Introduction: Transnationalism and the War Film Genre

ABSTRACT

This introduction offers a comprehensive context for this special issue of the Journal of War and Culture Studies. I define the concept of transnationalism as it is reflected in the scope of the articles included, all of which discuss non-American film productions about the American military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. I also argue that our understanding of the war film genre can only benefit from taking into account an array of different national cinematographies. The introduction contains summaries of the articles which discuss Iraqi, Afghan, British, German, Danish, Polish, Spanish, and Australian depictions of the American wars in the Middle East.

KEYWORDS:

• War film
• genre
• transnationalism
• globalization of culture
• the Afghanistan War
• the Iraq War

Defining transnationalism

The aim of this special issue of the Journal of War and Culture Studies is to establish a range of national cinematic perspectives on the Afghanistan War (2001–2021) and the Iraq War (2003–2011) other than the US/Hollywood representations. President George W. Bush stated in his declaration of a Global War on Terrorism that, ‘The attack took place on American soil, but it was an attack on the heart and soul of the civilized world. And the world has come together to fight a new and different war, the first, and we hope the only one, of the twenty-first century’ (2001; emphasis mine). Although we cannot compare these two military conflicts to the two world wars, the fact remains that international coalitions of armed forces were involved in them. A very large number of countries supported the US, also by joining the Multi-National Force in the case of Iraq and the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) in the case of Afghanistan. It is beyond doubt that American films have shaped the global cinematic image of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as if only American troops had fought there. However, various national cinematographies responded to these military conflicts, and not surprisingly so, considering the fact that these seemingly all-American wars inevitably left their political, social, and cultural marks on the countries which, by the decisions of their political leaders, ‘willingly’ entered the US-led coalitions. At the same time, one should not forget about the effect of these wars on the countries invaded. In all war (hi)stories, to understand the complex political, social, and cultural ramifications, the versions presented by both sides of the conflict should be considered of equal significance. Predictably enough, most non-American films depicting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have received little attention outside their own national contexts. It was impossible for us to include all non-American national film representations of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we discuss a broad and—we believe—representative selection of films produced by a number of cinematographies, including Great Britain, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Poland, Australia, and Iraq and Afghanistan, with the hope of illuminating transnational dimensions of contemporary war films. To see the war film genre transnationally is to recognize national differences across generic similarities.

In their approach to non-American film depictions of the US-led interventions in the Middle East, our authors pay special attention to the traditions and reconfigurations of the war film genre within different national cinemas. The diversity of the films discussed makes apparent the need for a redefinition of this cinematic genre, albeit often in reference to the impact of Hollywood. We see transnationalism in the field of film studies as a major trend which, somewhat counter to the processes of cultural globalization, underscores still prevailing nationally-specific social, political and aesthetic differences. Transnationalism offers a perspective that sees important correspondences between cultural productions across nations, but refuses to accept their homogeneity in terms of form and ideas. The war film genre is a case in point, given its concomitant rootedness in national aesthetic contexts and its employment of universally known schemata. This is why the ‘Americanization’ of the war film genre is one of the key points addressed in the articles collected in this special issue.

The war film genre: transnationalism versus the globalization of culture

One needs to remember that the genre of the war film, as it emerged in the aftermath of the Great War, was the effect of a truly transnational phenomenon. However, we may speak of a diminished form of transnationalism insofar as the canon of the Great War film privileges cinematic productions from Western Europe and the US which are basically anti-war combat films. This predominantly ideological bias is evident in Andrew Kelly’s Cinema and the Great War which contains chapters on American, British, French, and German cinematic representations of the Great War, yet the choices lead to but one conclusion, namely that ‘anything new, however, will still be anti-war. For the First World War at least no films could now be produced which favour the conflict’ (Kelly 1997: 181). The transnational perspective is notably broadened in Michael Paris’s edited volume The First World War and Popular Cinema: 1914 to the Present (1999). Chapters about Italian, Russian, Australian, and Canadian Great War films allow for a more complex take on the nationally distinct ideologies and modes of representation that films about the Great War reflect. Yet, in order to achieve a fully comprehensive transnational perspective which would allow us to understand the full-scale global impact of the Great War, one would need also to acknowledge Soviet films about the Russian Civil War, Finnish films about their Civil War, Estonian and Latvian films about their Wars of Independence, or Polish films about the Polish-Soviet War, to mention just a few examples. Not all war films are necessarily anti-war, and wars also facilitate political and social processes beyond the confines of the battlefield.

