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Abstract
In this paper we consider the Steven Spielberg/Tom Hanks series Band of Brothers from several perspectives: the theory and history of the docudrama; its sub‐generic war film manifestation (contrasted to cinema); the current cultural significance of testimony in television documentary and docudrama representation; and the emergence of ‘historical‐event’ television in post‐cold war Europe. We identify new codes and conventions in the series that respond to cultural and political change in the post‐9/11 conjuncture. Two episodes of Band of Brothers are analysed in relation to American responses to the events of 9/11, and the series is compared and contrasted to the European ‘historical‐event’ docudrama of the post‐cold war period.
Notes
1. We have written the only academic books solely on this subject – see Paget Citation1990, Citation1998; Lipkin Citation2002.
2. ‘High Concept’ television drama is resource‐heavy in terms of time, money, and personnel; ‘Low Concept’ the opposite (see Edgerton Citation1991).
3. Indeed, in November 2007, 90 years after the end of the First World War, the BBC could find only five former combatants, all over a hundred years old, to interview in programmes leading up to Armistice Day.
4. Too young himself to be a combatant, but still close to this older generation, Ambrose's admiration for the old soldiers is almost unquestioning. There is no hint of moral disapproval, for example, in the later chapters of the book that detail Easy Company's looting in a defeated Germany. The tone also, we suspect, had something to do with Ambrose growing old himself – he died a year after the launch of the television series.
5. Recent European ‘Historical‐Event Television’ also owes a debt to oral history. We discuss this phenomenon further later in the paper (see also Ebbrecht Citation2007a, Citation2007b).
6. We are thinking amongst others of the work of historians such as Rosenstone himself, and particularly of Hayden White (see especially White Citation1973).
7. Our emphasis. See BBC website article ‘Band of Brothers Author Dies’, dated 14 October 2002. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/2325595.stm
8. We owe the quoted phase to Rory Kelly's presentation at the ‘Spielberg at Sixty’ conference in Lincoln, 20 November 2007.
9. Spielberg and Hanks were, of course, no more unique in their field than Ambrose was in his. We would cite Sam Fuller's The Big Red One (1980) as a fictional re‐working of wartime, documentary, experience (see Orgeron Citation2007), and Terrence Malik's 1998 The Thin Red Line (itself a re‐make of a 1964 film – both adaptations of James Jones' experience‐soaked 1963 novel) as avant‐garde flipside to the popular Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers.
10. Ridley Scott's 2001 film Black Hawk Down treats this episode.
11. So, for example, the episode dealing with the airborne Operation Market Garden examines British decision making leading to disaster at Arnhem; the Bastogne episode faults the lack of preparation on the part of the higher US Army command that led to near‐disaster.
12. The series premiered earlier in the UK (September/October). Transmission in America was delayed owing to the historical event of 9/11.
13. ‘Remembrance Sunday’ has been on the calendar in Britain since the First World War, taking place on the nearest Sunday to 11 November (this being the day in 1918 when the guns finally stopped firing on the Western Front at 11.00 a.m.). We suggest that ‘remembrance’ is different from ‘remembering’ by virtue of its official dimension as a national event – it is a public, not private, exercise of ‘memory’.
14. The very title ‘Why We Fight’ is an intertextual echo of the wartime documentary film series directed by Hollywood's Frank Capra.
15. Marsha Orgeron gives an account of Samuel Fuller's wrestling with his felt responsibility as a witness of wartime atrocity in his films Verboten! (1955) and The Big Red One (1980). In the latter, Fuller stages a very similar moment of discovery to that in Band of Brothers (Orgeron Citation2007, 484–6).
16. For more on sentimentality see the essay by Charles Burnetts immediately preceding this one.
17. Email to Derek Paget, 15 November 2007.
18. This is borne out in other television cultures – Witness/Survivor speaking direct to camera has been a feature of, for example, a series of British‐made ‘Historical‐Event’ docudramas: in Dunkirk (2004), D‐Day – 6/6/44 (2004), and Hiroshima (2005), to name but three BBC films, the tropes described and analysed by Ebbrecht – witness testimony amongst them – are also to be found.