Virtue Through Suffering: The American War Film at the End of Celluloid

The World War II combat films made in Hollywood in the late 1990s and early 2000s demonstrate nostalgia for the celluloid-based, documentary-inspired techniques of the 1940s, while at the same time reveling in the possibilities of computer-generated imagery. This potential contradiction converges on the body of the American soldier, whose physical suffering is illustrated with […]

The World War II Video Game, Adaptation, and Postmodern History

From Air Force (Howard Hawks, 1943) to Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009), the cinema has taken on the cultural task of visualizing World War II. Increasingly, however, this task has also been taken up by new media—video games, in particular—resulting in new perspectives on the social and political meanings of the war in contemporary America. […]