The same can be said about the Second World War. To focus simply on one national war cinema is to miss the entirety of this conflict’s global impact, also in terms of its aftermath. The Second World War has a different status in the cultural memories of Germany or the Soviet Union or China or Finland, just as the Great War has had and continues to have a different national meaning for, say, the British versus the Poles. Hence the unquestionable value of critical studies that examine the national character of the war film genre in the light of the artistic and ideological dominants in national cinematographies. For example, in French War Films and National Identity, Noah McLaughlin argues that ‘French films are […] hybrid, though they draw often from literary or philosophical wellsprings’ in contrast to ‘Anglophone war films [which] are infused with elements from other cinematic genres, such as romance, action, Westerns, or thrillers—and especially melodrama’ (McLaughlin 2010: 3). His comprehensive study shows how the evolution of the French war film ‘[led] us to a greater understanding of historical thought and its role in the ever-changing notion of [the] nation’ (McLaughlin 2010: 10–11). In turn, Denise J. Youngblood’s Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005 analyses the war film genre in the political context of the USSR and in the aftermath of its collapse. His chapter on ‘Afghanistan and Chechen Wars’ serves as an intriguing counterpoint to American films on Iraq and Afghanistan, though, as Youngblood points out, it is important to see the degree of cross-cultural interdependence which underlies the war film genre: ‘Company 9 shares its zeitgeist with Sam Mendes’s Jarhead’ (Youngblood 2007: 206).

It needs to be emphasized that the concept of transnationalism excludes such films as Lewis Milestone’s 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front, or Clint Eastwood’s 2006 Letters from Iwo Jima. These are examples of films that offer an American vision of the enemy according to Hollywood conventions, in other words, they offer insights into one nation’s understanding of another nation. The transnational approach to the war film demands immersion into other than ‘our’ (national) representations of a given war and the recognition of other possible artistic formats for the genre, though it will also inevitably testify to the degree of global interconnectedness (embedded or explicit) across national films within this genre. The embedded form of interconnectedness is when similar plot developments, character configurations, and settings appear in different national war films, and apparently independently of each other. How otherwise can one account for all the points of convergence between the POW-based variants of the truce subgenre of the war film across time and nations: The Grand Illusion (dir. Jean Renoir, 1937, France), The Cowra Outbreak (dir. Phillip Noyce and Chris Noonan, 1984, Australia), Polumgla (dir. Artyom Antonov, 2005, Russia), Camp X-Ray (dir. Peter Sattler, 2014, US), and Land of Mine (dir. Martin Zandvliet, 2015, Denmark) (see Sokołowska-Paryż 2023). The explicit form of interconnectedness is when there are evident inter-cultural appropriations of generic and aesthetic formats, especially American. Sam Mendes’s 2019 film 1917 or Edward Berger’s 2022 version of Im Westen nichts Neues obviously borrow a lot from Hollywood war film aesthetics. In its symbolic overtones, 1917 may well remind one of Terrence Malick’s 1998 The Thin Red Line, whereas the German version of Im Westen nichts Neues is a visible appropriation of the techniques of the ‘war as spectacle’ aesthetics of ‘hyper-realism,’ inspired primarily by Steven Spielberg’s 1998 Saving Private Ryan (Chapman 2008: 17–33).

One may well wonder about the reasons underlying the explicit form of interconnectedness of inter-cultural generic and aesthetic paradigms. This may be simply to benefit from a previous film’s box office success as in the case of Kya Dilli Kya Lahore (dir. Vijay Raaz, 2014, India): ‘the date of the release of [Kya Dilli Kya Lahore] indicates it being an intended marketable follow-up to the box-office and critical success of Ničija zemlja (dir. Danis Tanović, 2001)’ (Sokołowska-Paryż 2023: 555). Or it may be to alleviate national guilt. In her analysis of the German TV-film Dresden (dir. Roland Suso Richter, 2006), Linda Robertson observes that for the political purposes of an ethical downgrading of contemporary Germany’s culpability for the Third Reich, this film not only ‘adopt[s] the genre conventions of Hollywood disaster movies to make sure that the film had both popular domestic and international appeal’ but also ‘illustrates how the Hollywood conventions of romantic melodrama, when used to tell the story of historical events during the war, constrict and inevitably distort or diminish the history they purport to make meaningful’ (Robertson 2006: 235). Robertson’s article raises the all-important question of the intended audience of the film, namely ‘to export Dresden, at least to the British, Canadian, New Zealand, and Australian markets’ (Robertson 2006: 241).

