Here are 100 books that The New American War Film fans have personally recommended if you like
The New American War Film.
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My eighth-grade teacher refused to believe I had read 12 books for extra credit in a semester or that works by Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Charles Dickens, and Alexandre Dumas were among them. She didn’t know that I had long loved reading, especially stories set in the past of distant lands. In the tenth grade, I declared myself a writer, but only after earning a PhD in history did the hunger to write historical stories become a reality. Much later, I learned that historical films were another wonderful way of encountering history.
I love this book by the late and much-honored Professor of Early Modern European history for its clarity, concision, elegance of expression, and boldness of interpretation.
It focuses on five outstanding films about slavery beginning as early as the 73-71 BC revolt of soldiers against ancient Rome led by the famed gladiator Spartacus and ending with the United States, Cuba, and other Caribbean countries in the late 19th century.
The author even insists, in a chapter on the film made from Toni Morrison’s ghost story novel, Beloved, that it is possible that some written historical fiction can teach us much about the past as traditional scholarly works of history.
The written word and what the eye can see are brought together in this fascinating foray into the depiction of resistance to slavery through the modern medium of film. Davis, whose book The Return of Martin Guerre was written while she served as consultant to the French film of the same name, now tackles the large issue of how the moving picture industry has portrayed slaves in five major motion pictures spanning four generations. The potential of film to narrate the historical past in an effective and meaningful way, with insistence on loyalty to the evidence, is assessed in five…
My eighth-grade teacher refused to believe I had read 12 books for extra credit in a semester or that works by Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Charles Dickens, and Alexandre Dumas were among them. She didn’t know that I had long loved reading, especially stories set in the past of distant lands. In the tenth grade, I declared myself a writer, but only after earning a PhD in history did the hunger to write historical stories become a reality. Much later, I learned that historical films were another wonderful way of encountering history.
When I first read this book, the only one on my list to deal exclusively with documentary film, I was knocked out by the brilliance of the author in locating, describing, and naming a new genre of historical film, which he calls the Microhistorical. The name is chosen as a parallel to a written genre with the same name that some historians have been writing in the last fifty years.
Such films are unique in both their sources and subject matter. Based almost exclusively on the lives of ordinary people or small forgotten incidents, the sources for such films rely largely on home movies; films never meant to be shown to the public. Remarkably, these microstudies contain important insights into the public’s beliefs about and reactions to the social conditions and movements of the past.
Traditional historical documentaries strive to project a sense of objectivity, producing a top-down view of history that focuses on public events and personalities. In recent decades, in line with historiographical trends advocating "history from below," a different type of historical documentary has emerged, focusing on tightly circumscribed subjects, personal archives, and first-person perspectives. Efren Cuevas categorizes these films as "microhistorical documentaries" and examines how they push cinema's capacity as a producer of historical knowledge in new directions.
Cuevas pinpoints the key features of these documentaries, identifying their parallels with written microhistory: a reduced scale of observation, a central role given…
My eighth-grade teacher refused to believe I had read 12 books for extra credit in a semester or that works by Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Charles Dickens, and Alexandre Dumas were among them. She didn’t know that I had long loved reading, especially stories set in the past of distant lands. In the tenth grade, I declared myself a writer, but only after earning a PhD in history did the hunger to write historical stories become a reality. Much later, I learned that historical films were another wonderful way of encountering history.
I love this book for two special reasons: it was written by a scholar who doubles as a film director and thus understands both media from the inside and it is the first work to elaborate on the meaning of “historiophoty,” a word coined years ago by the famed historian, Hayden White, that means “the representation of history and our thought about it in visual images.”
In clear and compelling prose, Nelson undertakes the enormous task of consolidating several decades of scholarship in diverse fields (history, film, philosophy) to create five principles that allow you and I to think more clearly about the real contributions of historical films. Her work allows you to better understand the explicit and implicit meanings of historical films.
Making History Move: Five Principles of the Historical Film builds upon decades of scholarship investigating history in visual culture by proposing a methodology of five principles to analyze history in moving images in the digital age. It charts a path to understanding the form of history with the most significant impact on public perceptions of the past. The book develops insights across these fields, including philosophical considerations of film and history, to clarify the form and function of history in moving images. It addresses the implications of the historical film on public historical consciousness, presenting criteria to engage and assess…
My eighth-grade teacher refused to believe I had read 12 books for extra credit in a semester or that works by Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Charles Dickens, and Alexandre Dumas were among them. She didn’t know that I had long loved reading, especially stories set in the past of distant lands. In the tenth grade, I declared myself a writer, but only after earning a PhD in history did the hunger to write historical stories become a reality. Much later, I learned that historical films were another wonderful way of encountering history.
