thus effectively silenced, his case clearly showing the power of the State to ‘neutralise’ anti-war sentiment.

^[8] I have analysed the poem in my publication: Caroline Perret,“Wilfred Owen: A Remembrance Tale (2007) and Gillies MacKinnon’s Regeneration – Behind the Lines (1997).” In The Great War in Post-Memory Literature, Drama and Film, edited by Marzena Sokolowska-Paryz and Martin Loeschnigg, Berlin: De Gruyter (‘Media and Cultural Memory series’), 2014.

^[9] Judith Butler, Frames of War – When is Life Grievable? (London and New York: Verso, 2009), xii–xiii.

^[10] See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discours sur l’Origine et les Fondements de l’Inégalité parmi les Hommes,” in Parcours Philosophiques, Gérard Durozoi et al. (Paris: Éditions Nathan, 1985), 47.

^[11] As the film has no spoken dialogue, it is surprising to note that it was only released in English-speaking countries, the UK, Canada and the US, between January 1989 and 1990. Limited  VHS and Laserdisc editions were also released shortly afterwards.

^[12] In this respect, it is interesting to note that War Requiem was performed for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1963, which was built after the original fourteenth-century structure was infamously destroyed by the Luftwaffe in a World War II bombing raid in 1940.

^[13] Wilfred Owen, The Poems (New York and London: Norton, 1985), 76.

^[14] Peter Evans, “Britten’s War Requiem,” Tempo 61-62 (Spring-Summer 1962): 22.

^[15] Stuart Hall, “For Allan White: Metaphors of Transformation,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 290-92.

^[16] Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957 [1917]), 243–258.

^[17] Wilfred Owen, The Poems (New York and London: Norton, 1985), 125.

^[18] Slavoj Žižek, “Passions of the Real, Passions of Semblance,” in Welcome to the Desert of the real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (New York: Verso, 2002), 22.

^[19] Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 129.

^[20] Here I use concepts developed in Judith Mayne, “Hiroshima mon Amour: Ways of Seeing, Ways of Telling,” in The 1978 Film Studies Annual (West Lafayette: Purdue University, 1978), 49-51.

Notes on Contributor

Dr Caroline Perret is currently Research Associate for the Group for War and Culture Studies at the University of Westminster, and researches the impact of war on cultural production. She is particularly interested in art, illustrated books, literature, films and poetry in the historical, political, social, and cultural context of WWI and WWII in both Britain and France. Her most recent publication is ‘Wilfred Owen and his War Poetry in Jeremy Paxman’s “Wilfred Owen: A Remembrance Tale” (2007) and Gillies MacKinnon’s “Regeneration – Behind the Lines” (1997)’, in The Great War in Post-Memory Literature, Drama and Film, edited by Marzena Sokolowska-Paryz and Martin Loeschnigg, De Gruyter’s ‘Media and Cultural Memory series’, October 2014.

Acknowledgments

With all my most sincere thanks to Helena Scott for her constant help and support.

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

Beckett, Andy. “Bang! A History of Britain in the 1980s by Graham Stewart – Review: a study of Thatcher’s era that leaves vital questions unanswered.” The Guardian, January 17, 2013.http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/17/bang-history-britain-1980s-review. Accessed April 10, 2015

Butler, Judith. Frames of War – When is Life Grievable? London and New York: Verso, 2009.

Evans, Peter. “Britten’s War Requiem.” Tempo 61-62 (Spring-Summer 1962): 20-24 / 29-39.

Freud, Sigmund. Mourning and Melancholia. Translated by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1957 [1917].

Golding, John. “Cubism.” In Concepts of Modern Art, edited by Nikos Stangos, 53-81. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991.

Gervereau, Laurent. “Le Vrai contre le Faux.” In Les Images qui mentent, 91, Paris: Seuil, 2011.

Hall, Stuart. “For Allen White: Metaphors of Transformation.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, 290-92. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Penguin Books, 1977.

Mayne, Judith. “Hiroshima mon Amour: Ways of Seeing, Ways of Telling.” In The 1978 Film Studies Annual, 49-51, West Lafayette: Purdue University, 1978.

Owen, Wilfred. The Poems. New York and London: Norton, 1985.

Perret, Caroline. “Wilfred Owen: A Remembrance Tale (2007) and Gillies MacKinnon’s Regeneration – Behind the Lines (1997).” In The Great War in Post-Memory Literature, Drama and Film, edited by Marzena Sokolowska-Paryz and Martin Loeschnigg, Berlin: De Gruyter (‘Media and Cultural Memory series’), 2014.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. “Discours sur l’Origine et les Fondements de l’Inégalité parmi les Hommes.” In Parcours Philosophiques, edited by Gérard Durozoi et al., 47, Paris: Éditions Nathan, 1985 [1755].

Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003.

Žižek, Slavoj. “Passions of the Real, Passions of Semblance.” In Welcome to the Desert of the real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, New York: Verso, 2002.

Filmography

War Requiem (Derek Jarman, 1988).

“The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution now unfolding is a great revolution that touches people to their very soul and constitutes a new stage in the development of the socialist revolution in our country…”^[1]

“Whatever the measures chosen for erasing facts and people from memory, the erasures even when perfectly programmed, only set in motion a memory that does not forget and that is seeking to be inscribed”.^[2]

 Within contemporary Chinese cinema, the tension of official remembrance and silencing persists through particular histories such as the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). What is troubling about the struggle for memory in this decade is how the tragedy and traumatic event of the Cultural Revolution continues to be censored, re-written, and ultimately forgotten. The Revolution continues to be silenced and replaced with idyllic narratives within cinema that seek to inspire an audience towards the greatness of Communist ideals. In this article, I interrogate the official remembrances of the Cultural Revolution and how the memory of a Communist utopia is produced through state strategies of soft power in contemporary popular Chinese cinema. Soft power leverages popular culture to attract and co-opt intended audiences to accept particular views without resorting to coercive methods.^[3] My paper focuses on the pop culture importance of blockbuster film. Specifically, my discussion focuses on Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014), a blockbuster film adaptation of a popular “8 Model Opera” that has resulted in tremendous box office profits in domestic Mainland Chinese markets. I discuss the film’s idyllic perceptions of the People’s Liberation Army, the Communist army that served as the precursor to the infamous Red Guards during the Maoist era. Then I juxtapose many of these official remembrances alongside a legacy of revolutionary posters from the Cultural Revolution that convey persistent narratives of Communist utopian ideals.

Remembrances and Forgetting

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee (CCPCC) sought to establish a legacy of memory that could live on for generations by initiating “a revolution to touch people’s souls”^[4]. In order to produce such memories, the streets of society saw an abundance of revolutionary posters distributed widely. These posters served to touch and inspire the people towards communist revolutionary ideals.^[5] Powerful, still visual imagery from these posters praised Mao Zedong and directed children and adults alike to take up arms and join the revolutionary cause. These posters also portrayed the Revolutionary army with pleasant brushstrokes that described how soldiers served the people, helped the poor and weak, and could even be equated to one’s family.^[6]

The Communist utopia ideologies expressed through these posters were brought to life within the artistic execution of the 8 Model Operas (yangbanxi). These eight operas were the only plays, ballets, and performances allowed by Chairman Mao and his state authority during the Cultural Revolution era. Among the most popular operas that are recognizable today are the Red Detachment of Women and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, which has inspired Tsui Hark’s film, The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014).

These idyllic remembrances, however, betray a forgotten, traumatic, and haunting legacy. Censored by the state, the Cultural Revolution was a period in Chinese history where Mao Zedong and his brand of Communist China imposed anti-tradition policies and extremist anti-bourgeois actions involving mass murders that left millions dead. The mandate to destroy the state’s enemies at all costs took its bloody toll throughout Chinese society. Diane Lary offers a striking comparison of the Cultural Revolution: ‘The upending of all traditional values had something in common with the Holocaust, but with a major difference: The Nazis turned on non-Aryan races; the Chinese turned on each other’.^[7]  The infamous slogan, “My parents may love me, but not as much as Chairman Mao” was a manipulative but powerful motivator for Mao’s followers^[8]. Dissenters accused of being disloyal to Revolutionary ideals were punished with “struggle sessions”, an act of intense public shaming and humiliation. The dissenters were tied up, labeled with accusatory signage, and then physically beaten in front of large crowds and witnesses.^[9] These punishments were intended to overturn the bourgeois and wealthy (e.g. landowners), while attacking intellectuals and those sympathetic to old ideas (e.g. Confucianism).

Unfortunately, many films that remember the trauma of painful, haunting histories such as the Cultural Revolution have increasingly faded. Notably, the Fifth Generation directors had begun to address these subjects as part of a ‘search-for-roots’ movement. Escaping or exiled to the West in the 1980s and 1990s, these directors adapted their own experiences under Maoist rule into film that was critical and indicting of Communist political atrocities.^[10] For instance, director Tian Zhuangzhuang was banned for 10 years due to his film, Blue Kite (1993). This film implicated the Chinese Communist regime. Blue Kite commented on how the CCP’s rise to power in 1949 began with an idyllic promise and hope of a better life for all people. But Tian’s film depicted how abuses of state power and sanctioned injustices affected individuals, families, and communities, eventually leading to the horrific Cultural Revolution. While Blue Kite was critically acclaimed in Western countries, China’s punishment on Tian would have a clear impact on his filmmaking. Since Blue Kite, Tian’s subsequent films to this date have not ventured into any more political critiques of the CCP.^[11] With bold, provocative cinema, Fifth Generation Chinese directors such as Tian Zhuangzhuang searched for “roots” that were far different from the Communist value of rediscovering one’s “roots” within the feigned ideals of the Communist Motherland. However, since the new millennium, these Fifth Generation directors have largely chosen to exercise greater caution after receiving criticisms and bans from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of their films and/or themselves during the 1980s and 90s. The closest that any of these directors have come to commenting on the censored Cultural Revolution in present day can be found, for instance, in Fifth Generation director Zhang Yimou’s Coming Home (2014). However, as I have argued elsewhere, while this film is set at the onset of the Cultural Revolution, it “skips” over the Revolution’s decade and refrains from offering condemning scenes of this period or the soldiers. In fact, the Red Guards are depicted as helpful, noble, and graceful. This is subtly reinforced with the inclusion of the model opera Red Detachment of Women within the film.^[12]

Furthermore, this nostalgic remembrance of the Communist ideal is evident in Zhang Yimou’s tenth film, The Road Home (1999). This was his second film since he had become much more politically submissive to the decisions of Chinese film studios, and in turn, the regulations of the Chinese authorities.^[13] The Road Home is significantly a film that produces a sentimental memory of China and its people through the narrative of a man’s reminiscence of his parent’s courtship in his home village.^[14] The film evokes lush pastoral settings, majestic scenery and landscapes, and vibrant colours of a village and countryside in 1960s China (likely also during the Cultural Revolution). Rey Chow suggests that the production of this film can be “traced to a residual socialist sentimentalism with its faith in the import of human action”.^[15] That is, The Road Home operates under the guise of romantic nostalgia and its melodrama evokes an (over)engagement with the personal (that is, within the private family sphere), while neglecting the larger historical contexts of national history. Its very problematics in terms of memory are due to how it carries ideological sensibilities of the Communist ideal by analogizing the public with the private. The Road Home’s melodrama carries a particular kind of “nostalgic sentimentalism” for a socialist humanism within the public sphere that articulates a nationalist quality. It attempts to convey a remembrance of a Communist era utopia by salvaging hope and humanity with themes of redemption within the innocence of a countryside.^[16] Thus, what is produced is a memory that neglects the realities of China’s history, as if suggesting that the atrocity of the Cultural Revolution could be gladly forgotten through the idyllic notion of reconnection with one’s ancestral roots and reunion with one’s family.^[17] These are similar ideals of one’s roots and reunion that also persist strongly in the narrative of Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014).

Part of the intent within soft power strategies is to bring greater visibility to remembrances that the state desires versus those that are preferred forgotten.^[18] For instance, the growth of “Confucius Institutes” in strategic Western cities (e.g. London and Vancouver) has led to valuable international partnerships of cultural, artistic and language exchange with Western social and educational institutions. However, the political ideology and practical concerns of these initiatives have been critiqued in both popular press and scholarly literature.^[19]

Within cinema, Chinese blockbuster films have also leveraged soft power strategies to produce particular memories of China in both domestic and international markets. For example, the state-produced film, The Founding of the Republic (2009), remembers the 60th anniversary of the CCP by unapologetically promoting its nationalist stance within a politics of commemorating Mao Zedong’s rise to power. The film attempts to attract audiences in both Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong markets by leveraging popular celebrity culture through the casting of numerous Mainland and Hong Kong film stars and directors. Commemorations of particular national wounds are also pervasive within the historical wartime blockbuster, Flowers of War (2012). This film remembers the Nanjing Massacre of 1937, depicting a traumatic history that saw Imperial Japanese soldiers murder, torture and rape hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens. In contrast to Founding the Republic, Flowers of War demonstrates a soft power strategy to reach international markets by casting an “A-list” American Hollywood actor, Christian Bale (The Dark Knight Trilogy), as the protagonist. ^[20] This film’s vision of China remembers the pain, humiliation, and suffering at the hands of a foreign, oppressive enemy. Black-and-white characterizations reveal Chinese characters depicted as heroic, brave, and sacrificial, while the Japanese are shown as villainous, sinister and ruthless. Such dualisms create a collective, national identification around an officially produced memory that cheers the good and deeply begrudges the evil with little space for ambiguous or sympathetic characters.^[21] This phenomenon of suffering and victory can be understood as the “logic of the wound”, where cinema speaks “bitterness” but also seeks to remedy the trauma of the situation through some resolution.^[22]

A War for Memory on Tiger Mountain

However, for Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain (hereafter Tiger), particular wounds need not be remedied, because references to the traumatic memory of the Cultural Revolution are nowhere to be seen. This invisibility may not be surprising, given that the film itself is set a couple of decades earlier in 1946, right after Imperial Japan’s surrender in World War II and during the Communist’s civil war against the KMT (Kuomingtang).^[23] The semi-historical story’s importance to the Revolution was likely due to the heroism of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the original historical circumstances. Thus, depicting a narrative that celebrates the PLA’s great victory allows for audiences to trace the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) legacy to the PLA’s glorious feats of heroism. In order to repeatedly produce and consolidate this particular vision of the CCP, it is thus unsurprising why the story of Tiger once served as one of the most popular 8 Model Operas during the Cultural Revolution.