The transnational approach illuminates all that has been made invisible in the process of the globalization of culture. It goes without saying that no other war in cultural history has become so ‘Americanized’ as the Vietnam War. Ask anyone about war films about this conflict and inevitably American titles will come up: The Deer Hunter (dir. Michael Cimino, 1978), Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), Platoon (dir. Oliver Stone, 1986) or Full Metal Jacket (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1987). However, the US did not fight there alone, but who remembers now South Vietnamese or North Vietnamese war films or, for that matter, the excellent Australian 1987 TV miniseries Vietnam, directed by Chris Noonan and John Duigan? One needs also to add the wider historical context for the Vietnam War, and this would include the obvious French context of the First Indochina War, perfectly depicted in Pierre Schoendoerffer’s 1992 Diên Biên Phu. One may also add one more recent French war movie on the same historical topic, Guillaume Nicloux’s 2018 Les Confins du Monde. It received positive ratings altogether, with one reviewer claiming that it is ‘an extremely confident and undeniably well-made Vietnam war movie, with something of Oliver Stone’s Platoon, except with the French in the role of the doomed occupying force’ (Bradshaw 2018). This remark must raise alarm bells as it clearly suggests US Vietnam War films have become the primary point of reference for the contemporary uses of the genre.

Why must it always be about the US/Hollywood?

I decided to check the Internet for the category which I named ‘the best war films of all times,’ just to see what titles would come up. After all, it is the Internet today, and not academic works, that has the global power to recommend what to watch. Here a page came up entitled ‘Best War Movies Of All Time: Top 5 Combat Films Most Recommended By Fans’ with the following introduction:

In the realm of cinema, war has often served as a gripping backdrop for tales of heroism, sacrifice, and the complex human condition. From the grandiose battlefields of World War II to the gritty trenches of Vietnam, war movies have captivated audiences with their ability to transport us into the heart of conflict. (Davis 2023)

Please note that the ideology of the war film (‘grandiose’ versus ‘gritty’) here is depicted as secondary to the generic constraints of the combat-oriented criterion of what is overtly defined as ‘the heart of the conflict,’ hence the choice of films listed as ‘the best of the best’: 1. Apocalypse Now (1979), 2. Saving Private Ryan (1998), 3. Paths of Glory (1957), 4. Patton (1970), 5. The Thin Red Line (1998). I note this particular webpage because it points to certain criteria which are still prevalent in defining the war film genre. First and foremost these are all anti-war films, second, these are all combat films, and third, these are all American films. These criteria bring me to Jeanine Basinger’s now seminal definition of the American combat film as the core of the war film genre. Her stated aim was ‘to establish a definition of the World War II combat genre’ and ‘to use this definition to trace the evolution of that genre from its pre-World War II influences, past the war and into its various historical ‘waves’ that reflect its shifting ideologies and usages’ (Basinger 2003 [1986]: 8). In her ‘basis assumptions,’ Basinger provides lists of what should be excluded from the genre of the combat film, namely ‘wartime films,’ ‘military background films,’ ‘training camp films,’ and ‘military biographies’ (Basinger 2003 [1986]: 9–13). Though her topic is the WWII combat film, her chosen examples are all American productions, as if no other national tradition of (even just) the war combat film existed.

Jeanine Basinger’s national bias is perfectly understandable. In the words of James Clarke, ‘for the majority of viewers it is the Hollywood-made, popular American cinema version of warfare that is most widely known’ (Clarke 2006: 2). One cannot disagree with this, considering the amount—if not always quality—of US/Hollywood produced war films. It suffices to look at Robert Eberwein’s edited 2005 volume The War Film, which includes contributions exclusively on American films, though the specific national focus is not included in the title. The section entitled ‘Genre’ contains an analysis of Lewis Milestone’s 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front, which is, in essence, an American appropriation of a German novel, a discussion of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998), yet another American production, nominated for the Academy Awards in seven categories, and Jeanine Basinger’s ‘The World War II Combat Film: Definition,’ based on her 1986 book. Though Eberwein’s edited volume aims to extend our understanding of the war film genre in terms of its historical range reaching out to the Civil War, its experiential scope including post-war veteran trauma, its possible political bias, or race and genre related issues, this volume offers us only insights into the evolution of the American national variant of the war film creating the impression that this genre has been and remains an exclusively American phenomenon. James Clarke’s War Films (2006) attempts to transcend the strictly American national focus on the war film genre with its chapters on films such as the French La Grande Illusion (dir. Jean Renoir, 1937) or the Australian Gallipoli (dir. Peter Weir, 1981) in the case of the Great War, and the Polish Kanał (dir. Andrzej Wajda, 1957) or the German Das Boot (dir. Wolfgang Petersen, 1981) within the thematic scope of the Second World War. The subsection ‘Wars in Other Worlds’ includes Ran (dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1985), a choice, which together with the section on Glory (dir. Edward Zick, 1989) or Land and Glory (dir. Ken Loach, 1995) correlates the transnational approach with the potential transhistorical reach of the war film. Furthermore. the inclusion of sections on seemingly such unexpected films as Aliens (dir. James Cameron, 1986) or War of the Worlds (dir. Steven Spielberg, 2005) clearly indicates the desire to transcend conventional approaches to the ‘battlefield,’ though it is still the combat zone, however redefined, that resides at the core of the selection of films under discussion. Nevertheless, it is impossible not to notice that in terms of quantity, still American productions prevail worldwide. And when non-American films are selected, it is mostly films with an international reach and made by renowned film directors.