Of the many books that focus on the historical films of an individual country or historical period, this is by far the most interesting and powerful. It deals with how the directors of the New German Cinema of the Seventies devised new visual and narrative strategies to come to terms with the shameful history of Hitler’s regime.
The book eschews the usual focus on guilt and atonement in favor of personal memory and a yearning for national identity. Focusing on a description of several important works–including Hitler: A Film from Germany, The Patriot, and The Marriage of Maria Braun–Kaes makes a strong case that such films both depicted and helped to promote a major shift in German attitudes toward their country’s past.
West German filmmakers have tried to repeatedly over the past half-century to come to terms with Germany's stigmatized history. How can Hitler and the Holocaust, how can the complicity and shame of the average German be narrated and visualized? How can Auschwitz be reconstructed? Anton Kaes argues that a major shift in German attitudes occurred in the mid-1970s-a shift best illustrated in films of the New German Cinema, which have focused less on guilt and atonement than on personal memory and yearning for national identity.
To support his claim, Kaes devotes a chapter to each of five complex and celebrated…
My husband, Robert McLaughlin, and I taught at Illinois State University for over thirty years. Our fathers both served in World War II (one in the Army Air Forces and one in the Navy) but would never talk about it. That spurred our interest in the war and what it was like. One way to know about it was through the popular culture of the time, such as movies, plays, radio, and books. As we watched more and more movies and gave presentations on them (we’re English professors by trade), we realized how these movies still affect how we think about the war.
If you’re interested in movies made in Hollywood during World War II and about the war, this reference book is for you.
It was invaluable as we were compiling what movies to use for our own book. There are intelligent overviews of movies by topic, such as the crisis abroad, spies, fascism, humor, and postwar planning.
What is even more valuable is the filmography, which lists the movies made by year, with the genre, setting, themes, studio, and how relevant it is to the war.
From 1937 through 1945, Hollywood produced over 1,000 films relating to the war. This enormous and exhaustive reference work first analyzes the war films as sociopolitical documents. Part one, entitled ""The Crisis Abroad, 1937-1941,"" focuses on movies that reflected America's increasing uneasiness. Part two, ""Waging War, 1942-1945,"" reveals that many movies made from 1942 through 1945 included at least some allusion to World War II.
A tiny mention of the legendary ‘fragrant concubine’ in a travelogue had me search out more information… and more and more until I’d researched and written the stories of four imperial concubines in the Qing era (18th century China). Some rose to power, while others fell to madness. Their extraordinary lives within the high red walls of the Forbidden City fascinated me. Along the way I found a banished empress and a real woman who had endless myths grow up around her, as well as secondary characters like the Italian Jesuit turned court painter. An irresistible era and way of life to explore, in all its shades of light and darkness.
An extraordinary tale of a chokingly claustrophobic household in historical China, in which four women (wives and concubines) jealously vie for attention and privilege. As the stakes grow higher, so do the dangers inherent in their choices. Made into the film Raise the Red Lanternby Zhang Yimou, for me, this is the gold standard on this theme.
The brutal realities of the dark places Su Tong depicts in this collection of novellas set in 1930s provincial China -- worlds of prostitution, poverty, and drug addiction -- belie his prose of stunning and simplebeauty. The title novella, "Raise the Red Lantern," which became a critically acclaimed film, tells the story of Lotus, a young woman whose father's suicide forces her to become the concubine of a wealthy merchant. Crushed by loneliness, despair, and cruel treatment, Lotus finds her descent into insanity both a weapon and a refuge.
"Nineteen Thirty-Four Escapes" is an account of a family's struggles during…
As long as I can remember I have found the world a terrifying yet magical place. My first memories are of reading ghost stories, the best mirrors for my emotional experiences. As a teenager supernatural tales continued to inspire me and still do. Sometimes a starkly realistic approach can prove too dull or intrusive; far better to process or confront issues by presenting them as fantastical. When I return to these books, or discover similar stories, I listen hard to what they are trying to tell me. I won’t learn overnight for, as the villain in The Doll Maker states: “the life so short, the craft so long to learn.”