To attract a new domestic and international audience, Tsui Hark’s adaptation of the opera attempts to reclaim the impact and influence of the original narrative. Tsui re-imagines and pays homage to the story’s history as both model play and filmed stage opera during the Cultural Revolution era. However, Tsui’s cinematic tribute perpetuates the same tropes of power and memory production that rendered the Cultural Revolution invisible. For example, dualistic tropes persist with black-and-white characterizations of “good”, Communist heroes (PLA), “bad” KMT villains and their allies, the “evil” bandits. The attractive spectacle and emotional poignancy of the film’s melodrama and nostalgia produces a dominant visibility of preferred history while forgetting the traumatic remembrance of state-sanctioned atrocity. This presents an incredible amount that is quite “visible” through the melodrama and spectacle of Tiger and its method of memory production.

Leveraging its legacy and popularity as an 8 Model Opera, its big budget, special effects, intense action, 3-D conversion effects (within cinemas), and meticulously planned screens, The Taking of Tiger Mountain was released in China on December 23, 2014.^[24] The sensory excess and spectacle of this film solicits and attracts the spectator’s attention through the visual novelty of Hollywood-style blockbuster aesthetics.^[25] Attempts to attract a new generation of Chinese spectators to Revolutionary opera were extremely successful. This modern update became the tenth highest-grossing film of all time in China within two months.^[26]

Briefly, the story of the 2014 version of Tiger was based on Qu Bo’s novel, Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy or also known as Tracks in the Snowy Forest (Lin hai xue yuan). The basic premise of all versions revolves around a contingent of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—a precursor to the Chinese Communist Party—and their conflict with various infamous gangs of bandits who have overtaken a strategic location in Northeastern China. The story centres around the heroic main protagonist, Yang  Zirong, who goes undercover to infiltrate the largest bandit gang in order to secure the PLA’s own survival and future military advantage in their civil war with the KMT (and the bandits).

The unique element of Tsui Hark’s film is a device that sandwiches the central drama of Tiger between present-day New York and China. It focuses on an ethnic Chinese character named Jimmy who lives in New York and who decides to take temporary leave to return “home” for Chinese New Year.  The past events in Tiger are immediately staged reflexively in the context of memory and spectatorship as the film first presents the first act of the central drama through the gaze of Jimmy. For example, in the taxi on his way to the airport, we see Jimmy streaming a film on his mobile phone using the Chinese video streaming website Youku. He appears to be watching an old version of the stage opera Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy (see Figure 1).

The inclusion of Jimmy permits the audience to know that they are, in fact, watching something “staged”, not unlike the experience of live theatre or opera. This operatic consciousness is further evident in the director’s choice of makeup for some of the actors, the at-times comical and melodramatic dialogue and acting, and also in the dualistic noble hero/evil villain dichotomy. Notably, the exaggerated makeup on selected characters included an exaggerated use of “rouge” for the cheeks (especially for the children and the supporting actress), extensive dark eye makeup for the male protagonist in some scenes (perhaps to point to his stature as the hero of this story), alongside postures and gestures that also portray this operatic influence. Thus, Tsui clearly pays tribute to the very operatic traditions of the original genre through the film’s depictions of “histrionic” or faux acting.^[27] The 2014 version thus subtly whispers to the spectator a tribute to stylized spectacles of past performances.

Fig. 1. Staging the central narrative: Jimmy turning on his phone to stream an old version of Tiger

Fig. 2. Yang Zirong and his heroic gaze

The director’s exuberance for the story is expressed visibly through the second ending, which depicts a high octane, excessively dramatic, special effects-laden version in which Jimmy re-imagines his “preferred” vision of the history after the film first shows the audience a regular ending. Amidst the sheer spectacle of the action-packed side of this “popcorn flick”, however, the film still wants the audience to take the subject matter seriously and with respect.

Absolutely no space is allowed to question, doubt, or critique the success, nobility, and intelligence of the PLA. They are flawlessly portrayed as noble, heroic, and brave. Yet, in spite of the operatic elements of the film, it also demonstrates a historicism and self-seriousness that clearly references the ideology of Cultural Revolution imagery and the desire to again inspire and “touch” its viewers towards Communist ideals. For instance, the camera angles, poses, and gestures of the PLA protagonist, Yang Zirong, in particular, enhance the ideological presentation of the film. Notably, we can see the camera actually frame Yang with the “socialist realist gaze”, a common camera device used in Mao era revolutionary film (see Figure 2).^[28] This gaze offers an intense look directed off-screen, suggesting a sublimely frozen, timeless moment in the narrative that depicts Yang’s ideological resplendency.^[29] In stark contrast to the heroism of the PLA, the villains are instead depicted with an almost cartoon-like exaggeration of sinister insidiousness. Thus, this film is intent on re-appropriating its propagandistic legacy to its new contemporary audience.

Producing the Communist Utopia

Significantly, Tiger’s idyllic presentation can be unrelenting in its attempts to preserve a particular nostalgia of the Maoist era while producing an unflinchingly positive perception of the PLA (and in turn, the Chinese Communist Party and its Red Guards). Portrayals of this Communist ideal in Tiger can, interestingly, be traced to the dominant visual media of the Cultural Revolution era: its Revolutionary posters. The significance of these posters are not to be underestimated, as many of them depict the very gestures, scenarios, imagery and ideologies that helped define memory production during the Maoist era. Interestingly, similar depictions can also be seen within different scenes of Tiger itself. Such imagery (whether moving image or still) clearly serves to evoke what Huang describes as the “isms” or key ideologies that the state wants to preserve of its “communist utopia”^[30]. Producing this utopian ideal was significant as the prevalence and potency of memory production during this era witnessed Mao and how he “created the terms of political discourse—created correct thought—by transforming his reading of the past into the only possible reading”.^[31] From the perspective of Chairman Mao, how the Chinese people remembered history determined the course of success, power, and influence for the CCP.

Juxtaposing Revolutionary Posters and Images from Tiger 

The production of this communist utopia/ideal is articulated through several narratives in Tiger that find their thematic and visual parallels through revolutionary posters from the Cultural Revolution. These parallels, I argue, suggest how Tiger demonstrates state strategies of soft power influence through shared visual depictions and narratives of Communist ideals.

For example, one notable side-story in Tiger involvesa rebellious young child named Knotti, whose father was killed by bandits. His mother Qinglian also went missing (it is later discovered that she was abducted by the bandit leader). Knotti’s development from a traumatized, fiercely resistant and antisocial child into a responsible, young, and inspired child soldier of the PLA willing to sacrifice himself to destroy the enemy satisfies much of the Revolutionary ideology promoted during the Cultural Revolution. Notably, the Communist regime considered the development of young children into soldiers as absolutely essential. This was evident through the existence of the Young Little Pioneers (which later became the Little Red Guards). Shockingly, this encouragement for children to take up arms and participate in the Revolution was visibly present through prevalent revolutionary posters (see Figure 3).^[32] If we juxtapose some of these posters from the Cultural Revolution with screen captures from Tiger, we can see a striking attention to the similarity of socialist poses, gestures and expressions. In Figure 4, for instance, a poster appeals to children to be “brave against the enemy” and depicts a child grabbing the enemy by his hair and violently drowning him. This parallels with a scene where Knotti, out of anger at seeing his PLA adult comrade shot (this is a “righteous anger” in the eyes of the Communist narrative), takes up his rifle to attack the enemy.

Fig. 3. “Army and People are One Family”. A child holds a toy gun while receiving a haircut from a Communist soldier[33]

Fig. 4: “Be Brave Against Your Enemy”; Knotti taking up arms to fight the enemy in Tiger [34]

Fig. 5a. “A PLA man and indignant children on hillside, looking through the documents of some unseen enemy…”[35]

Fig. 5b. Original composition

Similarly, in Figure 5a, we can see another comparison by viewing the Revolutionary poster against a cropped screen capture of Tiger. In the latter still, male and female children (Knotti and Little Juan in Tiger) are both visible in a scene where they decide to join the PLA’s fight. Little Juan is armed with wooden staffs that parallel the weaponry seen in the poster by various children. Little Dove (the female army doctor/soldier in Tiger) and Knotti are holding on to pairs of skis, which demonstrates a willingness to fight patriotically. These skis were being used by the soldiers for both navigating and fighting on the snowy mountain. Both the poster and the screen capture also show a supervising adult soldier (see male soldier in poster) and Little Dove. The original composition of this camera shot shows Little Dove, Knotti and Little Juan framed in the centre of the shot. Two PLA soldiers also serve to frame the shot like a picture frame. Within Tiger, this framing conveys a heightened sense of the characters’ and the film spectator’s admiration (see Figure 5b).  While the children are allowed to participate in the journey up Tiger mountain to the site of the final battle (under supervision of Little Dove), they are however encouraged to stay safe and outside the more dangerous areas. The intent of this image, it seems, is therefore to convey the sense of Knotti, Little Juan, and Little Dove’s strong patriotism to the cause. This expression of patriotism is also visible in the gestures and themes of another poster. Much like the screen capture of Tiger in Figure 5a, Figure 6 also depicts a similar gender and role combination: an adult female soldier, a young boy, and a young girl. Again, the intent of such gender and role arrangements appears to centre around themes of patriotism, loyalty and participation.

Fig. 6. “I love the blue sky of the motherland”[36]

In the case of children taking up arms, there are no suggestions of involuntary or victimized “child soldiers” in either posters or the film. Instead, we, as spectators, see a carefully crafted narrative of children who willingly take up arms out of their innocence and inspiration to make a difference and help out their comrades and friends. Such visions of memory evoke a crude emotional response of “rooting for” these children to do their best.^[37] It is this positive, inspirational message that expresses a communist ideal in both posters and film. That is, the film’s remembrance of such Revolutionary imagery suggests Communist ideals emphasizing the importance of unity and standing together, regardless of one’s age or background. The spectator is therefore encouraged to serve a greater cause that serves the country no matter the sacrifice.

Also visible is a portrayal that expresses the PLA soldiers’ generosity for the villagers. In the Communist narrative, this depicts their heart for the people, especially the elderly, poor and weak. Notably, villagers are in this scene exemplified through an old woman and her son. In this scene, Yang and his crew are investigating a village for survivors. Mistaken for bandits, Yang and his comrades are attacked by the peasant son hiding in their own home, but Yang declares that they have in fact come in peace. Soon they discover the peasant son is in fact an old friend, Yongqi, of one of the comrades present. Yongqi’s elder mother has fallen sick and is fatigued from having run out of food. Noticing the situation, Yang is seen taking food from his own rations. Little Dove, the army doctor, quickly attends to the elder mother and cooks porridge for her from Yang’s rations. In turn, Yongqi joins the PLA cause, and the village becomes a key strategic defensive outpost for the PLA.^[38]

Paralleling the film, images from old Revolutionary posters also establish the PLA group as one that is noble, generous and advocates for and with the common people (see figure 7). Here, the PLA soldiers willingly help the sick, poor and weak and demonstrate their responsibility and passion of helping villagers.

Fig. 7. Soldiers and doctor help the elder in room full of peasants.[39]

Fig. 8. PLA soldiers helping an ill elder villager onto her bed (kang)

Fig. 9. Army doctor feeding the elderly villager food to help her recover

Figure 8 shows a scene similar to the one portrayed in Tiger (cf. also Figure 7). The Communist ideal depicted in these posters is that of soldiers attending to the poor and vulnerable as their defenders and caretakers. A similar portrayal can be seen in Tiger where Little Dove also attends to the elder woman laying on the kang by trying to feed her food and/or medicine with a spoon (see Figures 8 and 9). All these images across posters and film point to an important remembrance of the CCP as a party that champions for all those who cannot help themselves. Tiger, then, becomes a key strategic medium of soft power for the CCP to leverage the popular appeal of blockbuster films and influence a new generation of spectators to Communist ideals and causes.

What is the significance of these juxtapositions between revolutionary posters and screenshots from The Taking of Tiger Mountain? From my comparisons so far, it is evident how Tiger re-appropriates old poster propaganda into moving images that convey the ideology and memory of a Communist utopia for a new generation increasingly distant from the Cultural Revolution era. As Evans and Donald argue, Chinese posters during the Maoist era evoke power relations that display for us, the modern viewers, the official discourses structuring, establishing and producing memories of a particular, preferred version of that specific era.^[40] While it is clear that the Chinese Communist Party’s contemporary soft power strategies differ greatly from the past, it is interesting to spot an attachment and re-appropriation to old propagandistic imagery and their utopian ideals. Still, from a filmmaking perspective, a large degree of credit must be given to Tsui Hark and his crew for the research and  meticulous work done to replicate these gestures and poses of a Revolutionary past into a nostalgic remembrance for a very different present era and film audience. Nonetheless, such efforts do not negate the persistence of produced memory as evidenced by the idyllic scenes in Tiger. After all, the revolutionary posters served a clear propagandistic purpose during the Cultural Revolution era.

Roots and Memory: PLA as Family

The new generation that grows increasingly distant to 20th century war histories is exemplified by Jimmy and in how the director stages past and present together. The intention here is to assert the ideals of inter-generational connection and filial piety. While these are noble notions, the film implants Communist ideals once again. Cinematic melodrama and spectacle are leveraged once more in soft power strategies to articulate the connectedness and familial bond that can exist between government and citizens. For new generations of domestic or international diasporic Chinese, the film promotes a Communist leadership—through the example of the PLA—that offers the spectator a solicitation of trust. Significantly, this solicitation is directed to ethnic Chinese diasporas, especially those raised in countries apart from Mainland China. Such attempts court transnational spectators to a utopian vision of China as “home” or motherland where one’s cultural and ancestral roots can be recovered, and where histories can be (selectively) remembered.

These themes are evident towards the end of Tiger, in present day. Jimmy returns to his grandmother’s home for Chinese New Year’s Eve dinner, the most important meal of the year in the Chinese calendar, to be shared with close family and/or friends. At the dinner table, Jimmy notices how his table is filled with numerous food dishes, enough to feed an army. Jimmy asks, “Why are there so many guests?”. Grandma responds, “What guests? They are all family”. Indeed, this food is meant for the PLA squad that the spectator has come to know over the course of the film. In the subsequent scene, Jimmy imagines the ghosts of the whole PLA squad as family members, smiling as they join Jimmy at the table (see Figure 10). It is here where we also discover that Jimmy’s grandfather is in fact Knotti, the little boy in the PLA army. Jimmy immediately feels touched and inspired by his Revolutionary vision of his grandfather and his army-family. In tears, Jimmy creates for himself a poignant, joyful remembrance of what family truly means. Spectators, too, are invited to participate in this melodramatic sentiment. Diasporic ethnic Chinese in the West are also invited to re-discover cultural roots with a Chinese motherland that will protect and welcome us. Indeed, spectators are invited to adopt a prosthetic memory of the joys of Revolution, and amnesia of its brutal consequences.