Studies such as James Chapman’s War and Film (2008) prove that there are recognizable and reproducible schemata underpinning the amalgam of national variants of the war film. Chapman’s distinction between ‘war as spectacle’ (Chapman 2008: 17–102) ‘war as tragedy’ (Chapman 2008: 103–170) and ‘war as adventure’ (Chapman 2008: 171–244) is based on an impressive transnational selection: Polish, Soviet/Russian, German, French, British films, and even one Finnish and one South Korean film are mentioned. Chapman concentrates on the combined ideological and affective effects of the aesthetics of the war film. Concomitantly, his selection of films evades the simplistic understanding of the war film simply as a combat film. Likewise, in the ‘Introduction’ to A Companion to the War Film, Douglas A. Cunningham states the twofold aim of his co-edited volume to be, first, ‘[…] examining war films not just from the US, but from many other countries around the world’; and second, ‘to revisit and re-evaluate the genre of the war film’ (Cunningham, 2006: 2). However, one may wonder whether these goals are actually achieved. We find in this volume chapters focused on the interpenetration of genres, the war film combined with the horror or science fiction. Interestingly, we can find Jeanine Basinger’s gendered equivalent of her previous hypermasculine model of the combat film (‘The Wartime American Woman on Film: Home-Front Soldier’). The transnational perspective, however, is all too limited, with examples including ‘Rearming the Individual in Paul May’s 08/15,’ ‘Bollywood’s Responses to the Kargil War,’ ‘Algerian War Cinema,’ ‘The Forgotten War Remembered in South Korean and American Cinema,’ and ‘Marketing the Bombing of Dresden in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States.’ As regards the most recent US military interventions, neither Iraq or Afghanistan emerge as significantly contributing to a new type of the war film, the subject matter being restricted to articles on Army Wives, Generation Kill, and Jarhead.

Of course, the US military engagement in the Middle East is, first, the 1991 Gulf War, which allowed President George H.W. Bush to proclaim that ‘we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.’ In the words of E.J. Dionne, Jr.,

America's 42-day war with Iraq did little to refashion the American economy, as World War II did, nor did it reshuffle the class structure, create new bureaucratic institutions or establish new ways of governing. Yet, in ways that might best be described as spiritual and intellectual, the clockwork efficiency of the American war effort seemed to change everything. (Dionne 1991)

One may venture a claim that the pompous political announcement of the demise of the Vietnam Syndrome had little, if any, effect, on the war film genre, remaining in its traditional ideological grip between what is a ‘good’ versus a ‘bad’ war. Hence the problem of war films inspired by US-led military interventions in the Middle East since they simply have not yielded as yet a cinematic canon of widely known titles comparable to the ‘good war’ type of World War II films or the ‘bad war’ type of the Vietnam War films. This may be due to the fact that we deal here with two different military conflicts, albeit partially overlapping: the Iraq War 2003–2011 and the War in Afghanistan 2001–2021. Another thing is that these are still relatively recent wars. Nevertheless, critical works about these wars foreground almost exclusively American perspectives; let it suffice to mention Martin Barker’s A Toxic Genre: The Iraq War Films (2011), or the relevant section in Steven Jay Rubin’s Combat Films: American Realism 1945–2010 (2011), or chapters in volumes such as Memory and Popular Film (ed. Paul Griange, 2003), Why We Fought: America’s Wars in Film and History (co-eds. Rollins and O’Connor 2008), A Companion to the War Film (co-eds. Douglas A. Cunningham and John C. Nelson, 2016).

