A Companion to the War Film

Douglas A. Cunningham, John C. Nelson, Douglas A. Cunningham, John C. Nelson

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781119292944
  9781118288894
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118337615
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

A Companion to the War Film contains 27 original essays that examine all aspects of the genre, from the traditional war film, to the new global nature of conflicts, and the diverse formats that war stories assume in today's digital culture.

• Includes new works from experienced and emerging scholars that expand the scope of the genre by applying fresh theoretical approaches and archival resources to the study of the war film
• Moves beyond the limited confines of "the combat film" to cover home-front films, international and foreign language films, and a range of conflicts and time periods
• Addresses complex questions of gender, race, forced internment, international terrorism, and war protest in films such as Full Metal Jacket, Good Kill, Grace is Gone, Gran Torino, The Messenger, Snow Falling on Cedars, So Proudly We Hail, Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War, Tender Comrade, and Zero Dark Thirty
• Provides a nuanced vision of war film that brings the genre firmly into the 21st Century and points the way for exciting future scholarship

1
“Hearing” the Music in War Films

Robert Eberwein

My interest here lies in presenting a limited and preliminary exploration of various issues related to the reception of music by two distinct populations of audiences for American war films. First, I consider those in the late nineteenth century who attended Love and War (1899; James H. White), a film about the Spanish–American War, and those who saw “Break the News to Mother” (1897/1899; Charles K. Harris), an illustrated song slide show about the Civil War. Then I discuss modern audiences’ experience listening to the music in Clint Eastwood’s Flags of our Fathers (2006), a film about the battle for Iwo Jima. There is no way of determining if anyone in 1899 saw both the film and the slide slow. It is possible that a viewer of Eastwood’s film might have seen one of the earlier works. In a way it does not really matter, because what is important is realizing what occurs as a viewer/auditor “hears” certain music in war films. My speculative and provisional hypothesis is that the way music was used in the earliest war films establishes a kind of paradigmatic model, making music into a text, a site onto which various examples of cultural and political history are inscribed. Audiences hearing music in the works from the nineteenth century and in Eastwood’s from our own twenty-first can both be understood as experiencing the musical, auditory equivalent of a palimpsest. That is, like the mystic writing pad that retains traces of what was “written,” some music in war films continues to show impressions of the wars in which it figured and in some cases films in which it appeared, thus generating dynamic interaction between audiences and history.¹

As I have indicated elsewhere, the war film genre can be said to have begun in 1898 during the Spanish–American War, which was the subject of three kinds of film. First, “actualities,” such as Burial of the Maine Victims (1898), were essentially newsreel accounts of events. In at least one venue, New York City’s Proctor’s Theater, this film was accompanied by an orchestra and the playing of “Taps” on a trumpet. According to one report, this produced a powerful reaction in the audience:

In these days of excitement it takes a good deal to stir a big theater audience to any great display of feeling unless applause is drawn from it by patriotic songs and a liberal waving of flags, but the people last night showed that they appreciated the service the [New York] Journal has done for humanity by giving to the simple black and white depiction of the Wargraph [Thomas Edison’s name for the projecting device] the same outburst of applause that greeted the National anthem … The orchestra hushed and a bugler behind the scenes began to play that last, sad call, ‘Taps,’ as a company of blue jackets swung around the corner of the pictured scene.²

Second, “reenactments” were films in which staged battles recreated specific encounters, such as US Infantry Supported by Rough Riders at El Caney (1899). Finally there were narratives, such as Love and War. This work can certainly be claimed not only as the first narrative war film, but, as far as I can tell, the first narrative film of any sort to use the word “war” in its title.³

This three-minute film, as it exists now in the Library of Congress print, has six scenes, each presented in a continuous shot from a stationary camera: (1) a youth leaves his anxious family to go to war; his brother holds the departing soldier’s rifle; (2) his mother, sitting next to the brother, reads the newspaper for accounts of him; (3) his father and another man come in with news that the soldier has been killed or wounded, producing anguish for all; (4) the brave soldier engages in battle, is wounded, and is rescued by his courageous comrade who dies saving him; (5) he is taken to a field hospital where a nurse prays over him; (6) he returns home and reunites with his family and girlfriend.

