Destructive Sublime

Tanine Allison

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813597492
• eBook ISBN: 9780813597508
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The American popular imagination has long portrayed World War II as the “good war, ” fought by the “greatest generation” for the sake of freedom and democracy. Yet, combat films and other war media complicate this conventional view by indulging in explosive displays of spectacular violence. Combat sequences, Tanine Allison argues, construct a counter-narrative of World War II by reminding viewers of the war’s harsh brutality. Destructive Sublime traces a new aesthetic history of the World War II combat genre by looking back at it through the lens of contemporary video games like Call of Duty. Allison locates some of video games’ glorification of violence, disruptive audiovisual style, and bodily sensation in even the most canonical and seemingly conservative films of the genre. In a series of case studies spanning more than seventy years—from wartime documentaries like The Battle of San Pietro to fictional reenactments like The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan to combat video games like Medal of Honor —this book reveals how the genre’s aesthetic forms reflect (and influence) how American culture conceives of war, nation, and representation itself.  

1

“No Faking Here”

The New Authenticity of Wartime Combat Documentaries

“Yes, this really happened,” intones the narrator of John Ford’s 1942 combat documentary, The Battle of Midway. The camera looks up at an American flag that a group of marines has just raised in the midst of the battle for Midway Atoll. This striking shot captures the Americans’ nationalistic determination to keep the Japanese from capturing the island. The shot also stands out, though, because of its visual quality—or, to be more precise, its lack of quality. The image, exposed on Kodachrome color film, is slightly blurry and overexposed, and a large lens flare partially obscures the image of the flag. The camera is at an odd angle, so the flagpole seems to be tilting over as it juts into the blue sky. Other parts of the film share this rough, unpolished quality. In another remarkable shot, the camera shakes so hard in response to an explosion that the strip of film is dislodged from the camera aperture and the frame line is exposed. According to the professional standards of photographers and cameramen of the day, these shots would be considered cinematographic errors best left on the cutting room floor.

These so-called errors, though, were at the heart of an unprecedented film aesthetic emerging during World War II. This new expression of the destructive sublime used the unrefined image as evidence of its authenticity and its proximity to real war. To do so, it broke the rules of conventional filmmaking and highlighted those imperfections that may have previously caused the footage to be tossed in the trash. When the narrator says, “Yes, this really happened,” the statement is quaintly redundant. The aesthetic of the image, raw and unpretty, has already made this claim itself. The blurry exposure, cinematographic mistakes, and ungainly compositions serve as indicators of the camera’s presence in a war zone. Mistakes give the footage more authenticity because the images produce records not only of the events transpiring but also of the chaos of filming in the middle of combat. Instead of following classical Hollywood conventions of clarity, professionalism, and coherence, this new aesthetic of combat introduces conventions that demonstrate what Thomas Doherty calls “verisimilitude-via-deficiency.”1

Figures 4 and 5. A prominent lens flare and frame displacement mar the image of the Kodachrome combat report in The Battle of Midway (John Ford, 1942).

This chapter charts the emergence of this new style within a segment of wartime documentaries made by Hollywood filmmakers for the U.S. military. This new aesthetic of failure ultimately became the visual calling card of the World War II combat documentary, but it existed alongside another, more pervasive grammar of the destructive sublime that visualized war through reenactments and the remote perspective. In this chapter, I examine how these two aesthetics forged competing images of the world at war—one presented from a safe distance with totalizing comprehension and the other from an unsafe proximity to dangerous events as they unfolded. This aesthetic contest represented a battle for the meaning of the war as it was being played out on the front lines across the globe. These documentaries contain the seeds of the contrasting aesthetic devices that this book traces throughout American media representations of World War II; these forms alternatively naturalize and denaturalize war, lull and shock their viewers, and confirm and confound the assumptions of their audiences.

Examining the production and reception histories of four combat documentaries—The Battle of Midway, December 7th (Gregg Toland/John Ford, 1943), The Battle of San Pietro (John Huston, 1945), and The Fighting Lady (Louis de Rochemont, 1945)—this chapter identifies elements of the two opposed aesthetic strategies and links them to contrasting philosophies of historical representation. While reenactments and the remote perspective held sway at the beginning of the war in films like December 7th, the rough aesthetics of The Battle of Midway opened up new possibilities for a crude, more “real” look at war that reached its apotheosis in The Battle of San Pietro and The Fighting Lady. However, the fact that much of The Battle of San Pietro was actually staged away from the front lines reveals that the new aesthetic is not a guarantor of truth or actuality but rather a visual style that connotes authenticity regardless of the circumstances of production. This, then, was the creation of not a new mode of filmmaking but rather a new style, one that could be mimicked in filming reenacted or fictionalized events to give them a sense of presence and urgency—to make them look like they were filmed under actual combat conditions even when they were not.