As Martin Barker emphasizes in his attempt to define the generic dominants of the Iraq war film, ‘histories such as this do not have starting points. But they can have turning points. And there is little doubt that the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington set in train many of the circumstances that shaped this cycle of films’ (Barker 2011: 4). His focus is on the interdependence between politics and filmmaking within the specifically US context: ‘The point is that any understanding of the ‘genre’ of Hollywood war movies has to begin by seeing the conditions of their production as an institutionalized compromise, of course constantly renegotiated, but insistently kept within the frame of those two heavily-invested, ‘balancing’ myths’ (Barker 2011: 11). This is an important statement, also in terms of transnationalism. The war film has always been the one genre most overtly and intricately connected to national politics and cultural constructions of a sense of national identity within the contexts of why, when and by whom, particular films were produced. Barker explains his use of the term ‘toxic genre’ as a borrowing ‘from a report in Variety in which Anne Thompson reported Kathryn Bigelow’s plans for The Hurt Locker, but wondered if she knew what she was letting herself in for’ (Barker 2011: 112). Several issues are at hand here. First, Barker offers a US perspective on Hollywood-produced Iraq war films. Second, he omits Afghanistan. Thirdly, the choice of representative American Iraq war films significantly narrows the understanding of the genre in terms of topic and filmmaking aesthetics. These are, one may argue, legitimate restrictions in terms of book writing, narrowing down the subject range to aspects of production, form, and theme within one specific and globally-influential national perspective on a given war war. The use of the word ‘toxic’ as relating to the Iraq war film must generate negative connotations. One is inclined to ask: why ‘toxic’? On the one hand, as Barker claims, ‘[c]ertainly there is plenty of evidence to show that other commentators thought Iraq movies constituted a type’ (Barker 2011: 112). On the other, Barker sees the alleged ‘toxic’ quality of Hollywood-made Iraq war films as stemming from an emergent conflict between the policy of the government and the ideologies either explicit or implicit in war films: ‘how should we understand the very appearance of these films, given that it was clear they would meet with such scepticism or hostility’; ‘to write and direct such a film would always be against a backdrop of fears of criticism, therefore creating a difficult balancing act between the wish to make a Statement, and careful drafting and presentation’ (Barker 2011: 132).

As I have earlier emphasized, academic works on the war film genre with a national focus are valuable in their own right. Yet, Barker’s book, being so far the only case study of post-9/11 war films is, in my opinion, only too obvious an example of the dominance of the American perspective on US-led military interventions. Looking for critical works on Iraq and Afghanistan war-related films, one may come across Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor co-edited 2008 volume entitled Why We Fought: America’s Wars in Film and History. However, it is only in part four ‘The Twenty-First Century: Terrorism and Asymmetrical Conflicts’ that we find contributions on feature and TV films and documentaries which relate to contemporary US military interventions in the Middle East. It is clear that the aim of the volume is not a re-definition of the war film genre, but rather an attempt at a comprehensive overview of how cinema has reflected, created, or deconstructed the dominant American cultural self-image in the context of war. Interestingly, the range of wars included in this volume—as the recurring subject matter of contemporary American films—go as far back as the American Revolution, the Mexican-American War, and the Civil War, to be followed by sections on World War I, World War II, the Cold War, and the Vietnam War. Implicitly, the range of contributions draw our attention to the omnipresent dilemma of whether the war film is to be treated in its own right as a genre or considered a subgenre of the historical film. Or, as James Clarke suggests, ‘[w]ith their focus on combat, war films have become ever so allied with the aesthetic of the action film, so that a war film of the early twenty-first century could have as much in common with the kinetic patterns of a film like Die Hard […] as with a film such as Walk in the Sun […]’ (Clarke 2006:5).

