Abstract
For a particular generation that was too young to remember the second world war, or for those who were born in the decade or so after it, film has remained a vital source of ‘evidence’ for providing substance to the oral history on which they were weaned. For such people, in their formative years, moving pictures provided direct access to the past, the nearest they could get to the experience which had done so much to shape the world into which they were born. Churchill was the hero; Hitler the villain. The Italians were cowards; the Japanese were inexplicable. Dunkirk was a victory; Dresden was necessary. The Germans may have been formidable opponents, but their defeat made the Allied victory seem all the greater. Douglas Bader looked like Kenneth More, Rommel looked like James Mason and every RAF pilot should have looked like David Niven. And for the most part films of the second world war, together with post-war films about the war, confirmed the stereotypes. Perhaps such stereotyping was the inevitable consequence of victory. However, set against the backdrop of cold war, the traumas of decolonisation and the threat of atomic annihilation, culminating in a Cuban missile crisis that scared just about everyone out of their wits, the second world war became the object of what may be described as a cinematic historiography that often said more about the post-war period than it did about the war itself.1
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Notes and References
No work dealing specifically with this topic has been written, but see R. Manvell, Films and the Second World War (London, 1974), from which substance to this claim can be gleaned.
G. N. Gordon, Persuasion: the theory and practice of manipulative communication (New York, 1971) p. 502f.
Notably George Kitson Clark, who was involved in the founding of the British Universities Film [now: and Video] Council in 1948, and the founders of the Inter University History Film Consortium in 1968. For a history of the latter, see the introduction by Nicholas Pronay in N. Pronay and D. W. Spring, Propaganda, Politics and Film, 1918–45 (London, 1982).
Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and methods (Berkeley, 1976) p. 3.
Notably N. Reeves, British film propaganda in the first world war (London, 1986);
A. Aldgate, Cinema and history: British newsreels in the Spanish Civil War (London, 1979);
J. Richards, Visions of Yesterday (London, 1973) and The Age of the Dream Palace: cinema and society in Britain, 1930–39 (London, 1984);
P. Sorlin, The Film in History: restaging the past (Oxford, 1980);
K. R. M. Short (ed.), Film and radio propaganda in World War Two (London, 1983) and Feature Films as history (London, 1981);
James Curran and Vincent Porter (eds), British cinema history (London, 1983);
J. C. Robertson, The British Board of Film Censors (London, 1985);
M. Dickinson and Sarah Street, Cinema and State (London, 1985);
A. Aldgate and J. Richards, Britain Can Take It: the British cinema in the Second World War (Oxford, 1986).
On British newsreels see Aldgate, Cinema and history (op. cit.); N. Pronay, ‘British newsreels in the 1930s: 1. audience and producers’ and ‘2. their policies and impact’, in History 56 (1971) 411–8 and 57 (1972) 63–72; Pronay, ‘The newsmedia at war’, in Pronay and Spring, Propaganda, Politics and Film (op. cit.), 173–208.
On American newsreels see R. Fielding, The March of Time, 1935–51 (New York, 1978);
on British documentaries see Roy Armes, Film and reality: an historical survey (London, 1974);
Eric Barnouw, Documentary, a history of the non-fiction film (New York, 1974);
R. M. Barsam, Non-fiction film: a critical history (London, 1974);
Rachel Low, Documentary and educational films of the 1930s (London, 1979), Films of comment and persuasion in the 1930s (London, 1979) and Film making in 1930s Britain (London, 1985);
E. Sussex, The rise and fall of British documentary (London, 1975).
On American documentaries see R. D. MacCann, The People’s Films (New York, 1973).
N. Pronay, ‘The Moving Picture and historical research’, in Journal of Contemporary History, 18 (1983) 3, 369–70.
A. J. P. Taylor, English history, 1914–45 (London, 1965) p. 313.
Angus Calder, The People’s War (London, 1971) p. 423.
Wartime Social Survey, The Cinema Audience (London, 1943).
M. Epstein (ed.), The Annual Register, 1945 (London, 1946) p. 341.
For the full story see I. McLaine, Ministry of Morale: home front morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (London, 1979) p. 38. This important book does not, however, cover the film propaganda activities of the MoI — a curious omission!
I. Christie (ed.), Powell, Pressburger and Others (London, 1978).
Philip M. Taylor, ‘“If war should come”: preparing the fifth arm for total war, 1935–39’, in Journal of Contemporary History 16 (1981) 27–51.
J. Richards, ‘The British Board of Film Censors and content control in the 1930s’, in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 1 (1981) 95–116 and 2 (1982) 38–48.
F. Thorpe and N. Pronay, British Official Films in the Second World War (Oxford, 1980) p. 21.
P. Swann, ‘John Grierson and the GPO Film Unit, 1933–39’, in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 3 (1983) 1.
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© 1988 Philip M. Taylor
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Taylor, P.M. (1988). Introduction: Film, the Historian and the Second World War. In: Taylor, P.M. (eds) Britain and the Cinema in the Second World War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19317-2_1
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