Fig. 10. Chinese New Year’s Eve family dinner with Jimmy, his grandfather Knotti, and the PLA squadron

Again, the involvement of such soft power efforts in this memory production demonstrates the state’s compulsion to (re)create a singular Chinese people, unified and united, regardless of place, space or time for the consumption by both domestic and international audiences.^[41] The implications of this final “family” scene that stretches across time and across geographies raises questions about the intent of such memory production for transnational markets. The importance of Jimmy in this film is both descriptive of the diasporic Chinese situation as well as prescriptive in urging ethnic Chinese in the West to rediscover their roots and heritage through a vision of re-connecting with the Motherland. This discourse of return and recovery of one’s roots in the context of a national, collective identification renders problematic any progressive notions of diasporic return.^[42] The issue at stake here, then, is to what extent these soft power strategies are cultivating dominant relationships of power with overseas diasporas through such (re)productions of memory.  As Laura Marks suggests:

The relationships between cultures are also mediated by power so that the dominant regime….sets the terms of what counts as knowledge….They may evade expression because of censorship; because memory is inaccessible; or because to give expression to memories is to invite madness.  They may become subsumed to the dominant regime and forced to speak its language…. ^[43]

Thus, disrupting these relations of power is not easy.  Hegemonic interference makes it extremely difficult, if nearly impossible, for a new generation to discern the entanglements and tensions between history and memory. Interrogating the possibility of re-written histories therefore requires one to be critically reflexive of how these histories are being envisioned in film. In this way, spectators can see film more actively by asking what sorts of remembrances are being repeated and what images and histories might be actively silenced or ignored. Through such questions and self-reflexivity, one’s individual and collective cultural memory can thus subvert problems of power by examining where there may be gaps in histories and memories.

In this regard, Jimmy’s presence and role in the introduction, middle act, and coda of The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014), might, for the more optimistic critic, spark a reflexive awareness of the spectator viewing the film. Perhaps this also reflects Tsui Hark’s subtle tension in articulating the opportunity for spectators to critically engage with the problematic spectacle and political intent of official state memory productions within this film. Even if this optimism is viable, the director’s attempts are nonetheless drowned in the sea of self-congratulatory, hegemonic imagery that is so intent on remembering state legacy and pushing on to the spectator a particular, prosthetic memory of Chinese history.^[44]

Conclusion

Regardless of the director’s intention in this film, identifying the gaps in mediated visions of memory and the processes of silencing often involves critically and reflexively noting what visual, mediated memories have become produced and rendered visible for the transnational audience/spectator. Within Tsui Hark’s The Taking of Tiger Mountain (2014), this replication of Revolutionary themes is expressed through scenes depicting noble virtues of sacrifice, filial piety, courage, power, and the sentimental articulation of recovering one’s ancestral roots and heritage. These replications and re-appropriations reflect the Communist discourse that is rendered visible through Tiger’s revolutionary imagery. This visible imagery attempts to repeat and retell particular, chosen narratives through the presentation of the PLA. Therefore, these Communist ideologies reflect a utopian ideal that dominated Party politics during the Maoist era, and can be traced back to memory strategies during the Cultural Revolution, including the dominant visual mode of propagandistic posters.

Nonetheless, the state appears to prefer soft power strategies that attain the consent and participation of the population, even as they re-appropriate old propagandistic methods. While these issues of soft power and memory production must be reflexively engaged, to offer immediate scrutiny is perhaps too simplistic. In this article, my position has been to offer a critical yet thoughtful analysis on the hegemonic state production of official memory and (soft) power. However, it may also be important to consider, as Chua Beng-Huat argues, how soft power can also be understood as an important tool towards re-building a nation or society’s international perception, particularly if this society was once marginalized and oppressed by wealthier, more developed countries.^[45] Weaving through the tension of problematic and more optimistic positions of understanding power and memory in relation to the themes I have discussed here would certainly be worthy of future study.

Regardless of how or why power and memory is produced, what is fundamental for spectators is to reflexively examine these issues in light of reflexively considering what issues, histories, and remembrances are at stake and at risk of being lost due to the struggles and tensions of such power. Ultimately, wrestling with this tension through an active engagement may therefore offer a way of reading film that may seek to bring voice to those who are silenced and bring a critical awareness to what histories and memories are rendered visible and invisible.

^[1] Sources of Chinese Tradition: From 1600 Through the Twentieth Century, compiled by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Richard Lufrano, 2^nd ed., vol. 2. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, 474-475.

^[2] Françoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudillière, History Beyond Trauma (New York: Other Press, 2004), xxvii.

^[3] Beng-Huat Chua. Structure, Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012),  6. Originally, the concept of soft power developed from Joseph Nye’s critical analysis of United States strategies and its global influence. However, because of Nye’s America-focused discussion, the concept of soft power and its relevance in different cultural contexts continues to be debated in scholarly literature. Chua’s discussion of soft power adopts Joseph Nye’s arguments while effectively adapting it to East Asian cultural contexts. For the purposes of this paper, I also adopt Chua’s position in my discussion of China’s use of it within popular cinema. However, I want to acknowledge that ongoing scholarly debates critique Nye’s conceptualization of soft power and its applicability to cultural contexts apart from the US. While important, these nuanced debates are beyond the scope of this paper. For excellent discussions and debates on this concept, please see Joseph Nye’s seminal book, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004). See also Jacques E. C. Hymans article, “India’s soft power and vulnerability”, India Review, 4:2 (2009),  234 – 265. Hymans’ paper critiques the simplicity and applicability of Nye’s soft power in reference to the unique cultural conditions in South Asian contexts. For an excellent examination of the Chinese propaganda system that also departs from Nye and instead focuses on subjective Chinese conceptions, contexts, and perceptions of soft power, see Kingsley Edney’s monograph, The Globalization of Chinese Propaganda: International Power and Domestic Political Cohesion, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

^[4] Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald. “Introducing Posters of China’s Cultural Revolution”. In Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, edited byHarriet Evans and Stephanie Donald. (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999).

^[5] Evans and Donald, 1999,  2.

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] Diane Lary. The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social  Transformation. 1937-1945. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010),  12.

^[8] Clare Bagshaw. A China Moment.. (Xlibris Corporation, 2012),  54.

^[9] Mo Yan. Red Sorghum. (H. Goldblatt, trans.) (Toronto: Penguin Books, 1994).

^[10] Ban Wang. Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, History in Modern

China. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004),  6.

^[11] Other Fifth Generation Chinese films that critiqued the CCP and their Cultural Revolution include Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine (1993)and Zhang Yimou’s To Live (1994). Both films were also critically acclaimed in European and North American festival circuits but were banned in China.

^[12] Nathan M.L. To, “Transgenerational Hauntings, Media, Memory and Power: Diasporic Visions of Historical Traumas in Modern China through Moving Images”, 2014. Manuscript submitted for publication; see also Nathan M.L. To, “Diasporic Montage and Critical Autoethnography: Mediated Visions of Intergenerational Memory and the Affective Transmission of Trauma”. In: B.T. Knudsen and C. Stage (eds.) Affective Methodologies, (forthcoming). Palgrave. The closest mainstream Chinese film to attempt a critique and commentary of the Cultural Revolution is Lu Chuan’s The Last Supper, based on Liu Bang (Gaozu), whose reign began the Han Dynasty. This film is also discussed in my 2014 paper cited here (see also Andrew and Rapp, 2002, 22).

^[13] Peter Rist. “Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home”. Off Screen, 6:8 (August 2002). Online Journal. [Accessed 03/14/2015].

^[14] The Road Home begins with a man’s return to his home village upon hearing of the death of his father. A flashback ensues, which reveals the film’s central narrative, which is to tell the courtship story of the man’s father and mother.

^[15] Rey Chow, “Sentimental Returns: On the Uses of the Everyday in the Recent Films of Zhang Yimou and Wong Kar-wai”. New Literary History, 33:4 (Autumn 2002),  648.

^[16] ibid.,  652.

^[17] ibid.

^[18] Zhang Xiaoling. China as an Emerging Soft Power: Winning Hearts and Minds through Communicating with Foreign Publics (Discussion Paper 35), October 2008. University of Nottingham: China Policy Institute.

^[19] Don Starr. “The Chinese language education in Europe: the Confucius Institutes”, European Journal of Education, 44: 1 (2009): 65-82.

^[20] To, 2014. The inclusion of Hollywood stars such as Christian Bale also points to the intention to reach an international market, and certainly a specific niche of diasporic ethnic Chinese in “Western” countries who desire to connect and re-connect with these histories. This issue raises questions about the development of a transnational, collective identification to a particular remembrance of history in relation to hegemonic power. For a more comprehensive discussion on this issue, particularly in regard to the Japanese imperial invasion with reference to theories of “affect” and “transgenerational haunting”,  see To, 2014.

^[21] To, 2014. For example, Lu Chuan’s film, City of Life and Death (2009) presents a chilling, graphic vision of the Nanjing Massacre. However, Lu’s film meditates on the difficult question of what defines one’s humanity if one commits great atrocities? Lu allows himself to portray some of these Japanese perpetrators with sympathy and moral shades of grey.

^[22] Rey Chow. “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem”, boundary 2, Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field, 25:3 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 6-7; Chris Berry and Mary Farquhar, China On Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 18.

^[23] In the context of the Tiger narrative, the PLA (Communists) were battling the KMT (Republicans) for control over China, continuing a decades long war for power and governance.

^[24] My paper was written based on viewing the 2-D version of this film. According to film reviews, some 3-D effects in cinemas focused on artillery and weapons-fire. These include flying bullets, shells, and cannon fire appeared to fire straight at the audience, and exploding grenades in slow-motion. Please see Yang Fan, “The Taking of Tiger Mountain,” Global Times, December 28 2014, accessed May 5, 2015, http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/898920.shtml; “Film Review: The Taking of Tiger Mountain,” December 31 2014, Film Journal International, accessed May 5, 2015, http://www.filmjournal.com/content/film-review-taking-tiger-mountain; Maggie Lee. “Film Review: ‘The Taking of Tiger Mountain’,” Variety, January 1, 2015, accessed May 5, 2015, http://variety.com/2015/film/asia/film-review-the-taking-of-tiger-mountain-1201388202/

^[25] Box office earnings reached over $144 Million USD by March 2, 2015.

^[26] Tom Gunning. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant Garde.” In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative. Ed. Adam Barker, Thomas Elsaesser (BFI Publishing, 1990). 56-62. My assertion here refers to Tom Gunning’s ‘cinema of attractions.’ Speaking about early American cinema, Gunning says that the cinema of attractions, “directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through an exciting spectacle- a unique event, whether fictional or documentary, that is of interest in itself” (p. 58). The debate between Chinese film and Gunning’s concept is beyond the scope of this paper but certainly worthy of future discussion. For excellent discussions on the cinema of attraction in reference to contemporary cinema technology such as 3D, please see Miriam Ross, 3D Cinema: Optical illusions and Tactile Experiences (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

^[27] Jason McGrath. “Cultural Revolution Model Opera Films and the Realist Tradition in Chinese Cinema”. The Opera Quarterly 26: 2-3 (2010): 343-376. This “histrionic” mode of acting contrasts the “verisimilar” mode, which is more similar to modern day approaches that preference a “natural”, realistic acting style that masks the very constructedness of acting.

^[28] McGrath, 2010, 11.

^[29] McGrath, 2010,  8-9.

^[30] Xuelei Huang, “Intellectuals and Cultural Production at the Mingxing (Star) Motion Picture Company (1922-1938)”. 2009. Doctoral Dissertation; McGrath, 2010 in discussion of the communist utopia.  See also Clark, 2008.

^[31] R.S. Watson (ed.), Memory, History, and Opposition Under State Socialism (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1994), 2.

^[32] Evans and Donald, 1999,  2. See also Lufrano, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 474-475.

^[33] Poster M104. “Army and People are One Family”. University of Westminster Chinese Poster Collection, London, UK (Digital archive version), November 1973, accessed March 12, 2015, http://chinaposters.westminster.ac.uk/zenphoto/Children/1402_big_0000.jpg. The curator’s description says of this poster: “A soldier cuts a young boy’s hair. The boy carries a small toy rifle. A papercut in the window says ‘Embrace the army, love the people’.”

^[34] Poster M41, “Be Brave Against Your Enemy”. University of Westminster Chinese Poster Collection, London, UK (Digital archive version), January 1979, accessed March 12, 2015, http://chinaposters.westminster.ac.uk/zenphoto/Children/1353_big_0000.jpg.

^[35] Poster M38, “Fight Instigator”. University of Westminster Chinese Poster Collection, London, UK (Digital archive version). August 1976, accessed March 12, 2015, http://chinaposters.westminster.ac.uk/zenphoto/Children/1351_big_0000.jpg. The poster depicts a cropped image of Little Dove, Knotti and Little Juan getting ready to join the PLA at their final battle. In both the poster and in Tiger, wooden staffs are present in the poster.

^[36] Poster K6, “I love the blue sky of the motherland”. University of Westminster Chinese Poster Collection, London, UK (Digital archive version). June 1976, accessed 14 March, 2015, http://chinaposters.westminster.ac.uk/zenphoto/National%20Festival%20and%20Patriotism/1292_big_0000.jpg

^[37] Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

^[38] My initial thought of this scene was of it demonstrating the soldiers’ filial piety for their elder. While this might also be true, a more accurate Communist narrative is the revolutionary army’s commitment to the poor, and to the common people/villagers. In the Cultural Revolution, Confucian origins of filial piety were overturned by Mao. Sons and daughters would turn against their fathers and mothers and report them to the Red Army if they betrayed the Revolutionary cause. This also pointed to Mao’s status as the revolutionary’s “true” father. Nonetheless, within Revolutionary supporters, respect for senior authorities was embedded within cultural consciousness.

^[39] As described by the PLA 8181 Troop political department itself: “A PLA soldier wears a doctor’s coat and holds a stethoscope. Another PLA soldier plays a musical instrument, while a female soldier sits with an old lady on the kang. The room is full of peasants, and a barefoot doctor is carrying satchel on the table. Set in northern China.”

^[40] Evans and Donald 1999,  2.

^[41] To, 2014,  3.

^[42] Sara Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier, and Mimi Sheller (2003). “Introduction: Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration”, in S. Ahmed, C. Castañeda, A Fortier, and M. Sheller (eds.), Uprooting/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. Oxford: Berg), p. 2.  In contrast to traditional notions of “diaspora” which can be problematic due to the issue colonial histories for some cultures, Ahmed et al. see diaspora differently. They argue for a position of ‘regroundings—of identity, culture, nation, diaspora—[that] can both resist and reproduce hegemonic forms of home and belonging’,  2.