Steven Jay Rubin’s Combat Films: American Realism, 1945–2010 is a clear follow-up to Jeanine Basinger’s The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre in its foregrounding of the American/Hollywood combat film as the generic core of the war film. As Rubin states, ‘These are colorful stories of the joy of initial discovery, creative passion and frustration, the genius of collaboration, the magic of performance, of logistical nightmares, location headaches, corporate indifference and interference, followed, in all cases, by a triumph of artistic perseverance’ (Rubin 2011 [1981]: 2), His focus is on how such films came into being in terms of film production or actors’ participation, but, all in all, we receive an in-depth study of American war-film-making, ranging from A Walk in the Sun (dir. Lewis Milestone, 1946) to only two films (!) representative of the post-Vietnam contemporary US military interventions: Black Hawk Down (dir. Ridley Scott, 2001) and The Hurt Locker (dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 2009). Paul Grainge’s edited volume entitled Memory and Popular Film (2003) provides further evidence that Iraq or Afghanistan do not hold a particular place in the national ‘memory’ of the US. It is telling that one of the contributors to the volume, Jon Storey, emphasizes the continuous hauntings of the Vietnam War, ‘Americanized’ to a degree that it would become ‘[…] an absolutely American phenomenon. This is an example of what we might call ‘imperial narcissism,’ in which the US is centred and Vietnam and the Vietnamese exist only to provide a context for an American tragedy, whose ultimate brutality is the loss of American innocence’ (Storey 2003:110). Hence the need to establish the perspective of transnationalism as an analytical tool of recognizing national forms of ‘otherness’ within the war film genre.

Transnationalizing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

The war film is one of the major indicators of national identity, insofar as it reflects either the dominant politically-imposed image of a national community or the socially-generated criticism of a hitherto dominant national self-image. Ernest Renan’s nineteenth-century definition of a nation as ‘a grand solidarity constituted by the sentiment of sacrifices which one has made and those which one is disposed to make again’ (Renan 1994 [1882]: 17) is by no means obsolete today. However strongly we may today condemn wars, the brutal truth is that a war is the most effective way of consolidating a nation by means of constructing a shared ‘moral conscience’ (Renan 1994 [1882]: 18). Concomitantly, the participation in another nation’s war may prove to be socially divisive, the more so if we are looking at conflicts fought only by professional soldiers as part of a paid mission and fought in some far away country for purposes not always clear to the general public. The articles collected in this issue prove the indisputable fact of the polarization of opinion across different nations, providing thus a more complex transnational perspective. They also show that an anti-war stance may affect one’s sense of national identity as powerfully as pro-war attitudes, and the latter is by no means to be considered outdated. And if we accept Benedict Anderson’s concept of a nation as an ‘imagined community’ because only ‘in the minds of each [member] lives the image of their communion’ (Anderson 1983: 6), then we must acknowledge the immense role of cultural forms of representations, such as film, in ether consolidating or deconstructing images of one’s national selfhood. One may well ask whether transnationalism is a feasible approach in the practical terms of being ever able to see all the films produced on the subject matter of a particular military conflict. And it is impossible, one may argue, to see all the transnational representation of all wars even in the restricted time frame of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. John Shelton Lawrence has drawn attention to the staggering amount of American war films, both feature films and documentaries: ‘Suid and Haverstick’s Stars and Stripes on Screen (2005) lists 1,300 feature films and documentaries depicting U.S. military personnel,’ whereas ‘Shull and Wilt’s Hollywood War Films, 1937–1945 (1996), which used more expansive criteria of theme and reference, lists more than 1000 films’ (Lawrence 2008: 529). We put forth the concept of transnationalism as a form of necessary awareness of different nations’ sensitivities, perspectives and aesthetic solutions rather than a prerequisite for academic studies of the war film genre. The aim of this special issue is to facilitate an interest in non-American perspectives on American wars so as to acknowledge the transnational impact of what seems to be limited national military engagements. We also hope this special issue will trigger the need to rethink the existing definitions of the war film genre.

