War and Film (review)

In his introduction, James Chapman claims that War and Film "does not aim to be either a comprehensive survey of the field or a definitive history of the representation of war in film"; nevertheless, his book could "best be described as a 'minor epic'" (p. 8). Chapman also argues that his book fills a gap in film and cultural studies since the war film remain a "relatively unexplored" field.

While it is true that there are no wide-ranging, transnational studies of war on film, historical studies of individual war films, cinematic violence, genre studies of Hollywood and other national cinemas' attitudes toward war make an impressive bibliography. While many are doubtless familiar with the classic studies by Michael Isenberg and Lawrence Suid, more recent monographs and edited collections by Robert Brent Toplin (1996), Andrew Kelly (1997), Marilyn Metelski and Nancy Lynch Street (2003), J. David Slocum (2006), and John E. O'Connor and Peter Rollins (2008) have helped to rethink the war film in relation to changing historical contexts of genre, masculinity, and nationalism; have explored television and other media's impact upon the war film; and have addressed the conflict between the documentation of "history" and the ritualization and stylization of violence on screen. Sadly, Chapman's book pays little attention to these and other recent interventions in the field. As the book seems to be aimed at an undergraduate market, a bibliography and discussion of the theoretical and historical questions influencing the field may have been useful.

Rather than following the prescriptive, Jeanine Basinger genre format, Chapman presents a loose "conceptual framework" for exploring the representation of war in films. Chapman believes that filmmakers have always seen war as spectacle, tragedy or adventure. He creates his own generic codes, but rather surprisingly, does not anchor them to any historical framework or context. There is no explanation of why filmmakers present a particular battle or war experience a certain way (ie: archival production history), no discussion of other media's impact on the visual representation of war (popular literature such as James Jones's The Thin Red Line, war miniseries such as the adaptation of Herman Wouk's War and Remembrance, documentaries such as Ken Burns's The Civil War), no analysis of changing audience reception, no comparisons of different national approaches to certain war events, etc. However, Chapman's coverage of films representing war is impressive. Chapman looks at not only the standard U.S. and British World War II films, the antiwar standbys All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Apocalypse Now (1979), but also the remarkable Russian film, Come and See (1985). Although Chapman manages to mention a startling array of war films—everything from Alexander Nevsky (1938) to The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003)—it is a quick, cursory sweep of the landscape. This book does not break new ground in film, military, or cultural studies. It is, however, an engaging overview of a complex and enduringly popular film genre. It is a pity Reaktion did not present the book better; the edition lacks the last half of the index and many of the frame grabs are in different and sometimes distorted aspect ratios.