^[43] Laura Marks, Skin of the Film (Texas: University of Texas Press, 2000), 24.

^[44] Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). According to Landsberg, “Prosthetic memories are adopted as the result of a person’s experience with a mass cultural technology of memory that dramatizes or recreates a history that he or she did not live”, 29.

^[45] Chua, 2012,  23,129. For Chua, this was evident in the development of the Korean wave. According to Chua, this helped transform the international, public perception of South Korea from a marginalized country enslaved as a source of comfort women for colonial oppressors like the Japanese imperial army, to one that became envied for their beautiful women, handsome men, and trendy fashion.

Notes on Contributor

Nathan M.L. To has a Ph.D from the Media and Communication Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research explores the entanglement between affect, media, diasporas and the intergenerational transmission of trauma through distributed, mediated visions of memory in the 2nd generation Chinese-Canadian experience. Prior to Goldsmiths, he studied his MA in Canada specializing in Counselling Psychology. He is certified as a clinical counselor in Canada and continues to consult as a Media Psychology/Clinical Researcher-Consultant. Overall, Nathan’s diverse background has developed interdisciplinary research interests including trauma and memory studies, cultural studies, critical media psychology, Asian studies, diaspora, and digital media research.

Bibliography

Ahmed, Sara, Castañeda, Claudia, Fortier, Anne-Marie, Sheller, Mimi. “Introduction: Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of home and migration’, in S. Ahmed, C. Castañeda, A Fortier, and M. Sheller (eds.), Uprooting/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. 1-22. Oxford: Berg. 2003.

Andrew, Anita, and John A. Rapp. “Other Imperial Predecessors”. In Autocracy and China’s Rebel Founding Emperors: Comparing Chairman Mao and Ming Taizu, edited by Anita Andrew & John Rapp,  13-28. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc., 2000.

Bagshaw, Clare. A China Moment. 2012. Xlibris Corporation.

Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision. Stanford:Stanford University Press, 2005.

Berry, Chris and Farquhar, Mary. China On Screen. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.

Cho, Grace M. (2008) Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Chow, Rey. “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem”, boundary 2, Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field, 25:3 (Autumn, 1998): 1-24.

Chow, Rey. “Sentimental Returns: On the Uses of the Everyday in the Recent Films of Zhang Yimou and Wong Kar-wai. New Literary History, 33:4 (Autumn 2002),  639-654.

Chua Beng-Huat. Structure, Audience and Soft Power in East Asian Pop Culture Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012.

Clark, Paul. The Chinese Cultural Revolution: A History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Davoine, Francoise, and Jean-Max Gaudillière. History Beyond Trauma. New York:  Other Press, 2004.

de Bary, Wm. Theodore, and Richard Lufrano.Sources of Chinese Tradition: From 1600 Through the Twentieth Century (compilation), 2^nd edition, Volume 2,  474-475. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Edney, Kingsley. The Globalization of Chinese Propaganda: International Power and Domestic Political Cohesion, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Evans, Harriet and Stephanie Donald,. “Introducing Posters of China’s Cultural Revolution”. In Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, edited byHarriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1999. p. 2.

“Film Review: The Taking of Tiger Mountain,” December 31 2014, Film Journal International. Accessed May 5, 2015. http://www.filmjournal.com/content/film-review-taking-tiger-mountain

Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, its Spectator and the Avant Garde.” In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, edited by Adam Barker, Thomas Elsaesser. BFI Publishing, 1990.  56-62.

Lee, Maggie. “Film Review: ‘The Taking of Tiger Mountain’,” Variety, January 1, 2015. Accessed May 5, 2015. http://variety.com/2015/film/asia/film-review-the-taking-of-tiger-mountain-1201388202/

Huang, Xuelei. Intellectuals and Cultural Production at the Mingxing (Star) Motion Picture Company (1922-1938). 2009. Doctoral Dissertation.

Hymans, Jacques, E. C. “India’s soft power and vulnerability”, India Review, 4:2 (2009), 234 – 265.

Landsberg, Alison. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

Lary, Diane. The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Social Transformation. 1937-1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Marks, Laura.  Skin of the Film. Texas: University of Texas Press,2000.

McGrath, Jason. “Cultural Revolution model opera films and the realist tradition in Chinese cinema”. The Opera Quarterly 26:2-3 (2010),  343-376.

Nye, Joseph. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. New York: Public Affairs, 2004.

Rist, Peter. “Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home”. Off Screen, 6:8 (August 2002). [Online Journal]. Retrieved March 14, 2015. http://offscreen.com/view/road_home.

Ross, Miriam. 3D Cinema: Optical Illusions and Tactile Experiences. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015.

Starr, Don. “The Chinese language education in Europe: the Confucius Institutes”, European Journal of Education, 44: 1 (2009),  65-82.

To, Nathan M.L. “Diasporic montage and critical autoethnography: Mediated visions of intergenerational memory and the affective transmission of trauma”. In Affective Methodologies, edited by Britta T. Knudsen and Carmen Stage. London: Palgrave, (forthcoming).

To, Nathan M.L. “Transgenerational Hauntings, Media, Memory and Power: Diasporic Visions of Historical Traumas in Modern China through Moving Images”. 2014. Manuscript submitted for publication.

University of Westminster Chinese Poster Collection, London, UK. http://chinaposters.westminster.ac.uk/

Wang, Ban. Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, History in Modern China.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.

Watson, Rubie S.  “Memory, History, and Opposition Under State Socialism: An Introduction”. In Memory, History, and Opposition Under State Socialism, edited by Rubie S. Watson. Sante Fe:School of American Research Press, 1999.

Yan, Mo Red Sorghum. (H. Goldblatt, trans.).  Toronto: Penguin Books, 1994.

Yang Fan. “The Taking of Tiger Mountain,” Global Times, December 28 2014. Accessed May 5, 2015. http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/898920.shtml

Zhang Xiaoling. China as an emerging soft power: Winning hearts and minds through communicating with foreign publics (Discussion Paper 35), University of Nottingham: China Policy Institute. October 2008.

Filmography

The Blue Kite (Lan feng zheng, Tian Zhuangzhuang, 1993).

City of Life and Death (Nanjing! Nanjing!, Lu Chuan, 2009).

Coming Home (Gui Lai, Zhang Yimou, 2014).

The Dark Knight Trilogy  (Christopher Nolan, 2005 – 2012).

Farewell My Concubine (Ba wang bie ji, Chen Kaige, 1993).

The Flowers of War (Jin líng shí san chai, Zhang Yimou, 2011).

The Founding of a Republic (Jian guo da ye, Han Sanping and Huang Jianxin, 2009).

The Last Supper (Wang de Shengyan, Lu Chuan, 2012).

The Road Home (Wo de fu qin mu qin, Zhang Yimou, 1999).

The Taking of Tiger Mountain (Zhì qu weihu shan, Tsui Hark, 2014).

To Live (Huo zhe, Zhang Yimou, 1994).

When talking about the media representation of the 2003 war in Iraq, two terms are heavily used: manipulation and authenticity. Manipulation is often brought up in relation to the topic of television news coverage; several texts in media and communication studies show how the US military controlled media in order to establish a “presentable” image of war.^[1] The term authenticity, however, is often used for describing the specific quality of those pictures of war that through their online circulation embody the possibilities of digital communication: pictures taken by soldiers themselves with mobile phone cameras and camcorders, producing an enormous amount of images which are then spread via the Internet. These pictures promise to show what is missing in the TV news: combat action, improvised explosive device explosions and dead bodies. They are considered to be true and pure since they seem to show unstaged, real events.

The fiction films about the war in Iraq invariably pick up the aesthetics of these pictures in one way or another, as seen in The Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, 2007), Redacted (Brian DePalma, 2007), The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008) or Green Zone (Paul Greengrass, 2010). It seems a logical conclusion to say that the movies actually use these aesthetics to gain an impression of authenticity, incorporating the look of online images as a style to share in this authenticity.^[2] It can also be assumed that we, the viewers, trust in this kind of authentication: even fictional films like The Hurt Locker are praised for providing a very authentic picture of war.^[3] This correlation leads to several questions. Does this mean the fictional depictions of war in Hollywood films are more authentic than the news reports on TV? Do they provide a more authentic view on historical events?

In order to deal with these questions, one could examine what kind of authenticity comes into effect here. But that would reinforce the contradiction inside which the discussion about media representation of war seems to be trapped: between the demand for authentic images on the one hand and the accusation of manipulation on the other. This contradiction derives from the idea that media representation should be able to represent the reality of war as it really is, in an objective manner that is not influenced by strategies of staging, and that there is an objective truth about war that only needs to be revealed. But what should a “real” image of war look like, why do such images not appear in TV news coverage and what role does the fictional genre cinema thus play?

In our view, what needs to be examined here is not as much the question how authentic images of war should look like in reference to an empirical reality, but how we are able to picture the war in the first place, and how to give war an image that makes it visible and tangible to us. That is, the reality of war is only graspable through the mediated experience of war. There is neither a “real” war out there nor the “right” way to represent it through media or to depict its truth. Rather, there are different modes of aesthetic construction and perception that are necessary to make war visible and palpable to us, to shape our attitude towards war as a historical event and to make moral judgments about it.

In this paper, we want to argue that war as a historical event emerges as specific modes of aesthetic experience that are generated and shaped by audiovisual media. These modes of experience are culturally and aesthetically formed and hence historically contingent. We would like to show how these modes of experience are shaped and how different types of audiovisual media interact in this process. In order to achieve this, we will provide an analysis of the documentary The War Tapes (Deborah Scranton, 2006), a film that has been praised with showing the most authentic picture of war. Drawing on an analytical concept developed with regard to the fictional Hollywood war film, we would like to show how even in documentary films the aesthetic modes and poetics of affect of the war film genre loom large, interact with new forms of media imagery (like mobile phone videos) and thus profoundly structure the viewer’s experience of war.

The War Tapes already drew a lot of attention from the circumstances of its genesis: all footage was filmed by soldiers themselves. Twenty-one soldiers in total were equipped with MiniDV cameras, five of them filmed during the entire year of their mission. A whole movie filmed through the eyes of soldiers, this shaky, right in the middle of the action camcorder aesthetic that has become so characteristic for the imagery of this war made the movie appreciated by the public especially for being “deeply authentic”.^[4] Our assumption, however, is, that it is not the authenticity of the immediate documentation of real events which constitutes the specificity of this movie. Rather it is the way in which the film organises this material. Its dramaturgy does not provide a chronology of real events or a true image of war, but a compositional unfolding of very subjective and sensual-affective modes of experience. From the beginning to the end this film is structured in its very own logic, which is, drawing on our central assumption, highly geared to patterns of staging and poetics of affect of the fictional war film genre.

The Hollywood War Film’s Poetics of Affect

Our description of the Hollywood war film stems from an understanding of genre developed by Hermann Kappelhoff that is based on a comprehension of cinematic forms as part of a communicative economics of affect.^[5] Behind this stands the assumption that a film genre is not only about subject matters or certain ways of organizing narrative events. “War” in the war film genre is more than a subject matter, it is a complex melange of culturally and historically shaped visual forms, affective experiences, and collective memories and myths. The war films are related to the audience’s knowledge of war; their viewers become familiar with images of loss, death and survival by more than just reference. The Hollywood war film genre modulates the audience’s emotional sensations between thrilling stimulation and horror, guilt and mourning, and vulnerability and ‘shock and awe’. The genre is hence better described as a dynamic system that addresses, shapes and differentiates emotional experience through formal staging patterns. Within processes of aesthetic perception the film’s poetics unfold as movements of affect which the viewer experiences as his or her own emotionality.^[6] Thus the films function as interventions in a mediated economy of affect in which the integration of the individual subject into communal life is negotiated again and again.^[7] We understand these films as a media practice in which a society addresses itself as a political community. Their poetics of affect–their aesthetic constructions triggering specific modes of viewer experience–thus provide an interface between abstract political conditions and individual self-perception.

Referring to these understandings, and drawing on Christine Gledhill’s “concept of modality”,^[8] our comprehension of genre is one that cannot be thought of beyond a genre system – a dynamic ensemble of forms and functionalities of expression that merge into different genres, as well as other forms of audiovisual articulation, as historically variable modes of staging and representation. These modes are not at all discrete entities but heavily related to one another and exposed to a constant mutual permeation–this becomes very clear in case of the war film, with its intertwined modalities of horror, thrill, action, etc.^[9] These “modalities of experience” gain shape through the films’ formal staging patterns, their orchestration and unfolding throughout the process of perception: camera movements and perspectives, rhythms of montage, lighting, sound, character movements, gestures, etc. all interact and structure the spectator’s perceptive, affective and cognitive operations.^[10] Hence, these specifically formed modalities of experience are the sphere in which the individual spectator’s sensations and feelings are connected to and integrated into abstract cultural and political processes. In this way a genre system constitutes a sphere of social communication in which events of social reality become accessible and are transformed as aesthetic experiences of cohabitation.^[11] The specific configurations of these aesthetic modes are historically contingent, dynamic and constantly changing; hence, analysing their very concrete appearances within particular films provides the key to examining the films’ and the genres’ cultural significance in a historical perspective.

In light of these ideas, the central questions brought to films are: How do they address their spectators? Alongside this, which staging strategies can be found and how do these strategies elicit and modulate the viewers’ perception and emotions? The aim is to describe the audiovisual orchestration of a film and its entanglement with affective moods embodied by a spectator subject as a specific poetics of affect. Accordingly, to establish a historical perspective, the cinematic forms of expression are not primarily brought into relation to a prior historical reality (the depiction of historical wartime events) but with how they situate the spectator within a shared world of sentiment, a sense of belonging to a common world of aesthetic, emotional and moral judgment. This situating has then to be examined as itself historically significant.

According to Kappelhoff’s concept, we assume that the modalities of experience that constitute the poetics of affect of the war film genre can be differentiated into a set of eight scene categories that can be identified within almost every Hollywood war film and of which each can be assigned to distinct realms of affect. They were developed from the classic war or combat film and are called pathos scenes.^[12] Besides their affective qualities which, as we will see, can often be situated in-between opposing poles of emotional conditions, they are determined by specific narrative constellations and aesthetic strategies. By dissecting their re-groupings and modifications one can pursue the historical, socio-political and media shifts from the origins of the genre to the Vietnam war film and contemporary movies about the conflicts in the Middle East.

The eight categories are:

1)    The pain of separation / corporate feeling (sense of (a new) community): Transition between two social systems

The affective potential of this category accrues primarily from the cinematic staging of moments of loss concerning aspects and elements of civilian society, and moments of merging into a new community. Thus, these scenes mark the transition of the soldiers between the two social systems of the quotidian sociality of civilian life and the military sociality due to the state of emergency that is war. They specifically portray aspects and processes of transition, variations and modifications of civilian sociality with the goal of establishing a military sociality. Recurring motifs are rituals of transition, processes of immediate replacement, the segregation of the sexes, and the establishing of paternal structures in the military community.

