Two World Wars engulfed Europe, Asia and the United States, leaving indelible scars on the landscape and survivors. The trauma of civil wars in Spain (declared) and Latin America (tacit) spanned decades yet, contradictorily, bind parties together even today. Civil wars still haunt Africa where, in more recent years, ethnic cleansing has led to wholesale genocide. Drawing on the emerging field of Memory Studies, this book examines narrative and documentary films, made far from Hollywood, that address memory--both traumatic and nostalgic--surrounding these conflicts, despite attempts by special interests to erase or manipulate history.

Hollywood Remembrance and American War addresses the synergy between Hollywood war films and American forms of war remembrance. Subjecting the notion that war films ought to be considered ʻthe war memorials of today’ to critical scrutiny, the book develops a theoretical understanding of how Hollywood war films, as rhetorical sites of remembering and memory, reflect, replicate and resist American modes of remembrance. The authors first develop the framework for, and elaborate on, the co-evolution of Hollywood war cinema and American war memorialization in the historical, political and ideological terms of remembrance, and the parallel synergic relationship between the aesthetic and industrial status of Hollywood war cinema and the remembering of American war on film. The chapters then move to analysis of Hollywood war films – covering The Great War, World War II, The Korean War, The Vietnam War, The Cold War, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – and critically scrutinize the terms upon which a film could be considered a memorial to the war it represents. Bringing together the fields of film studies and memory studies, this book will be of interest to scholars and students in not just these areas but those in the fields of history, media and cultural studies more broadly, too.

Audiences never have a lukewarm opinion of a Subiela film. They either love it passionately or hate it profoundly. That Eliseo Subiela (Buenos Aires, 1944-2016), an original and sensitive thinker, survived, and indeed throve in economically challenged Argentina while garnering more accolades abroad than in his own country, is a tribute to his grit, intelligence, imagination and persistence of vision. With an astounding list of prizes and honors, he was a world-class auteur. Even when he was making a TV commercial, his surreal style and poetic sensibility were unmistakable. This book represents the culmination of 20 years of research and personal correspondence with Eliseo Subiela. Through ten scholarly studies and five interviews, it sheds light on his life, esthetics, obsessions, struggles with madness, and, of course, his films. It addresses his earlier career in advertising, lifelong artistic influences, screenwriting techniques, critical reactions to his films, and what Subiela's example has to offer aspiring filmmakers, especially those in Latin America.

World War II irrevocably shaped culture--and much of cinema--in the 20th century, thanks to its devastating, global impact that changed the way we think about and portray war. This book focuses on European war films made about the war between 1945 and 1985 in countries that were occupied or invaded by the Nazis, such as Poland, France, Italy, the Soviet Union, and Germany itself. Many of these films were banned, censored, or sharply criticized at the time of their release for the radical ways they reframed the war and rejected the mythologizing of war experience as a heroic battle between the forces of good and evil. The particular films examined, made by arthouse directors like Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Larisa Shepitko, among many more, deviate from mainstream cinematic depictions of the war and instead present viewpoints and experiences of WWII which are often controversial or transgressive. They explore the often-complicated ways that participation in war and genocide shapes national identity and the ways that we think about bodies and sexuality, trauma, violence, power, justice, and personal responsibility--themes that continue to resonate throughout culture and global politics.

This book examines the cultural articulation of Spanish History (and histories (remembered, meaningful experiences). It analyzes how real people and fictional characters experience the rupture of post-war repression, as their vindicating collective memory counters the authoritarian narrative and laws that demonized and criminalized them. The book, that breaks the persistent cycle of denial of Francoist malfeasance, is a resource for scholars and students who research the representation of Spain’s dictatorship, its aftermath and the recovery of postdictatorial memory.

When reality becomes fantastic, what literary effects will render it credible or comprehensible? To respond meaningfully to the surreality of the Holocaust, writers must produce works of moral and emotional complexity. One way they have achieved this is through elements of fantasy. Covering a range of theoretical perspectives, this collection of essays explores the use of fantastic story-telling in Holocaust literature and film. Writers such as Jane Yolen and Art Spiegelman are discussed, as well as the sci-fi television series V (1983), Stephen King's novella Apt Pupil (1982), Guillermo del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006) and Martin Scorsese's dark thriller Shutter Island (2010).

About depictions of war in cinema.