The trajectory of this style leads toward the shaky, handheld cinematography of Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), which also uses the embedded camera to provide a sense of proximity and realism to its battle scenes, as I explore further in chapter 4. The influence of this style can also be found in the first-person perspective of video games like the Medal of Honor and Call of Duty series, discussed in chapter 5, which also attempt to engage users by placing them directly into the middle of the action. Because of its emphasis on the individuated perspective and the circumstances of filming, the new documentary aesthetic ignores bigger-picture issues, such as the reasons for the war, encapsulated so well in films like Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series (1942–1945). But it does create a new way of engaging viewers in the destructive sublime of combat, making the war viscerally felt and perceptually proximate. As I note in a final section of the chapter, which addresses French film theorist André Bazin’s hesitations about uncritical belief in the documentary image, the new kind of vision made possible by portable battlefield cameras may impress spectators by its seeming authenticity, but the camera-eye can also distort and obfuscate reality.

Pearl Harbor in Hollywood: Gregg Toland and John Ford’s December 7th

Before filming The Battle of Midway, legendary Hollywood director John Ford was involved with another film, December 7th. The latter film exemplifies an older mode of documentary filmmaking reliant on staged and reenacted material that was not easily distinguished from fictional filmmaking. During World War II, the lines between documentary and fictional filmmaking were blurred as the imperatives of total war brought everyone into war production in one way or another. Many Hollywood directors, for instance, got involved in making films for the military during the war. John Huston, William Wyler, Frank Capra, George Cukor, and George Stevens, alongside John Ford, all took part in making government- or military-sponsored documentary films.2 Many other Hollywood technicians and famous actors enlisted as well, including Clark Gable, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, and Sterling Hayden. Because they were bringing a Hollywood sensibility to a form of filmmaking with which many had no experience—documentary or nonfiction filmmaking—it’s no surprise that the results were often strange amalgams of documentary and fictional conventions. What is more surprising is that these same filmmakers were responsible for the appearance of a brand-new aesthetic that revolutionized documentary film style.

The story of December 7th begins even before the United States officially entered World War II, when John Ford organized a group of film industry personnel into an informal, quasi-military espionage group. Although Ford had missed his opportunity to participate in World War I as a young man, he had a “romantic conception of himself as a roving seaman always ready to light out” and had arranged for himself a commission as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy Reserves in 1934.3 He began doing impromptu reconnaissance missions on his personal sailboat, usually on his own orders, scouting Japanese fishermen off the coast of San Diego or Mexico.4 Without receiving any authorization to do so, Ford started recruiting other people in the film industry for a military filmmaking unit that would provide photographic intelligence to aid the war effort in Europe. The Field Photographic Branch, or “Field Photo” for short, included such top names as cinematographers Gregg Toland and Joe August, special-effects expert Ray Kellogg, character actor and World War I veteran Jack Pennick, editor Robert Parrish, and screenwriters Sam Engel, Garson Kanin, and Budd Schulberg. With borrowed costumes and prop weapons, Ford put his conscripts through drills on the sound stages at Twentieth Century–Fox. Without even shooting any film, Ford had already invested in the ethos of reenactment, using his skills as a metteur-en-scene to re-create martial activities independent of any legitimate military authority. Rebuffed by Ford’s beloved U.S. Navy, the Field Photo eventually found a place in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS; later, the CIA). “John Ford’s navy,” as some referred to it, operated outside of the military chain of command, providing film reports to OSS chief “Wild” Bill Donovan, who reported directly to President Roosevelt.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Donovan asked Ford and his crew to make a film documenting the rebuilding of the Pacific Fleet in order to reassure the public about the navy’s preparedness.5 The working title for the film was The Story of Pearl Harbor: An Epic in American History, and Ford handed the reins over to Gregg Toland, an experienced cinematographer known for his groundbreaking work on Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), who had been itching to sit in the director’s chair. Ford and Toland had worked together previously on The Long Voyage Home (John Ford, 1940) and The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940). Influenced at some points by the Depression-era documentary photographs of Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White, The Grapes of Wrath expressed a mode of social realism that worked to expose the lives of the downtrodden, but Toland had little experience with documentary filmmaking. Toland and Sam Engel, formerly a writer and producer for Twentieth Century–Fox, flew to Hawaii to begin production in January 1942. They shot some background material, obtained copies of the minimal footage shot during the attack by two amateur cameramen, and organized some reenactments at Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field. But their designs for the film were far grander than a brief newsreel about military preparedness. Toland and his crew wrote a screenplay, hired actors and extras, and set up shop back at the Twentieth Century–Fox studios in Los Angeles.6

