Cinema and the Civilizing Process: Rethinking Violence in the World War II Combat Film

This essay proposes an alternative critical approach to the "violence" of the World War II combat film. Guiding this approach is the idea of a "civilizing process" that attends both to specific representations in war films and to the institutional role of cinema in socializing and regulating individual behavior. The theoretical grounding here is the sociological work of Norbert Elias, whose major study, The Civilizing Process, was first published in 1939.