2)    The loss of ego boundaries (fear) / Exaggerated self-esteem: Formation of a group body (corps)

The affective potential of this pathos category is situated between experiences of loss of the self and the experience of an ego-dissolution, meaning the liquidation of the boundaries of individual potential in a larger group body. Orchestrating the relationship of the individual to the military body, these scenes emphasize the physicality of individual corporeality and its merging and absorption into a physically staged group body. A central motif is the military drill, a typical aspect with regard to visual compositions of the geometric figuration of the group body.

3)    Horror / fear / hostility: Battle and nature

The affective dimension of this pathos category stems from the cinematic concept behind classic horror films. It evokes the eerie uncertainty about that which one sees or hears, the fear of being abandoned, of losing one’s bodily self and one’s identity in chaos. On the level of plot and action, these scenes depict the battle against nature. This battle replaces the battle against the enemy and acts as a form of the experience of this battle. The scenes arise out of constellations offered by army formations and the natural hurdles which repeatedly need to be overcome and provide cover for the enemy, as well as out of signs of death and exhaustion that nature inscribes in the individual body.

4)    Feeling of omnipotence / feeling of powerlessness: Battle and technology

The affective dimension of this pathos category stems from the illusion of merging with military weapons technology in combat and the possibilities of cinematographic action modes as an image of a triumphant desire for fusion. The cinematic staging of these scenes revolves, on the one hand, around the merging of human bodies and machines, on the other around the special relationship between weapons and cinematic technology. In the first case the use of weapons is staged as the experience of technology as a body that has become infinitely powerful. This goes hand in hand with the dissolution of the individual body and its integration into the group body. At the fore of the latter is a specific form of viewing pleasure, which allows the spectator to experience and enter the perceptual and affective/emotional space of a cinematic battle without being harmed. Everyday perception is expanded by the technological capabilities of cinema.

5)    Feeling of solace / feeling of loss (homesickness): Homeland, woman, home

This pathos category focuses on processes of withdrawing from the social foundation of military order and returning to civilian life. Therefore, it often features modes of memory and references to something that is remembered. In a first variation, the mode of memory is established by the presence of absent characteristics, moments and characters from pre-war daily life. Often there are media-related reminders of civilian society within the film—for example photographs or music on the radio—that trigger memories of home within military order. The second variation portrays the completed withdrawal from military order—the return to civilian sociality. Here it is predominantly the military sociality in states of emergency that is remembered. The affective potential of these scenes arises either from a desire for civilian sociality or is characterized through the experience of exhaustion caused by the remembrance of war.

6)    Agony / grief: Suffering, victim, sacrifice

The crucial affective dimension of this pathos category is embedded in the sensorial experience of physical pain, vulnerability and dying. The inside view of an indissoluble, irreconcilable experience of suffering thereby characterizes the central pathos of American war films. Through different constellations and modes of cinematic staging the motif of suffering can appear in three variations: the victim, the sacrifice, and the scene of suffering. The victim scenes are about the realization of vulnerability and mortality. The victim’s image is usually staged as an unexpected moment of death. During the sacrifice scenes the soldier’s death is cinematically connected to a greater cause such as the army or the nation. The self-sacrifice of the soldier is portrayed as a heroic death—often this death and the subsequent funeral are staged as the renewal of the community.The scenes of suffering focus on the suffering individual who experiences himself or herself as a vulnerable and mortal body. The point of culmination is the apotheosis of the individual (deification).

7)    Anger / sense of guilt: Injustice and humiliation / moral self-assertion

On the one hand, the affective dimension of this pathos category contains rage as the transformation of moral judgement into bodily desire and the delight in the corporeal. This desire culminates in fury, rebellion and explosive rage. Its personification is the figure of the berserker. On the other hand, the scenes contain feelings of guilt as a consequence of the shared responsibility of the individual soldier for the suffering inflicted upon others by the military/group and/or the emphasis on national/collective responsibility. The cinematic staging of these figurations captures the individual experience of identity as a moral relationship to the societal forms of the military and the nation in a specific emotional sensation.

8)    Sense of community as the shared filmic remembrance of shared suffering

At first sight, these scenes are defined simply by the use and integration of documentary material into cinematically staged events. This includes footage of real battles and images of the dead and injured after the battle, as well as that of rituals of military life. But these scenes do not simply counter the fictional mode with one of factuality or authenticity. Rather, the cinematic events are referenced to the documentary images; the latter become fictionally charged—whereby the difference between the kinds of footage is not negated. Thus both documentary and fictional footage—edited into a dense visual memory—aim at the corporeal presence of the viewers who are given a relationship to the historical events by this documentary footage. The aim is an emotional participation in exactly these documentary images. This takes place in the mode of remembrance, promoting a sense of community that develops through the cinematic staging of a shared memory.

In their successive order and their combinations and overlappings throughout the course of particular films, these eight categories of pathos generate the films’ poetics of affect as a specific dramaturgical structure. The following diagram shows their arrangement over the course of the war film Gung Ho! (Ray Enright, 1943).

This structure can be described as a sort of basic or original scheme, typical for the first classic war films. Throughout history, these arrangements are constantly altered in specific ways. This systematic approach to the genre makes it able to analyse the films on two different levels: first, on the level of their macro structure, i.e. how they arrange the pathos scenes over the course of the whole film, and second on the level of their micro structure, i.e. how they concretely realise the particular categories through their strategies of staging in discrete scenes. Furthermore, this method of analysis provides the possibility to examine the war films in a historical perspective: by comparative investigations, it shows how the affective structures and realisations of the pathos categories are altered and transformed over the course of time, i.e. how the films address viewers’ experience and emotions in historically significant ways.

Although it was developed with close analysis of the fictional war film genre, it is crucial to the concept that these poetics of affect are highly related to other media formats. The ongoing transformations that the genre’s poetics undergo are driven by the constant exchange with audiovisual depictions of war in other formats, like news coverage, documentary, or YouTube videos.^[13] New forms of media technology provide new ways of expression, new ways of picturing and perceiving, of seeing, hearing and feeling the war. Through this exchange, the genre’s specific modalities of experience are altered and reformulated constantly, circulating throughout different types of media.

The Hollywood War Film and Media Representation of the Iraq War

In case of the 2003 war in Iraq, contemporary media representation was determined by an increased and dynamic emergence of new media types and audiovisual forms. As mentioned above, the possibilities of digital recording through mobile phone cameras and camcorders as well as the Internet presentation of these audiovisual material, had a huge impact on this war’s media appearance. In order to investigate how these new forms interact with the war film genre’s poetics of affect, we should first take a look at these pictures, especially with regard to their affective qualities and the modalities of experience they provide.

These images function in a specific mode of temporality and directness: we are not so much attracted to them because of the fact that they show real events, but because there is a certain expectation of thrill and monstrosity. When clicking the button to watch these videos on YouTube, we have the expectation that they will make an impact visible or show the moment of explosion or death. This mode of anticipation is part of these images from the very beginning and charges them with a diffuse affective quality, one that is situated on the thin line between fascination and anxiety. It is both rooted in our familiarity with media practices, like using YouTube in order to find images of war, and also in the video’s formal features: the shaky movements, the low quality, the tinny sounds and arbitrary voices and off comments. The dominant mode of these images is an intrinsic subjective one: the setting and the shaky movements demonstrate that there is someone holding the camera, that we are with someone and are sharing his or her view. At the same time, we barely ever know who this person is and where and what exactly we are seeing. These pictures provide a subjectivity that potentially everyone who watches them can take on as his or her own, and that at the same time is shared by many individuals.

It is this affective quality which is subsequently assimilated and shaped into patterns of pathos by the war films as well as by other forms of media. Thereby, the core interest does not lie in establishing a reference to an empirical reality of war or history, but to the aesthetic possibilities that make war perceivable to us as a mediated experience. In this way, the films give a certain sense to these pictures, a possibility to relate them to our feelings and moral judgements as culturally and politically determined individuals. This circulation of poetic patterns does not merely work in one direction: in the same way fictional genre films incorporate patterns from other media formats, these other formats to a large extent draw on the genre’s poetics of affect when organising their audiovisual material.

It is, however, not a new discovery that war coverage in any media is influenced by staging strategies of fictional genre films. But these processes of permeation are commonly condemned as a disingenuous strategy of manipulation that blurs an objective depiction of war by drawing on emotional and ideological values. From our viewpoint, this mutual relation is an integral part of a dynamic process of cultural communication through audiovisual media. To elaborate on this, we will now track down the ways of interaction of the genre’s poetics of affect and non-fictional media by analyzing The War Tapes. It is important to note that we would like to emphasize the dynamic aspect of this process. This analysis is not about identifying mere stereotypical rules or standard motifs, but about processes of interplay, modulation and reformulation of poetic patterns.

Analysis: The War Tapes

Although the audiovisual footage The War Tapes was shot by several soldiers, three of them become central protagonists in the movie–Steven Pink, Mike Moriarty and Zack Bazzi. Each of them is characterised by a very specific personality.

Steve Pink is a talkative carpenter who is interested in journalism, has been studying English and who likes to shoot films and write. Again and again, we see him writing down words that he simultaneously audibly articulates via voice-over. Mike Moriarty is an exemplary patriot; he always places a lot of emphasis on values like family and pride in one’s country. To him, military service is an honourable duty, that–in his case–is associated with the images of 9/11: We see his own recordings of Ground Zero shortly after September 11, 2001, we see his hand touching the dust in the streets and we learn that he deliberately drove there to see “the wound” with his own eyes. Being described as a not particularly educated but thoughtful guy who struggles with depression, he is often shown in dark night shots. Zack Bazzi is a Lebanese immigrant who speaks Arabic and is characterised by a rather pragmatic attitude. Our knowledge about these traits is provided through the characters themselves: we watch them and listen to their voice-overs, coming to know their and their families’ stories.

In order to systematically identify how The War Tapes responds to the fictional genre’s poetics of affect it is at first necessary to have a look at how the film organises its material and draws on the categories of pathos we identified. In this regard, the film’s macro structure diagram is surprising.

Despite the film’s seemingly authentic approach to war, the macro structure of its poetics of affect shows strong similarities to the typical structure of classic war movies from World War II as seen in the diagram of Gung Ho!.

In the beginning, there is a strong appearance of category 1, transition between two social systems (the pain of separation / corporate feeling), and 2, formation of a group body (the loss of ego boundaries (fear) / exaggerated self-esteem), like it is with the classical genre film. The increased appearance of category 5, homeland, women, home (feeling of solace / feeling of loss (homesickness)) in the middle part of the movie is also very classical, and so is the battle sequence with category 3, battle and nature (horror/fear/hostility), and 4, battle and technology (feeling of omnipotence / feeling of powerlessness) in combination with category 6, suffering, victim, sacrifice (agony / grief), in the latter part. Even the return of category 1 in the latter third, with which a reintegration into the civilian society and the moral legitimacy is re-established and can be identified in this case in a very conventional homecoming scene. Then there is an epilogue, which shows the soldiers back home.

Going into more detail, the diagram shows that a significant attribute of The War Tapesis the increased appearance of category 5, homeland, women, home. This is surprising considering the fact that discussions surrounding the film almost always centre around the self-made material of the soldiers from Iraq. By examining the particular manner of how these scenes are structured and how they unfold within the dramaturgy of affect over the course of the film, it becomes clear that they follow a specific pattern. The structural configurations of these parts are clearly related to how they organise the central protagonists of the film.

The three characters are depicted through portrait scenes which mostly coincide with the sequences that are accounted for the pathos category homeland, women, home. Having a closer look at these passages, it stands out that there is a constant structure.

At first, there is a prologue in which all three of the characters are introduced one after the other. After that and throughout the course of the movie there is a separate portrait scene of each of them. However, all three portraits operate within similar principles. At the end of the film, there is an epilogue in which each of the three characters reappears in a prolonged sequence. Even though the structure changes throughout the movie, the length and the characteristics of these personalised scenes stay fairly similar, meaning that the movie creates a certain balance between its three characters. The only exception to this is an additional home sequence of Mike Moriarty at the end of The War Tapeswhich we will return to in later analysis.

Another structural principle becomes obvious through the diagram: just before every home sequence (pathos category 5: Feeling of solace / feeling of loss) there is a battle scene with gun fights or a scene in which the viewer is confronted with pictures of burnt or distorted and dead bodies (pathos categories 3: Horror/fear/hostility and 4: Feeling of omnipotence / feeling of powerlessness). How these scenes are related to the always following character portraits is demonstrated in the following clip from the first third of the film.

As we can see in the clip, the material’s montage is quite complex. We see a sequence of subjective shots joined together by a flowing montage and partially connected by a voice-over. There are a number of shots which are assigned to one or the other of the characters by displayed text. However, and this is crucial, we can still never be sure to whom the view that is presented to us belongs. In the beginning we accompany Moriarty, which is clearly marked by the text within the image and his voice-over. Then we are shown images of an explosion, and it is no longer clear through whose “camera-eye” we are now looking. This becomes especially striking when in-between shots of the explosion show us a shaky close-up of Pink, which makes it apparent that we are definitely no longer with Moriarty. Then, during the battle, the perspective completely dissolves–all we can see is loud, blurry chaos, in which any sense of orientation has been lost, making the view literally break apart. The affective dimension of the pathos categories 3 and 4 are fully brought to bear here: the use of imagery that is at once overpowering and powerless provokes a disturbing uncertainty, a feeling of being terrified of the dissolution and abundance of one’s (the protagonist’s as well as the spectator’s) individual body. Then, the way of cinematic staging changes completely and the mode of the ‘subject in chaos’ is converted into a much more stable subjectivisation: we suddenly see written lines on paper, hear Pink’s voice, see only his eyes in close-up: a moment of internalisation that creates a subjective space which, for a short period of time, completely binds us to the character of Pink. The unsettling affective quality of the previous battle is transformed into a different modality that brings some order.

This transition illustrates the main principle by which the film is structured and composed: the audiovisual perspective it creates through the camcorder material is on the one hand extremely subjective, but on the other hand this perspective does not belong to any specific point of view and cannot be assigned to any specific character as it constantly changes between the three (and potentially others that have no face or name). The three main characters are step by step carved out of this flow, they gain shape through the home portraits until the perspective is literally shattered again. At the same time, they are furnished with more and more attributes, which serves a progressively clear characterisation. If we take a closer look at how Moriarty’s portrait increasingly gains shape within the general flow of the audiovisual imagery, this principle becomes very clear.