Toland initially produced thirty-eight thousand feet of black-and-white footage for December 7th, which was culled to eight thousand feet for his original cut of eighty-three minutes.7 Toland’s film begins and ends with extensive scripted scenes featuring familiar actors playing American archetypes. There are no credits identifying the actors and their roles, but many of them would have been recognizable to audiences at the time, including Harry Davenport, who had appeared in Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1939) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (William Dieterle, 1939), and Walter Huston, who had played the title characters in Abraham Lincoln (D. W. Griffith, 1930) and Dodsworth (William Wyler, 1936). (Walter Huston is also the father of The Battle of San Pietro director John Huston, discussed below, who directed him in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre [1948] after the war.) Dana Andrews, then an up-and-coming actor, discussed at more length in the next chapter, also appears in December 7th.

The style of December 7th does not differ substantially from a typical Hollywood fictional film. In no way does it attempt to “fool” audiences into thinking that these were “real” events captured firsthand by a camera. In the first third of the film, Uncle Sam (Walter Huston) wrestles with his conscience, “Mr. C” (Harry Davenport), over the vast number of Japanese citizens living in the Hawaiian Islands, whom Mr. C depicts as having divided loyalties at best; a later section of the film depicts them as spies for the villainous Japanese consul general. Toland paints an ominous portrait of the islands through montages of Japanese cultural centers, deceitful Japanese saboteurs masquerading as chauffeurs or gardeners, and an “interview” with a Shinto priest who confirms that the Japanese worship their emperor as a god.

The second part of the film reenacts the Pearl Harbor attack, using large-scale reenactments, miniature models, practical special effects, and a small amount of newsreel footage. After the advancing Japanese are finally “beaten back,” the film honors fallen soldiers, shows an emotional funeral service, and lauds the efforts of those repairing the ships damaged in the attacks. A final section consists of a conversation between two dead soldiers walking in a cemetery: Dana Andrews as an anonymous young sailor who died at Pearl Harbor and Paul Hurst as a cynical soldier who died at the Marne. The Great War veteran morosely discusses the futility of endless war and fears the return to isolationism. Using an extended baseball metaphor, the Pearl Harbor sailor displays his optimism, declaring that he has faith in “the Roosevelts, the Churchills, the Stalins, and the Chiang Kai-sheks” to make the world safe, “to call a fair ball fair and a foul ball foul.”

When studio executives and military officials were finally shown the film, they found much of it objectionable. The use of theatrical dramatizations and sophisticated special effects to re-create the battle of Pearl Harbor were not the source of controversy, however. Rather, Adm. Harold Stark, head of naval operations at Pearl Harbor, objected to how the navy was represented in the film: “The picture leaves the distinct impression that the Navy was not on the job, and this is not true.”8 Julian Johnson, head of production at Twentieth Century–Fox, where much of the film had been made, gushed, “This is the most powerful American war film I have ever seen far and away,” yet he claimed that the ending scene, returning to the issue of America’s isolationist past and the stalemate horrors of the First World War, was “bad anti-climax.”9 Only one respondent objected to the film’s reliance on dramatic reenactments and the scripted allegories of Uncle Sam. Lowell Mellett, head of the Office of War Information Bureau of Motion Pictures, complained about the government’s involvement in the production of what was to him clearly a fictional motion picture. Mellett objected that the “presentation of fictional propaganda . . . would seem to be an improper activity for the U.S. government.”10 Although he successfully blocked the film from getting a theatrical release, his concerns about government-produced fiction and...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: A Retrospective Look at the World War II Combat Genre
• Chapter 1. “No Faking Here”: The New Authenticity of Wartime Combat Documentaries
• Chapter 2. The “Good War”? Style and Space in 1940s Combat Films
• Chapter 3. Rationalizing War: Reconstructions of World War II during the Cold War and Vietnam
• Chapter 4. Nostalgia for Combat: World War II at the End of Cinema
• Chapter 5. Simulating War on an Algorithmic Playground
• Conclusion: A Bad War? The World War II Combat Genre Now
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author