Samir Dayal’s ‘The Traumatic Mirror and the Asymptote: Cinematic Representations of American Intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan’ opens this special issue for a reason. If we are dealing with US military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, is it not most appropriate to start with the impact of these conflicts on the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Kurds? Dayal offers a comparative analysis of documentary and feature films representing both sides of the conflicts. In reference to the documentary, he analyses Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield (dir. Richard Rowley, 2013), The Ballad of Special OPs Cody (dir. Michael Rakowitz, 2017), Once upon a Time in Iraq (dir. James Bluemel, 2020), Nice Bombs (dir. Usama Alshaibi, 2006), Homeland: Iraq, Year Zero (dir. Abbas Fahdel, 2015), and The Dreams of Sparrows (dir. Hayder Daffar, 2003–2004). As regards feature films, mainstream American productions such as The Hurt Locker (dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 2008), Zero Dark Thirty (dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 2012), and American Sniper (dir. Clint Eastwood, 2014) are compared to Mosul (dir. Matthew Michael Carnahan, 2019), Ahlaam (dir.Mohamed Al-Daradji, 2006), War, Love, God, & Madness (dir. Mohamed Al-Daradji, 2008), Turtles Can Fly (dir. Bahman Ghobadi, 2004), The Patience Stone (dir. Atiq Rahimi, 2012). The article includes also films which, due to their time of release, evidently bespeak of the post 9/11 reality, even if in a veiled metaphorical manner: Condom Lead (dir. Arab Nasser, Tarzan Nasser, 2013) and Flee (dir. Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021). Dayal’s overarching argument is that of the ‘asymptote’ as the national(istic) interpretative determinant of all these films, to be understood as the refusal to see beyond the restricted frames of one’s own national perspective. Both sides may well accuse each other of a wilful misunderstanding of the ‘enemy’ beyond the official political discourse and cultural prejudice, but regardless of whether the attitudes are supportive or critical of the war, the films remain ‘locked’ in their portrayal of ‘imagined’ national identities. As Dayal rightly claims, it is not enough to simply include the experiences of an ‘other,’ to give him/her voice, to depict this ‘other’ as similar in terms of gender or sexuality, even if differing in terms of race or religion. It is necessary to portray this ‘other’ as a critical reflection of one’s own national self and only then can one comprehend the complex reasons leading to specific military conflicts. If filmic representations only perpetuate either the heroic or the traumatic image of one’s national self, how can future conflicts be avoided? Dayal also raises the issue of the war film genre, as it transgresses the documentary versus popular modes of representation. Documentaries tend to appropriate feature film techniques, and feature films tend to poise themselves as documentaries by asserting their ‘realistic’ portrayal of characters and events.

Holger Pötzsch’s ‘Guilt and Grievability at War: Military Accountability and the Other in Mark of Cain and Battle for Haditha’ problematizes the British perspective on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan within the theoretical frame of Judith Butler’s concept of the ‘grievability of life.’ His discussion focuses on two British feature films which deliberately revolve around actual cases of war crimes, committed by British troops in Mark of Cain (dir. Marc Munden, 2007) and American troops in Battle for Haditha (dir. Nick Broomfield, 2007). The recent attacks on the Houthi in Yemen are perhaps the most striking example of the invariably strong military ties between and US and the UK. This decades-long political and military bond is put to question in these two films which propose that the nation should not accept the terms of its alliance. Great Britain is a perfect example of a nation where politics and cultural memory of Iraq and Afghanistan drift their own separate ways. As Pötzsch argues, the two films exemplify what he defines as ‘a critical realist tradition of British film making,’ the roots of which go as far back as the Great War but also include the Falklands War. These films are also discussed from the perspective of the continuously evolving genre of the war film, and in terms of its ideological and aesthetic connection to and in opposition to the US/Hollywood war film. The perspective of the so-called ‘enemy’ is marginalized in Mark of Cain so as to more powerfully underscore the British soldiers’ perpetrator guilt within a thematic and formal hybridity of the war film genre, including the combat variant in the given circumstances of the conflict, the POW/prisoner variant, the homecoming of the veteran variant, but also courtroom drama and family drama. The Iraqi victims do not receive a role in the plot which would show them as equal in importance to the British soldiers and civilians, their function relegated to being simply a proof of war’s dehumanizing impact and the reason for the psychological breakdown and insubordination of the British soldier-protagonists. This film may well be seen as a criticism of the British military, with the interpersonal dynamics of the army being more relevant than the experience of combat. In the case of Battle for Haditha, Broomfield incorporates the cinematic techniques of ‘direct cinema’ so as to tell the ‘truth’ of war directly through actual soldiers and Iraqi civilians rather than through performative characterizations via professional actors. The question which Pötzsch poses is to what extent the inclusion of hitherto marginalized perspectives of Iraqi enemies and civilian bystanders actually changes our (Western civilization) understanding of the conventionally-dubbed ‘terrorist’ enemy and the Iraqi civilian cultural ‘other.’ Ultimately, this is still a predominantly British perspective, ideologically and formally deriving from British/European traditions of representing war.

