Shooting the civil war : cinema, history and American national identity

TITLE_DISPLAY:

Personal Author:

Barrett, Jenny.

Publication Information:

London ; New York : I.B. Tauris ; New York, NY : Distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Format:

Books

Series:

Cinema and society series.

Cinema and society.

Physical Description:

xii, 220 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

Subject Term:

War films -- United States -- History.

Geographic Term:

United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Motion pictures and the war.

Electronic Access:

Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0913/2009284311-b.html
Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0913/2009284311-d.html
Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0913/2009284311-t.html

ISBN:

9781845117757

9781845117764

Available:*

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No fewer than seven hundred Civil War films have been made by Hollywood from early silent days to the present, from the epoch-making "Birth of a Nation", through "The Red Badge of Courage" and "Gone With the Wind" to the recent "Glory", "Ride with the Devil" and "Cold Mountain". This readable and innovative book on the American Civil War as presented in Hollywood cinema goes deep into the best of these films, arguing that rather than belonging to a single genre, Civil War films are to be found across genres, as domestic melodramas, Westerns or combat films for example. As such, they have fresh insights to give into the war and into America's sense of itself."Shooting the Civil War" shows how these films create an American ancestor who is blameless and undertakes a process of reinscription into the American historical family. It also makes the remarkable revelation that no Civil War film yet made has had a central black character who survives the war, fathers the children of the future, and can stand as representative of the whole American people. To this extent, the book is saying, the Civil War remains a work in progress.

Reviews (1)

Choice Review

According to Barrett (film studies, Edge Hill Univ., UK), the major thematic work of Hollywood films about the Civil War is the construction of an American identity, with the nation itself construed as an "imagined community." Exploring movies from the early silents to contemporary works, the author discovers many common patterns that cross genre lines (domestic melodramas, Westerns, war films, for example) and survive through many historical eras. She uses D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation as a touchstone, analyzing it thoroughly and comparing and contrasting it to many other films--for example, Gone with the Wind and Glory. In a way, Griffith's film remains a paradigm for the cinematic vision of the US as a unified national family of brave, self-sacrificing Caucasians. Barrett's book is itself a unified interpretation of the US Civil War era as presented cinematically. The author marshals a convincing range of evidence, and she clearly plots the historical "understanding" that the movies have generated. The book looks calmly at a rather appalling pattern: "the way that cinema has participated in the imagining of a blameless and thoroughly honourable American national identity." Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. R. D. Sears Berea College

Foreword	p. vii
General Editor's Introduction	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
1 National Identity, Ideology and American Film Genres	p. 13
2 Civil War Melodramas: The Family and the Home	p. 24
3 War-Westerns: Shifting Lines of Conflict	p. 58
4 Civil War Combat Films: Masculine American Ancestry	p. 94
5 The Birth of a Nation: Race, Family, Gender	p. 126
6 An Enduring Southern Ancestry	p. 156
Conclusion: To Remember/Forget	p. 185
Selected Filmography	p. 199
Bibliography	p. 205
Index	p. 215

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