The naval war film

Genre, history and national cinema

Jonathan Rayner

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781847796257
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book undertakes a unique, coherent and comprehensive consideration of the depiction of naval warfare in the cinema. The films under discussion encompass all areas of naval operations in war, and highlight varying institutional and aesthetic responses to navies and the sea in popular culture. The examination of these films centres on their similarities to and differences from the conventions of the war genre and seeks to determine whether the distinctive characteristics of naval film narratives justify their categorisation as a separate genre or sub-genre in popular cinema. The explicit factual bases and drama-documentary style of many key naval films, such as In Which We Serve, They Were Expendable and Das Boot, also requires the consideration of these films as texts for popular historical transmission. Their frequent reinforcement of establishment views of the past, which derives from their conservative ideological position towards national and naval culture, makes these films key texts for the consideration of national cinemas as purveyors of contemporary history as popularly conceived by filmmakers and received by audiences.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 British naval films and the documentary feature
• 2 Post-war British naval films and the service comedy
• 3 Hollywood and the one-ocean war
• 4 The submarine war and the submarine film
• 5 American films of the Cold War
• 6 ‘Damn the photon torpedoes!’ Star Trek and the transfiguration of naval history
• 7 Popularising the navy, rewriting the past: contemporary naval films
• Conclusion
• Appendix I: Comparison of narrative elements in naval war films
• Appendix II: Warships in feature films
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index