This next scene, assigned with category 5 of our analytical systematisation, puts us right into a tent–it is dark, we hear a guitar playing and get the impression of a calm, sentimental atmosphere. Moriarty is singled out by a close up in green light through night-vision equipment, we listen to him through voice-over, he is talking about his family. We see a photo of his children on his computer desktop, then his home in full screen as the first picture of a now starting sequence displaying his wife and children back home.

In this way, the intense quality and unstable atmosphere of the battle scene is again set in relation to and canalised by a very subjective and personalised mode that can be described as a sort of internalisation, always leading us to the portrait of the person whom we are accompanying. What is interesting about the portrait on the level of narration, like in the other two, is the way Moriarty gathers attributes without being actually present: we learn of his domestic joys, his sense of duty, his suffering from depression, the pride his son takes in his dad. These portrait scenes function as an inverted picture, a photographic negative of the soldiers’ lives and feelings, and serve no other purpose than to assert their status as filmic characters. They frame the images of Iraq in a contrastive manner and thus become a kind of anchor on which the characters crystallise as types.

The changing movement, from the unsettling, precarious and uneasy camcorder mode in Iraq to the home portraits that give shape to the characters can be described as the core of the specific dramaturgy of affect of The War Tapes. What is brought to the fore here is the specific affective quality of the Internet images, which we tried to characterise earlier. The overall poetics of affect of the film amplifies the described features of these images: their unclear temporality, the lack of certainty and knowledge, and the expectation of what might come next, the precarious perspective that constantly falls apart but still is always so radically subjective. This mode is even further strengthened by underscoring that the view established here does not refer to an actual event or a concrete person. Instead it gains shape as a specific arrangement of experience that is, through the dramaturgical pattern, related to and equally shared between the three characters and framed by a dramaturgical structure of affective modalities.

Thus, the film The War Tapesunfolds and spells out the specific affective quality of Internet videos and at the same time transforms it into a modality of experience that is constitutive for the fictional war film genre. To elaborate on this, we will take a look at another scene. As the diagram shows, there is one exception within the symmetrical structure the film develops regarding its characters: in the film’s last third, there is an additional home portrait of Mike Moriarty. Similar to the other portraits, this scene is preceded by a battle scene (category 3 and 4), but this battle scene is special: it is the scene we know from the film’s very beginning, this time shown more extensively and with all its unsettling force. Throughout the film, the battle scenes have become more and more intense, with images that are increasingly horrific and disturbing, making the horror of war increasingly apparent, and finding a climax in this repeated scene. In this sequence we are confronted with the immediate perceptual experience of the Internet images again, even more intensified by the fact that we recognise the images from the beginning of the film. Before, we only saw charred bodies, but now we experience a soldier being wounded and see the faces of dead Iraqis, killed by the soldiers.

This scene is followed by the additional portrait of Moriarty’s home; then, from the internalised view of Moriarty, we are thrown into another disturbing setting: the next scene is about a little girl’s death when she is accidentally run over by the convoy Moriarty is travelling with. The scene takes place at night, shot in a dark, nightmarish way.

While we hear Moriarty’s voice recounting what happened when the girl was run over, the picture becomes completely dark. For this moment, we just hear the characters’ unsettled and afflicted voices, telling about the worst moment in their lives. Again a moment of internalisation that sets the following sequence into an extremely subjective mode. Blurry, pale dark pictures show a street scene at night, the car’s headlights drawing abstract patterns on the screen due to the stammering slow motion. Then, we are shown pictures from Mike Moriarty’s camera, trying to focus on the girl’s body that is hardly recognizable as human. The camera performs some sort of groping movement: it tries to get closer and closer to the body, to make visible what is unimaginable, although the images are not able to reveal anything. They remain vague, shaky and dark and finally blur more and more. Before they fade out, leaving an impression of subtle horror, they are again synced to the characters’ voices, as well as to the soldiers’ close-ups.

In this way, these shaky, dark, and horrific pictures are transformed into a mode that does not merely refer to a historical event (we don’t even know when and where this incident happened). Rather, it marks them as a subjective impression of someone suffering and mourning the cruelties of war in a way that we can share and that relates these hardly recognisable pictures to our own senses and feelings. What happens here is that these camcorder pictures are framed in a manner that highly refers to the pathos forms of the war film genre: in the way the pictures are organised, they realise a specific form of our category 6, Suffering, victim, sacrifice, or what Kappelhoff describes as the war film genre’s melodramatic core, the suffering of the individual being confronted with it’s own vulnerability.^[14] In this case, the vulnerability is not a bodily one, and neither the loss of a fallen comrade that is mourned. Rather, the individual suffers from its own confrontation with the cruelties of war and the own guilt it has to bear.^[15] However, this scene of suffering still gives expression to the central conflict around which the Hollywood war film genre constantly circulates: the contradiction between the striving for individual freedom and happiness as the defining and most valuable goods of this political community, and their loss and sacrifice in favour of war and greater political aims. It is this conflict that the films make accessible to the individual as concrete bodily sensations and a subjective feeling.

In our example of The War Tapes, the scene of suffering undergoes a specific alteration, caused by the camcorder pictures’ specific aesthetic quality. The camcorder’s groping movements and shaky, blurry pictures are not just technological artefacts that give an authentic impression because they testify that someone was present in this particular historical moment. Rather, they are themselves expressions of someone mourning, someone trying to cope with the situation, to get closer and closer to the unimaginable, horrific truth of this moment, without being able to reach it. The picture material itself, in the way it is organised in time, performs and expresses the movements of someone trying to get a feeling and an understanding of what this incident means to him or her. Hence, there is no empirical truth about the war waiting to be discovered; the only truth that can be revealed here is about the means and specific forms of expression and perception that are used in order to picture this unbelievable incident. They tell something about culturally and historically specific ways of perceiving, communicating and judging the war, giving expression to how an individual, the soldier as well as the spectator, as part of a specific cultural community, perceives, feels and thinks about the war in this particular historical moment, by means of contemporary media technology and traditional staging patterns.

Our analytical system of pathos scenes makes this alteration even more graspable. Compared to former war films, the specificity regarding the scene of suffering in The War Tapes is its merging with another realm of pathos that used to appear more distinct (in another category): the modality of horror. Here, the horror is not connected to the appearance of the enemy or a hostile nature anymore, as it is typical for our pathos scene 3, Battle and nature. Instead, it is the personal confrontation with the cruelties of war and one’s own guilt that is inset in this horrific mode of melodramatic suffering. This is not just about the representation of a war crime that the spectator is asked to evaluate rationally; again, it is the audiovisual composition that realises the horror and suffering as a feeling for the spectator.

As the analysis has shown, the examination of the poetic patterns that circulate throughout different media formats provides an important keyin order to deal with the enormous amount of audiovisual forms that determine contemporary cultural communication.The War Tapes organises and frames its seemingly authentic audiovisual material in a way that heavily relates to the poetics of the fictional genre on different levels. The genre’s staging patterns are altered by relating them to the new picture material and to the modalities of experience it provides. In this way, these pictures are made accessible to a culturally specific way of experiencing, feeling and judging the war. It is not the authenticity of the raw footage that makes a film like The War Tapes so credible to us. Instead, it is the aesthetic construction that makes no difference between the “real” and the “manipulated”, the “authentic” and the “staged”, but gives us the necessary framing to experience what this war means to us in a specific moment of time or in history.

^[1] See for example: Howard Tumber and Jerry Palmer, Media at War:The Iraq Crisis (London: SAGE, 2004).

^[2] See for example: Martin Barker, A ‘Toxic Genre’: The Iraq War Films (London: Pluto Press, 2011).

^[3] While critiques praised the film for its realistic approach, several military members felt compelled to claim that the depictions of the soldiers’ experiences are not authentic at all. However, this heated discussion shows how public discourse is trapped within the dichotomy of manipulation and authenticity, as we will argue later on in the text. See Julian E. Barnes, Ned Parker and John Horn, “’The Hurt Locker’ Sets Off Conflict,” Los Angeles Times, February 23, 2010. http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/25/entertainment/la-et-hurt-locker26-2010feb26.
Accessed May 15, 2015.

^[4]Tribeca Film Festival Film Guide Archive. https://tribecafilm.com/filmguide/archive/512cf49f1c7d76e0460019ca-war-tapes.
Accessed May 18, 2015.

^[5] Hermann Kappelhoff, “Melodrama and war in Hollywood genre cinema,” in After the Tears: Victimhood, Subjectivity and the Melodramatic Mode, ed. Scott Loren and Jörg Metelmann (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, in press). See also Hermann Kappelhoff, “Der Krieg im Spiegel des Genrekinos. John Fords They Were Expendable”, in Mobilisierung der Sinne. Der Hollywood-Kriegsfilm zwischen Genrekino und Historie, ed. Hermann Kappelhoff, David Gaertner and Cilli Pogodda, (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2013), 184-227. Hermann Kappelhoff, “Affektmobilisierung und mediale Kriegsinszenierung,“ in Sprachen der Emotion. Kultur, Kunst, Gesellschaft, ed. Gunter Gebauer and Markus Edler (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2014), 245-266.

^[6] This understanding is founded on the neophenomenological film theory of Vivian Sobchack as well as Gilles Deleuze’s description of affect as the ability to affect and be affected, as a prepersonal intensity of becoming. See Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). See also Brian Massumi, foreword to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), XVI.

^[7] In the light of Jaques Rancière’s “Politics of Aesthetics” and Stanley Cavell’s remarks on cinema as a possibility of the experience of social reality, Hermann Kappelhoff addresses this foundation of political/democratic processes as the basis of theories of cinematic realism and genre cinema. He is thereby drawing on Hannah Arendt’s re-reading of the Kantian sensus communis and Richard Rorty’s notion of commonality and solidarity as a sentimental development of moral identities. See Hermann Kappelhoff, The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015) and Kappelhoff, “Affektmobilisierung und mediale Kriegsinszenierung.“

^[8] Christine Gledhill, “Rethinking Genre”, in Reinventing Film Studies, ed.Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (London: Arnold, 2001), 223.

^[9] Matthias Grotkopp and Hermann Kappelhoff, “Film Genre and Modality. The Incestuous Nature of Genre Exemplified by the War Film,” in In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy, ed.Sébastien Lefait and Philippe Ortoli (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 29-39.

^[10] Hermann Kappelhoff and Jan-Hendrik Bakels, “Das Zuschauergefühl – Möglichkeiten qualitativer Medienanalyse,” Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 5, 2 (2011): 78-96.

^[11] Hermann Kappelhoff, Matthias Grotkopp and Michael Lück have extensively outlined the theoretical backgrounds and historical developments of such an understanding of genre during their lecture series “Genre und Gemeinsinn” held at Freie Universität Berlin in the years 2013 and 2014.

^[12] This research approach has been developed and conceptualised in the research project Mobilization of Emotions in War Films (2008 – 2011) within the Cluster of Excellence “Languages of Emotion” at Freie Universität Berlin and its follow-up project Staging images of war as a mediated experience of community (2011-2015), under the direction of Hermann Kappelhoff and funded by the German Research Foundation. For detailed information, see: http://www.empirische-medienaesthetik.fu-berlin.de/en/affektmobilisierung/index.html.

^[13] Several studies have shown that non-fictional war reporting and the fictional war film genre have always been closely intertwined, on the level of production economics as well as of aesthetics. See for example David Gaertner’s work about the relation of film and Newsreel production and aesthetics in the Hollywood studio system during WWII: David Gaertner, “Mit allen Mitteln. Hollywoods Propagandafilme am Beispiel von Frank Capras why we fight-Reihe,” in Mobilisierung der Sinne. Der Hollywood-Kriegsfilm zwischen Genrekino und Historie, ed. Hermann Kappelhoff, David Gaertner and Cilli Pogodda, (Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2013), 307-344.

^[14] Kappelhoff, “Melodrama and war in Hollywood genre cinema.”

^[15] Kappelhoff, “Melodrama and war in Hollywood genre cinema.”

Notes on Contributors

Cilli Pogodda is a research associate in the DFG project “Staging Images of War as a Mediated Experience of Community” and assistant lecturer at the Seminar of Film Studies of Freie Universität Berlin. She is currently working on a dissertation project with the topic “Media Technology, Aesthetics and Affect in Media Representations of the Iraq War”. Her main research interests are genre cinema, media aesthetics as well as cinematic corporeality and affectivity.

Danny Gronmaier is a research associate in the DFG project “Staging Images of War as a Mediated Experience of Community” and assistant lecturer at the Seminar of Film Studies of Freie Universität Berlin. He is currently working on a dissertation project about the aesthetic historicity of Hollywood sports films. His main research interests are, amongst others, the relation of film and history, affect theory, the medialisation of sports, and genre studies.

Bibliography

Barker, Martin. A ‘Toxic Genre’: The Iraq War Films. London: Pluto Press, 2011.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, XVI.

Gledhill, Christine. “Rethinking Genre.” In Reinventing Film Studies, edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, 221-243. London: Arnold, 2001.

Gaertner, David. “Mit allen Mitteln. Hollywoods Propagandafilme am Beispiel von Frank Capras Why We Fight-Reihe.” In Mobilisierung der Sinne: Der Hollywood-Kriegsfilm zwischen Genrekino und Historie, edited by Hermann Kappelhoff, David Gaertner and Cilli Pogodda, 307-344. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2013.

Grotkopp, Matthias and Hermann Kappelhoff. “Film Genre and Modality. The Incestuous Nature of Genre Exemplified by the War Film.” In In Praise of Cinematic Bastardy, edited by Sébastien Lefait and Philippe Ortoli, 29-39. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.

Kappelhoff, Hermann. “Melodrama and War in Hollywood Genre Cinema.” In After the Tears: Victimhood, Subjectivity and the Melodramatic Mode, edited by Scott Loren and Jörg Metelmann. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press (in press).

—— The Politics and Poetics of Cinematic Realism. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015.

——“Affektmobilisierung und mediale Kriegsinszenierung.“ In Sprachen der Emotion: Kultur, Kunst, Gesellschaft, edited by Gunter Gebauer and Markus Edler, 245-266. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2014.

——“Der Krieg im Spiegel des Genrekinos: John Fords They Were Expendable.” In Mobilisierung der Sinne. Der Hollywood-Kriegsfilm zwischen Genrekino und Historie, edited by Hermann Kappelhoff, David Gaertner and Cilli Pogodda, 184-227. Berlin: Vorwerk 8, 2013.

Kappelhoff, Hermann and Jan-Hendrik Bakels. “Das Zuschauergefühl – Möglichkeiten qualitativer Medienanalyse.” Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 5, 2 (2011): 78-96.

Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991.

Tumber, Howard and Jerry Palmer. Media at War: The Iraq Crisis. London: SAGE, 2004.

Filmography

Green Zone (Paul Greengrass, 2010).

In the Valley of Elah (Paul Haggis, 2007).

Redacted (Brian DePalma, 2007).

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008).

The War Tapes (Deborah Scranton, 2006).

Much of the discourse about the ethics of Holocaust representation considers it a sacred event that imposes representational limits. Survivors are often considered “authorities” of Holocaust memory. However, Alasdair Richardson defines the Holocaust as an event “on the edge of living memory”: soon there will be no first-hand witnesses to share their stories.^[1] When the last survivor dies, the responsibility to remember will be entirely passed onto a new generation who cannot provide first-hand accounts of events; they did not literally witness this tragic past, but are called to “bear witness” in a more abstract sense as they remember the Holocaust through memorials, education and other media.^[2] While debates about the “appropriateness” of Holocaust representation have long-existed, the recent surge in online engagement with it complicates issues further and has led to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) launching social media guidelines for educators.^[3]

Young people are particularly prevalent users of social media, thus it is not surprising that they might turn to this format to remember the Holocaust. The theme of this issue is conflicting images/ contested realities, and much of the youth-produced material relating to the Holocaust online has been contested by the press and academics because it appears to conflict with pre-existing guidelines about the ethics of Holocaust representation by not presenting the truthful and solemn engagement expected of such works. Should this be particularly concerning? This paper considers the extent to which pre-existing guidelines about “appropriate” representation, mostly defined by survivors, are still relevant to young producers of digital Holocaust memory, and whether there might be new ethical questions that are as, if not more, important. Is the fact these contested images conflict with pre-existing ethical guidelines problematic or productive?

Holocaust Memory, Representation and Digital Media

When Anna Reading suggested in 2001 that “the Holocaust has taken on a virtual dimension”, she could hardly have predicted the impact digital technology would have on contemporary Holocaust memory.^[4] There is now an abundance of digital material available or in development, from hologram survivors to digital archives; virtual ghetto tours to Holocaust denial YouTube “documentaries”.^[5] The democracy of the Internet offers users a variety of different explorations of this past and gives opportunities for a wide range of individuals to participate in producing Holocaust memory, as well as consuming it. While professional organisations will be more aware of the guidelines associated with “approriate” Holocaust representation (whether they adhere to or deliberately challenge them), it is less likely that the average Internet user will have this knowledge, especially young people.

There is a growing number of platforms, in relation to material constructed for users, that enables anyone to contribute to Holocaust memory, including YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. The YouTube video I Will Survive Auschwitz shows a male survivor with his grandchildren dancing at various concentration camps.^[6] It received mixed feedback, with many survivors lambasting it as distasteful, but younger generations celebrating it as the survivor’s way of remembering his history.^[7] The site also hosts numerous youth-produced Lego stop-motion videos about the Holocaust that have also faced criticism for impropriety. However, if the new generation is to be the future authority of Holocaust memory, then to completely condemn its modes of communication is counter-productive. Behind the drive to remember are imperatives to learn from the past and defend against denial. By refusing to engage with young people’s preferred methods of communication, we risk discouraging them from engaging with Holocaust memory.

Criticism about Holocaust representation is often influenced by survivors Terrence Des Pres and Elie Wiesel’s writings. Des Pres commands that the Holocaust must be represented accurately and treated as a solemn and unique event.^[8] While Wiesel condemns that mainstream media, particularly NBC’s Holocaust miniseries (Marvin J. Chomsky, 1978), for “trivialising” the Holocaust.^[9] Wiesel critiques the series’ use of melodrama and soap opera conventions which were unavoidable given its format. However, as Lawrence Baron notes, the formal limitations of film (and by extension, television) should not automatically mean that these media are not suitable for Holocaust representation, particularly when they have the potential to reach wide audiences.^[10] In response to criticisms of Holocaust, Andreas Huyssen states:

If it is our concern and responsibility to prevent forgetting, we have to be open to the powerful effects that a melodramatic soap opera can exert on the minds of viewers today. The post-Holocaust generations that received their primary socialization through television may find their way toward testimony, documentary, and historical treaties precisely via a fictionalized and emotionalized Holocaust made for prime time television.^[11]

Huyssen’s words should also be heeded in the context of social media, through which today’s young people receive “their primary socialization”.^[12] On the Internet, they can quickly find their way to historical sources, literally a few “clicks” away from any initial encounter. However, social media is more complex than television because young people are no longer just spectators, but users and producers.^[13]

Work by Meghan McGlinn Manfra and Jeremy D. Stoddard, Anna Reading and Peter A. Sproat focuses on web content about genocide created for young people rather than by them, thus does not fully account for the democratic possibilities and limitations of the Internet.^[14] They highlight texts that enable young people to see and hear eyewitnesses, but engage them less in actively contributing to memory. In one of the few works about youth-produced content online, Jason Hansen notes “the development of new technologies  […] [has] dramatically reduced the barriers to participation that have historically limited the influence of individuals in [the process of the construction of public memory]”. ^[15] Young people are now producing memory as well as consuming it.

In response to this new trend, in 2014, IHRA published guidelines for using social media in Holocaust education. The report recognises that with changing technologies, any definition of “social media” must be fluid, but recognises it as digital spaces that is “not passive”, where  “individuals […] actively participate, collaborate, contribute, and create”.^[16] The report highlights the misconception that young people are digital natives, the usefulness of moderation and privacy tools and the public nature of social media; it specifically emphasises the importance of appropriateness, vocabulary, and historical context when discussing the Holocaust online: issues at the forefront of wider debates about Holocaust representation.^[17] While the report is targeted at educators, these issues are relevant to thinking about young people’s use of social media too.

I now turn to one example of youth-produced social media to examine the extent to which it speaks to pre-existing ethical frameworks about Holocaust representation and the new challenges its online dimension offers. I will discuss Circle Productions’ “brickfilm” – a Lego stop-motion animation – Lego Holocaust (2011) uploaded to YouTube. The following analysis explores how this example of youth-produced social media engagement with Holocaust memory speaks to, and often transgresses, long-established concerns about the appropriateness, but also reveals new challenges social media introduce to discourses about Holocaust memory and representation.

Lego Holocaust

Two male Lego figures, one looking concerned, one more cheerful, appear on screen. A narrator explains that these are “normal looking people”, but that “Hitler and his followers saw them as powerful enemies”. There is a cut, and in the next shot the men’s heads have changed to monstrous faces – more specifically, Star Wars fans will recognise them as Yoda and Greedo (famous characters from the series). This is the opening sequence to Circle Productions’s “brickfilm” Lego Holocaust. The film continues with a Lego narrator stating that he will explain what happened during the Holocaust. This is followed by the film’s only non-Lego image: an archival photograph of a yellow star that is shown as the narrator explains, in voiceover, that some of the ways Jews were segregated in Nazi Germany. A series of historical re-enactments are then presented in Lego, with characters’ voices provided through voiceover. Firstly, an authoritative Lego figure orders a general to carry out mass executions. Then there is a confrontation between three male Lego figures in a shop, representing the boycotting of Jewish businesses. After this, an official unloads a Jewish man from a Lego police car into a concentration camp mostly constructed of grey Lego bricks. Here, the Jewish man witnesses a shooting, where plasticine is used to express the victims’ blood.

Then, the narrator stands in the barracks of the camp describing living conditions before a black screen is accompanied by different characters’ voices exclaiming their fear and asking “where is God?”. Finally skeleton Lego figures with yellow heads enter the gas chamber. They fall to the ground, before a transition shows the same characters now with skeleton heads to match their bodies.

At first glance, the fact that Lego Holocaust is an animation might seem particularly problematic. Paul Wells and Alan Cholodenko relate animation to “bringing to life”, while the Holocaust was characterised by torture and mass murder.^[18] However, the form has often been used to address serious issues in animated documentaries, a genre that one could consider to characterise Lego Holocaust. Annabelle Honess Roe defines such a film, as one that “(1) has been recorded or recreated frame by frame; (ii) is about the world rather than a world wholly imagined by its creators; and (iii) has been presented as a documentary by its producers and/or received as a documentary by audiences, festivals or critics”.^[19] As a stop-motion film that attempts to tell the history of the Holocaust (however simply), Lego Holocaust clearly fulfills Honess Roe’s first two criteria. Though the filmhas not attracted enough public attention to fairly judge it against the third, its educational structure and use of documentary techniques such as an objective narrator, archival photograph and a narrative about the history of a real event, suggest Lego Holocaust is an animated documentary. The film’s producers have clearly attempted to “give a sense of what we understand reality itself to have been” (as Bill Nichols identifies as conventional of documentaries) by re-enacting scenarios related to the Holocaust, however this does not necessarily mean Lego Holocaust offers, what Wiesel and Des Pres would consider, an accurate, non-trivial representation.^[20]

Circle Productions is a group of animators that produce “brickfilms”, mostly for school projects.^[21] There is a growing number of such films online, the popularity of which has led to the development of www.Brickfilms.com and the Academy Award-winning feature film, The Lego Movie (Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, 2014). Many amateur works are uploaded to YouTube. Evidence in video descriptions suggests schools are adopting this as a form of creative independent learning. However, it is not necessarily teachers that suggest the use of Lego. When a commenter on YouTube asked Circle Productions if Lego Holocaust was created for homework, one of the film”s producers replied: “It was an RE portfolio and was better than writing about it [sic]”. This comment implies it was the young students who decided to use Lego for the assignment. Joshua Leasure of www.Brickfilms.com notes that while Lego is historically associated with play, when making such works “you stop seeing Legos as toys. You get used to seeing them moving around acting… from a film perspective, it becomes just another medium”. However, he identifies two major limitations of Brickfilms: the one facial expression of the characters, usually a grin, and the need to use voice to distinguish identities and emotion.^[22] Interestingly Lego Holocaust’s first Jewish character looks concerned rather than smiley. As Baron highlights with live-action, “brickfilms’” limitations are part of their identity, when a Jewish man is transported to a concentration camp in a white police van in Lego Holocaust this foregrounds the imaginative compromises the producers have to make in order to compose their narrative with Lego. It is not necessarily an attempt to dishonour the memory of the Holocaust.

If Lego Holocaust is held up to pre-existing guidelines about Holocaust representation, then it seems “inappropriate”. While the young producers clearly attempt to educate their audience, they certainly do not engage with the factual complexity of the Holocaust. Furthermore, the use of colourful Lego pieces might be construed as refuting the solemness of the event. The mostly smiling characters and bright colours certainly evoke a sense of the trivial. When Hansen spoke to one of the young boys involved, the producer attempted to quantify his awareness and knowledge about the Holocaust stating  that he “supplemented information he had gained from a Holocaust-related diary his class was reading with images of concentration camps from the H.B.O miniseries Band of Brothers and ‘information from my dad’”.^[23] While his research sources may not be academic, as to be expected of a child, the film clearly reveals an attempt to tackle some sophisticated lines of thought. Lego Holocaust uses a “contemporary” Lego narrator who walks through “historical” spaces, such as the barracks, explaining the living conditions. Circle Productions seems to subtly engage with the differences between concentration camps then and now, emphasising that they are spaces one can walk through freely today.

It is significant that the narrator does not enter the gas chamber, which can be read in the context of debates about la pellicule maudite (the “confounded” or “missing reel” – mythological footage of the gas chamber in action, the use of which was debated by Claude Lanzmann and Jean-Luc Godard. The former claimed such footage should be destroyed, while the latter, that it must be shown to redeem cinema of its failure to record the Holocaust. ^[24]). Furthermore, the choice not to place the narrator in the gas chamber emphasises this as a moment the spectator (and producers) can never truly understand even through mediated forms – no one can share the victims’ experiences. The producers use a mixed media approach, including a photograph of a yellow star emphasising the “reality” behind the re-creation, reminding the spectator that while this may look colourful and animated, it refers to a real, tragic era of history. A dark screen represents the barracks at night, as one of the prisoners asks “why have we been abandoned by God?”, while others express fear, highlighting a plurality of responses and referring, however simplistically, to the theological questions provoked by the Holocaust. However, the brief time the young producers give to each of these complex issues might lead one to deem the film to be “trivial”.

The film works against IHRA guidelines, simplifying historical fact and confusing chronology. For example, in the second scene, a Nazi official orders a general to have all Jews sent to camps and murdered, when we know that the “Final Solution” was only introduced with the Wannsee Conference in 1942 – an event that belongs later in the Holocaust narrative. Furthermore, by ending with the cliché gas chamber scene it avoids counter-narratives of the Holocaust: ghettos, mass shootings, malnutrition and disease in concentration camps; stories of resistance, escape and survival. It also conflates concentration and death camps, a common misnomer due to Auschwitz’s (the most famous “camp”) multi-functions. This evidence strengthens the case for considering the film a trivialisation of the Holocaust.

Most troubling perhaps, and an issue not noted in the pre-existing guidelines, is the young narrator adopting the role of the perpetrator as he voices their threats towards Jews. With social media offering young people the opportunity to produce Holocaust memory, it gives them the chance to role-play “characters” from this traumatic past too. Though adult actors perform as Nazis in fiction films, at first glance, it seems particularly problematic when a child “plays” a perpetrator. The importance of play then, is not to be dismissed in relation to “brickfilms” as quickly as Leasure suggests. There is a growing body of work that considers play in the context of Holocaust and genocide memory as a productive rebellion against the traditional representational guidelines.

While play seems a trivial activity, and brightly-coloured Lego, not solemn, it offers opportunities for “postmemory” generations to engage with the Holocaust. Marianne Hirsch uses the term “postmemory” to refer to the complex experiences later generations have with Holocaust memory when they did not experience it first-hand. She states, “postmemory’s connection to the past is […] mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation” – characteristics also associated with play.^[25] James E. Young notes that for such generations, their memory of the Holocaust is always hypermediated – they do not remember the actual events of the past, rather their memory is shaped by media encounters with it (films, literature, survivor testimony etc.).^[26] He argues that toys allow individuals “to imagine history, not as it really happened, but as it matter[s] in their life”.^[27] Thus the act of, what he calls, “memory-play” expresses how such producers perceive the significance of the Holocaust.^[28] As Young states, “it becomes memory of the witness’s memory”.^[29]

Jordana Blejmar reinforces Young’s idea when she claims that “playful memories […]redirect our gaze from the experience of adult survivors and towards those of their descendants, offering a new (child-like) perspective”.^[30] While Blejmar is directly referring to artists whose parents survived atrocities, her notion of the “child-like” perspective is particularly interesting in relation to Lego Holocaust. It infers a naiveté and innocence in the producers’ attempt to confront this past. The over-exaggerated voices the film’s narrator adopts for Nazi characters expresses that it is the mass media (where the “Nazi” has become little more than a symbol of evil), rather than history, where these young people discover such figures. Also the gas chamber finale repeats the “master narrative” portrayed in the majority of Holocaust films. “The Holocaust” then for Circle Productions is not merely a historical event, but a cultural symbol recognised from media representation.^[31]The educational framing of their film evidences they clearly did not set out to create an offensive piece, but they reveal their lack of knowledge about the Holocaust (which one would expect not only from young people, but anyone who did not experience it). Thus the film is not only a work about the Holocaust, but what it means to these young people: it is an expression of hypermediated Holocaust memory.

