In this original and engaging work, author Kent Puckett looks at how
British filmmakers imagined, saw, and sought to represent its war during
wartime through film. The Second World War posed unique representational
challenges to Britain's filmmakers. Because of its logistical enormity,
the unprecedented scope of its destruction, its conceptual status as
total, and the way it affected everyday life through aerial bombing,
blackouts, rationing, and the demands of total mobilization, World War
II created new, critical opportunities for cinematic representation.
Beginning with a close and critical analysis of Britain's cultural
scene, War Pictures examines where the historiography of war, the
philosophy of violence, and aesthetics come together. Focusing on three
films made in Britain during the second half of the Second World
War--Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of
Colonel Blimp (1943), Lawrence Olivier's Henry V (1944), and David
Lean's Brief Encounter (1945)--Puckett treats these movies as objects of
considerable historical interest but also as works that exploit the full
resources of cinematic technique to engage with the idea, experience,
and political complexity of war. By examining how cinema functioned as
propaganda, criticism, and a form of self-analysis, War Pictures reveals
how British filmmakers, writers, critics, and politicians understood the
nature and consequence of total war as it related to ideas about freedom
and security, national character, and the daunting persistence of human
violence. While Powell and Pressburger, Olivier, and Lean developed
deeply self-conscious wartime films, their specific and strategic use of
cinematic eccentricity was an aesthetic response to broader
contradictions that characterized the homefront in Britain between 1939
and 1945. This stylistic eccentricity shaped British thinking about war,
violence, and commitment as well as both an answer to and an expression
of a more general violence.
Although War Pictures focuses on a particularly intense moment in time,
Puckett uses that particularity to make a larger argument about the
pressure that war puts on aesthetic representation, past and present.
Through cinema, Britain grappled with the paradoxical notion that, in
order to preserve its character, it had not only to fight and to win but
also to abandon exactly those old decencies, those "sporting-club
rules," that it sought also to protect.