Exactly what audiences in November in 1899 saw during the presentation of this film is difficult to determine since the film available to us now differs from the one described both in the Edison Catalogue and in the advertisement for the film published in The New York Clipper, a well-known trade publication, seven days after the film was copyrighted.⁴ According to the Catalogue, Love and War is

[a]n illustrated song telling the story of a hero who leaves for the war as a private, is promoted to the rank of captain for bravery in service, meets the girl of his choice, who is a Red Cross nurse on the field, and finally returns home triumphantly as an officer to the father and mother to whom he bade good-by as a private. The film presents this beautiful song picture in six scenes, each of which has a separate song, making the entire series a complete and effective novelty. PARTING. – “Our hero boy to the war has gone.” Words and music. CAMPING. – “What! A letter from home.” Words and music. FIGHTING. – The battle prayer. “Father, on Thee I Call.” Words and music. CONVALESCING. – “Weeping, Sad and Lonely.” Words and music. SORROWING. – The mother's lament. “Come back, my dear boy, to me.” Words and music. RETURNING. – When our hero boy comes back again. Hurrah! Hurrah! “Star Spangled Banner.” Words and music. The above scene can be illustrated either by a soloist, quartette or with an orchestra, and with or without stereopticon slides. This series of animated pictures, when properly illustrated or announced by stereopticon reading matter, should make a great success.⁵

The advertisement in the New York Clipper, a trade journal at the time, uses some of the language of the Edison Catalogue and adds two sentences:

LOVE AND WAR … A wonderful song picture. We have at last succeeded in perfectly synchronizing Music and Moving Pictures [my italics]. The above is an illustrated song, telling the story of a hero who leaves for the war as a private, is promoted to the rank of captain for bravery in service, meets the girl of his choice, who is a Red Cross nurse on the field, and finally returns home triumphantly as an officer to the father and mother to whom he bade goodbye as a private. The scenes are carefully chosen to fit the words and songs, which have been especially composed for these pictures [my italics]. LENGTH 200 ft., complete with words of song and music, $45.00.

(The New York Clipper, 18 November 1899, p. 801)

The disparity between the film we have and the printed descriptions in the Edison Catalogue and the New York Clipper is made even more problematic by the explanation offered by the Library of Congress: “Only four of the scenes described in the Edison Catalogue were submitted for copyright under the title Love and War and thus survive in the Library’s paper print copy; two other scenes were likely produced and, perhaps, copyrighted as separate films but then added to the Love and war picture sing and sold to fill out the description.”⁶ The advertisement does not mention the language from the Edison Catalogue about using soloists or presenting stereopticon slides. But both the Catalogue and Clipper describe the film as an “illustrated song” and “song picture.” According to Rick Altman, “illustrated songs” had begun to appear as early as 1863 when the producer “Tony Pastor bought lantern slide portraits of Civil War generals … to illustrate his song ‘Heroes of the War.’” He explains their history:

By the end of the century, illustrated songs were a vaudeville feature. In this period, sixteen to twenty slides would be used to illustrate each song. Photographed in black and white with live models staged to represent the words of the songs, the slides would then be hand-colored and projected while a singer belted out the lyrics. Audiences would usually be invited to join in the chorus, reading the words off the screen. ⁷

(Altman, 2004, p. 107)

Since the illustrated song was focused on only one work, it is not clear why the Edison Catalogue gives this label to Love and War even as it identifies six illustrated songs within the film. In addition, the advertisement makes a claim that cannot be supported historically in regard to having “at last succeeded in synchronizing music and moving pictures.” Edison himself had already done this in the 1894 or 1895 short, The Dickson Experimental Sound Test, in which two men dance with each other. Shown originally on the kinetophone, the music was supplied by a wax cylindrical tube.⁸

An ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 “Hearing” the Music in War Films
• 2 Antilochus’s Burden
• 3 War Films in an Age of War and Cinema
• 4 Exploring War Horror’s Narrative Punch in Spielberg’s Munich and Saving Private Ryan
• 5 The Service Tragicomedy
• 6 The Wartime American Woman on Film
• 7 “Conspiracy of Silence”
• 8 Filming a Nuclear State
• 9 The Gendered Remembrance of Japanese-American Internment
• 10 “The Angels of Bataan and Corregidor”
• 11 In the Exigency of a National Cause
• 12 Transnational Algerian War Cinema Revisited
• 13 Fifty Years Hence
• 14 Dresden (2006)
• 15 How to Recognize a War Movie
• 16 Making Citizens out of Soldiers
• 17 Those at Home Also Serve
• 18 Generation Kill
• 19 “TiK ToK on the Clock, but the Party Don’t Stop, No”
• 20 Kuwaiting for Godot
• 21 The Meaning of the Soldier
• 22 Why We (Shouldn’t) Fight
• 23 A War for Everyone
• 24 Is There Such a Thing as an Antiwar Film?
• 25 Through a Soldier’s Eyes
• Index
• End User License Agreement