“I’m still not certain you really are a woman?” Whenever Valerie has her period she is transported to a magical if sinister otherworld (yes, this novel was written by a man). A surreal, Freudian, East European coming-of-age fairytale that lies somewhere between Alice In Wonderland and a gothic pastiche. In the 70s it was also adapted into a film that apparently influenced Angela Carter. Not unjustifiably, the teenage experience is portrayed as a disorientating, eroticized nightmare from which Valerie must use all her wiles to escape, fending off vampiric family members after her inheritance and hypocritical authority figures keen to simultaneously sexualize her and burn her as a witch. At least she owns a set of magic earrings. “I’m acting like a sleepwalker. Is it all a dream?”
Written in 1935 at the height of Czech Surrealism but not published until 1945, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders is a bizarre erotic fantasy of a young girl's maturation into womanhood on the night of her first menstruation. Referencing Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Marquis de Sade's Justine, K. H. Macha's May, F. W. Murnau's film Nosferatu, Nezval employs the language of the pulp serial novel to construct a lyrical, menacing dream of sexual awakening involving a vampire with an insatiable appetite for chicken blood, changelings, lecherous priests, a malicious grandmother, and an androgynous merging of brother with sister.
One reason I became a professor of humanities, teaching subjects like film, theater, and literature, was to share my enthusiasm for the great works of imagination which have inspired people for centuries. Stories shape our lives and pass on our most important values and beliefs to future generations. In my academic career, I have directed plays and have written two novels, but teaching film has been my major passion for the last several years.
This book initiated my interest in narrative film theory back in my graduate school days. It became a crucial source for my dissertation.
Bordwell writes about popular films but with a highly analytical eye. All his books are worth reading for those who want intelligent, in-depth discussion, not just stories about Hollywood culture.
I am a professor of pop culture, so I know personally that talking about race can be so incredibly awkward at times – but it does not always have to be! Often, many restrict themselves from fully participating in these necessary dialogues only because of a profound fear of “saying the wrong thing.” As individuals responsible for preparing a new generation of thinkers prepared to innovate improved solutions for the society we share, inevitably, the topic of race must not only be broached, but broached productively. I write to provide tools to help make such difficult conversations less difficult.
I recommend this book to anyone who has ever seen a female character onscreen (does that make all of us?!).
As a cisgender male, I grew up with a pretty myopic point of view and was conditioned to look to (white) males onscreen for key pieces of information or heroism.
This book helped me appreciate why my perspective was slanted and shaped this way – Karen Hollinger’s work has sensitized me to the idea that there is always more than one perspective to be mindful of when watching a movie.
Feminist Film Studies is a readable, yet comprehensive textbook for introductory classes in feminist film theory and criticism.
Karen Hollinger provides an accessible overview of women's representation and involvement in film, complemented by analyses of key texts that illustrate major topics in the field. Key areas include:
a brief history of the development of feminist film theory
the theorization of the male gaze and the female spectator
women in genre films and literary adaptations
the female biopic
feminism and avant-garde and documentary film
women as auteurs
lesbian representation
women in Third Cinema.
Each chapter includes a "Films in Focus" section,…
I have taught philosophy and film for almost 40 years, first at Ohio State and then at Notre Dame. My focus had been German cinema, but I was drawn to Hitchcock for three reasons: first, he received his origins in Weimar Germany and owes much to German expressionism; second, his films are so cinematically beautiful and effective that I began teaching them again and again, and the students loved them; finally, I thought it worthwhile and a fun project to address the extent to which his films raise deep and engaging philosophical questions.
If one wants to learn about Hitchcock’s complex relation with women, one can turn to Donald Spoto’s The Dark Side of Genius or Laurence Leamer’s recent Hitchcock’s Blondes, but if one wants to contemplate the aesthetic question, how are women portrayed in Hitchcock, Modleski is far more rewarding.
I learned much from her weighing of Hitchcock’s ambivalence toward women. The book offers a strong feminist account of seven films, and I have consistently recommended it to my students as one of the best books on Hitchcock.
Originally published in 1988, The Women Who Knew Too Much remains a classic work in film theory and feminist criticism. The book consists of a theoretical introduction and analyses of seven important films by Alfred Hitchcock, each of which provides a basis for an analysis of the female spectator as well as of the male spectator. Modleski considers the emotional and psychic investments of men and women in female characters whose stories often undermine the mastery of the cinematic "master of suspense." The third edition features an interview with the author by David Greven, in which he and Modleski reflect…