As has been discussed, one of the particularly concerning issues about Lego Holocaust, however, is the fact the young narrator plays perpetrators, imitating Nazi anti-Semitism when he states “you filthy Jew!” as a victim is marched into the concentration camp. However, Ernst Van Alphen emphasises the particular usefulness of playing perpetrators. He proposes that heteropathic identification (a term he borrows from Kaja Silverman, who defines it as, “temporarily and partially – becoming (like) the other”) with perpetrators is productive.^[32] Van Alphen claims that while identification with victims can help us recognise their suffering, it fundamentally reinforces a sense that we are innocent (just like them). However, identifying with perpetrators, albeit temporality and partially, “makes one aware of the ease with which one can slide into a measure of complicity”.^[33] Van Alphen suggests, through playing perpetrators, rather than identifying with victims (a position so commonly suggested by museums and feature films), that one can learn meaningful lessons from the Holocaust. He implies this is more important than whether a representation is solemn, accurate or non-trivial.

The educational tone of Lego Holocaust is somewhat exceptional compared to works like Ben Riley’s Lego Animation on the Ways of Torture in Sobibor Death Camp (2011) (which from the voiceover appears also to have been produced by a young person).^[34] However, the latter film also foregrounds the hypermediated dimension of postmemory. This “brickfilm” uses British game show Countdown’s (Armand Jammot, 1982-) ticking clock soundtrack to divide its narrative into segments: Jews arrive at Sobibor, enter a gas chamber, die in the gas chamber, while others are shot. It is a piece of ultraviolence. One might well consider it inappropriate, however, it is important to read this as an example of how young people remember the Holocaust. Perhaps, its ultraviolent dimension, which IHRA and educators prefer to avoid, is the factor that most colours this individual’s hypermediated memory of this past.

We should not instantly dismiss “brickfilms”. Lego Holocaust illustrates young people’s ability to engage with the Holocaust through play – an activity that challenges pre-existing representational guidelines, but does not necessarily mean that the work is inappropriate. Indeed, through play, these young people are able to express not only their knowledge about the Holocaust (however inaccurate or unfactual this may be), but also their hypermediated memory of it: they show their audience what the Holocaust means to them as young people in the Twenty-First Century. The film points to a transition in Holocaust memory, that we are now entering a somewhat postmodern age defined by works about postmemory, rather than only the historical event of the Holocaust. While the playfulness of Lego Holocaust suggests challenges to pre-existing ethical guidelines about representing the event, its social dimension points to new issues.

YouTube has the potential to be a wonderfully democratic platform, as Hansen notes, someone can create and upload a video in seconds, and share it with the world. However, this also has consequences.^[35] Patricia Lange highlights that it gives young people the opportunity to learn in public, which on the one hand enables them to get feedback from beyond their local community, but on the other hand, places them in a vulnerable position – a potential target for harsh criticism and “trolls”.^[36] Hansen notes that the type of negative comments on YouTube videos referencing the Holocaust range from dismissing its importance and anti-Semitism, to banal posts about production quality.^[37] In her analysis of the online use of photographs of the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes in Cambodia, Stephanie Benzaquen concludes that “YouTube does not seem conducive to community building […] Comment culture on YouTube, creating an aggressive and entertainment-oriented environment, makes it difficult for people to find a way to a more active outlet for their potential opinions and historical interpretations”.^[38]

The few YouTube comments about Circle Productions’s film express an interest in the rationale for its creation: “have you done this as a homework piece? You have a lot of facts I think you should get a really good Mark” [sic]; bizarre comment about production: “British accent are great” [sic]; or expressions of shared knowledge: “I’m so glad people other then [sic] me know the horrible things the nazi [sic] did to the Jews!!!!” and “I know about the holocaust”. The most worrying is perhaps the first comment suggesting the film is somewhat historically accurate and the peculiar second remark. While Ben Ripley has comments open, no one has replied to his work publicly. It would be simple to suggest that neither film has been viewed beyond family, peers and friends, but with the former video receiving more than 1,000 views and the latter more than 400, this is evidently not the case.^[39]

While Lange, Hansen and Benzaquen draw attention to the potential dangers of YouTube comments, there is only a minor suggestion of this in these case studies. However, taking their research into account we should question whether it is appropriate to encourage young people to share such sensitive material online. How else might they be supported to work through the issues of the Holocaust in creative ways that intellectually stimulate them without sharing their work with an public audience? Furthermore, if few people are commenting, why bother sharing work publicly? When professional film-makers are criticised for tackling the subject, despite often thorough historical research, how can we expect children to master the complexity of the Holocaust in such a way that will be considered perfect enough to avoid negative criticism online? With the existence of Internet trolls – individuals who seem to make it their hobby to harass people online – any attempt to completely avoid such criticism seems futile. Perhaps keeping such work on local systems might be safer. To place young people in a position where they are targets for abuse seems antithetical to Holocaust commemoration. While Circle Productions and Ben Ripleyhave not received aggressive responses, the producers seem to have gained little from sharing their work publicly online. While IHRA suggests the use of private settings to Holocaust educators wanting to engage with social media, it would be useful if the importance of such features were also introduced to their students. Furthermore, young people not only produce content for YouTube, but are also avid spectators of its content. Thus, the platform offers the potential danger for young people to access traumatic or offensive material. With Holocaust denial videos surfacing on the first page of searches for “Auschwitz” on the site, this is of particular concern.

“Brickfilms” are a form of communication young people use to participate in digital communities. They raise challenging questions for Holocaust representation. To simply lambaste them as inappropriate could discourage young people from engaging with Holocaust memory. When such a plethora of Holocaust denial and Neo-Nazi material exists on social media platforms, it seems counter-productive to discourage production of commemorative content on these sites. We must be careful not to participate in a media panic and immediately consider them as “trivialising” the past. By taking young people’s constructions of Holocaust memory on social media seriously, we are introduced to some poignant questions that encourage us to reflect on the future of Holocaust memory in a time when survivors can no longer share their testimony or define ethical guidelines:

1. Are the pre-existing guidelines regarding Holocaust representation still relevant to young people, to whom the Holocaust can only be known through hypermediated memory?
2. When young people become producers of Holocaust memory, how do issues such as play challenge pre-existing guidelines? Are these challenges productive?
3. What new issues arise from the social dimension of platforms like YouTube? Is it safe for young people to share their constructions of Holocaust memory on these sites?

The images young people create online relating to Holocaust memory may be considered to conflict with pre-existing ethical standards about Holocaust representation, however by carefully studying youth-produced content like Lego Holocaust, we can see that it points to a significant shift in Holocaust memory: Holocaust memory is now not only about remembering what actually happened in the past, but also considering how it is relevant to later generations.

^[1] Alasdair Richardson, “Holocaust Education: An Investigation into the Types of Learning that Take Place When Students Encounter the Holocaust”{PhD thesis, University of Winchester, 2012},  28.

^[2] Today, the notion “to bear witness” in regards to the Holocaust refers to actively remembering it.

^[3] IHRA, “Using Social Media in Holocaust Education”, accessed February 20, 2015, https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/media-room/stories/new-social-media-guidelines

^[4] Anna Reading, “Clicking on Hitler: The Virtual Holocaust @Home”, in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, edited by Barbie Zelizer,  323-339. London: The Athlone Press, 2001.

^[5] USC Shoah Foundation is developing a hologram of survivor Pinchas Gutter. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an extensive digital archive: http://www.ushmm.org/research/research-in-collections/search-the-collections, and a virtual version of the Riga ghetto has been created (www.rgm.lv/map/). A quick search for “Holocaust” on YouTube often surfaces denial videos on the first page.

^[6] I Will Survive Auschwitz can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFzNBzKTS4I

^[7] Criticism of the video is covered in Tony Paterson, “Auschwitz ‘I will survive’ dance video is internet sensation”, The Independent, July 16, 2010, accessed December 15, 2014, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/auschwitz-i-will-survive-dance-video-is-internet-sensation-2027725.html

Responding to the Wiener Library Twitter debate, Emily Sample (@Justatwamp) states “their history, their choice how to remember!”, accessed February 5, 2015, https://storify.com/wienerlibrary/wldebate2015

^[8] Terrence Des Pres, “Holocaust Laughter?”, in Writing and the Holocaust, edited by Berel Lang. New York: Homles and Meier, 1988,  220.

^[9] Elie Wiesel, “Art and the Holocaust: Trivializing Memory”, The New York Times, June 11, 1989. accessed December 15, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/11/movies/art-and-the-holocaust-trivializing-memory.html

^[10] Lawrence Baron, Projecting the Holocaust into the Present. Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2005,  4.

^[11] Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Making Time in a Culture of Amnesia. New York & London: Routledge, 1995,  256.

^[12]Ibid.

^[13] The distinction between television and online engagement is not to assume watching television is a passive activity, but rather to identify the specificities of the online experience as one which encourages more explicit activity on the part of the “user”, who can develop content.

^[14] Meghan McGlinn Manfra & Jeremy D. Stoddard, “Powerful and Authentic Digital Media and Strategies for Teaching about Genocide and the Holocaust”, in The Social Studies November/ December 2008, 260-264. Reading, “Clicking on Hitler”, 2001. Peter A. Sproat, “Researching, writing and teaching genocide: Sources on the internet”, in Journal of Genocide Research, 3:3,  451-561.

^[15] Jason Hansen, “Auschwitz is made of Legos and Hitler hates Beckham: YouTube and the Future of Holocaust Remembrance” (paper presented at the Future of Holocaust Studies conference, Southampton and Winchester Universities, July 29-31, 2013),  2.

^[16] “Using Social Media in Holocaust Education”, 1.

^[17] “Using Social Media in Holocaust Education”,  2-4.

^[18] Paul Wells, Understanding Animation. London & New York, Routledge, 1998,  1 and Alan Cholodenko, The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation. Sydney: Power Publications, 1991, 15.

^[19] Annabelle Honess Roe, Animated Documentary. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 4.

^[20] Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001,  1.

^[21] While the young producers do not specify their age, it would not be inappropriate to presume they are at secondary school because they refer to the production as an assignment for their “RE portfolio” (subject distinctions do not exist at primary).

^[22] Leasure quoted in “Lego Star Wars”, in Imagine 7, 2007,  2.

^[23] Hansen, “Auschwitz is made of Legos”,  4.

^[24] The debate is discussed in detail, in English, in Libby Saxton, Haunted Images: Film, Ethics, Testimony and the Holocaust. London & New York: Wallflower, 2008.

^[25] Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012,  5.

^[26] James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000,  1.

^[27] James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge, 42.

^[28] James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge, 49.

^[29] James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge, 1.

^[30] Jordana Blejmar, “Toying with History: Playful Memories in Albertina Carri’s Los rubios“, in Journal of Romance Studies Vol 13 (3) (2013), 44.

^[31] In fact, Tim Cole differentiates between the “myth” of the Holocaust and the historical event, claiming that while the former “may have drawn on the historical Holocaust […] it now exists apart from that historical event”. See Cole, Selling the Holocaust: From Auschwitz to Schindler: How History is Bought, Packaged and Sold, New York: Routledge, 1999, 4.

^[32] Ernst Van Alphen, “Playing the Holocaust”, in Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/ Recent Art, edited by Norma L. Kleeblatt. New York, New Jersey, New Brunswick & London: The Jewish Museum, New York & Rutgers University Press, 2000, 77.

^[33]  Ibid.

^[34] Ben Ripley’s film can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7UOMzmj8xY

^[35] Hansen, “Auschwitz is made of Legos”, 2.

^[36] Patricia G. Lange, Kids on YouTube: Technical Identities and Digital Literacies. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2014, 20.

^[37] Hansen, “Auschwitz is made of Legos”, 9.

^[38] Stephanie Benzaquen, “***Warning: much of the video footage shows people who have suffered greatly*** – looking at the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes, Cambodia, on Flickr and YouTube”, in Media, Culture & Society, 2014, 16.

^[39] The author notes the potential impact researchers such as she might have had on these numbers by sharing these links publicly.

Notes on Contributor

Victoria Grace Walden is a PhD researcher and teaching fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. Her thesis explores Holocaust film and the materiality of memory, she is interested in narrative depictions of the past, animation, archival re-appropriation, and the moving-image in museum spaces. She runs the international research group ‘The Holocaust, Contemporary Genocide, Popular Culture and Digital Technology’.

Bibliography

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Benzaquen, Stephanie. “***Warning: much of the video footage shows people who have suffered greatly*** – looking at the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes, Cambodia, on Flickr and YouTube”, in Media, Culture & Society, 2014, 1-20.

Blejmar, Jordana. “Toying with History: Playful Memories in Albertina Carri’s Los rubios“, in Journal of Romance Studies Vol 13 (3) (2013), 44-61.

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Imagine, “Lego Star Wars”, 2007, 7.

Lange, Patricia G. Kids on YouTube: Technical Identities and Digital Literacies. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2014.

McGlinn Manfra, Meghan & Jeremy D. Stoddard. “Powerful and Authentic Digital Media and Strategies for Teaching about Genocide and the Holocaust”, in The Social Studies November/ December 2008, 260- 264.

Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001.

Paterson, Tony. “Auschwitz “I will survive” dance video is internet sensation”, The Independent, July 16, 2010. Accessed December 12, 2014.  http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/auschwitz-i-will-survive-dance-video-is-internet-sensation-2027725.html

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Filmography

Band of Brothers [TV], (Phil Alden Robinson et al., 2001).

Countdown [TV], (Armand Jammot, 1982-).

Holocaust [TV], (Marvin J. Chomsky, 1978).

The Lego Movie (Phil Lord & Christopher Miller, 2014).

YouTube Videos

I Will Survive Auschwitz, [uploaded by] The Secluded BLADE  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFzNBzKTS4I

Lego animation on the ways of torture in sobibor death camp, Ben Ripley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7UOMzmj8xY

Lego Holocaust, Circle Productions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V48NBbm2mc