Florian Zappe’s ‘Burdens of History, Ethics of Engagement: German Film and the Afghan War’ focuses on the combined political, social, and cultural shift in Germany which brought to an end a decades-long era of the self-imposed philosophy and official doctrine of military non-intervention following the symbolic caesura of the Stunde Null (Zero Hour) of 1945. Two worlds wars were instigated by Germany, and in both cases, the nation was defeated. The centuries-long tradition of German militarism received thus two staggering blows, and the division of Germany into separate states after the Second World War only added to the humiliation. The focus of the article are two films discussed from the theoretical vantage point of just war theory: the TV production Auslandseinsatz (dir. Till Endemann, 2012) and the feature film Zwischen Welten (dir. Feo Aladag, 2014). Immediately, we encounter here the problem of access, a TV film will not be available or sought for to the same extent as a feature film which was part of the Berlin Film Festival in 2014 and thus gained the potential of reaching an international audience. The analysis of both films is preceded by the discussion of the rise of the ‘never again’ policy both in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, a policy readily taken over after the unification of Germany in 1990 in order to uphold the image of a nation that no longer poses a threat to the world. The 9/11 terrorist attack became a watershed event resulting in the political decision to send German troops to Afghanistan and, in consequence, forcing public opinion to assume a stance on the legitimacy and ethics of becoming engaged in war. Florian Zappe discusses Auslandseinsatz and Zwischen Welten as representative examples of the ‘humanitarian military film’ which he defines as a uniquely German subgenre of the war film where documentation of combat is rendered secondary to ethical concerns about the just-ness of military intervention. In general terms, these two films tell us more about contemporary German attitudes to remilitarization than they do about the realities of the war in Afghanistan. As Zappe argues, the films need to be viewed in their role as counterpoints to the hitherto prevailing generic paradigms and ideological positionings in the German war film, with the one-time imperial-rooted apotheosis of militarism to be replaced by overt and ardent pacifism due to the experiences of the Great War and the Second World War. In turn, these ‘humanitarian war films,’ addressing a different kind of military conflict and a different geopolitical situation, deliberately evade being either pro- or anti-war. They are a mirror reflecting the moral concerns about military intervention in a nation which, as indicated in the title of article, remains ‘burdened by history.’ Thus the article offers an invaluable insight into the national mind via the war film.

Likewise, Ib Bondebjerg’s ‘Beyond ‘us and them’?: National and Global Themes in Danish Afghanistan Films’ revolves round the impact of 9/11 on a national mindset. Though Denmark has been a member of NATO since 1949, its role in military conflicts has been limited to UN peace-keeping missions, effectively promoting a comforting self-image of peace-loving Danes. The political decision to engage Danish troops in Iraq and Afghanistan in a combatant role sparked a heated public debate and social rifts. The result was a visible increase of documentary and popular war films which proves the extent to which Danish participation in the so-called ‘global war on terror’ rendered this a socially relevant topic in the cultural domain. Bondebjerg discusses first the ‘new national memory culture’ which emerged in Denmark so to alleviate the shock of the facts of the human price that was paid in terms of soldiers killed, invalidated, or PTSD-diagnosed. Television, as the most far-reaching medium, engaged in producing war-focused programmes and war documentaries. The core of the article is an in-depth analysis of the Danish national format of the war documentary as exemplified by Armadillo (dir. Janus Metz, 2010) versus the Danish feature war film as exemplified by Krigen (dir. Tobias Lindholm, 2015). Armadillo is discussed as an ‘observational documentary,’ serving to create the illusion that viewers are accompanying the Danish soldiers at all times, gaining insight into both their private and army lives. Bondebjerg draws our attention to the formal strategies employed by Janus Metz with the aim to transgress the frames of pure documentation and to provide a hybrid form conveying simultaneously the effect of the authenticity of the representation and the possibility of affective engagement through the literary mode of story-telling. In turn, Krigen is discussed as a Danish variation of the combat subgenre of the war film, attempting to include a more complex image of the Afghan ‘other.’ The most important point of convergence between the documentary and the feature films is how they extend their interest beyond the combat zone to encompass also the soldiers’ families in Denmark, i.e. the civilian zone. It is the point of both films to emphasize that the setting of a war cannot be restricted to the battlefield, for war affects also civilians even if these civilians are not directly threatened by this conflict. The question of the legitimacy of going to war entails also the question of the effect on this decision on the family left at home and the society at large. Ib Bondebjerg claims that films, as a globally accessible medium, can cut across national, political, social, racial, religious, and cultural differences. If Armadillo and Krigen are essentially about the Danish perspective on the nation’s involvement in a war somewhere far away and the inability to fully understand the humanness of the so-defined ‘enemy’ they are fighting, there are other Danish films which testify to the nation’s potential to see the wider picture due its social multiculturalism. Hence the article concludes with documentaries which do not allow a simple categorization of the war film. Nevertheless, they offer a more complicated image of the ‘enemy’ in order to find the unifying values across national cultures so as to question the reasons for politically-enhanced estrangement which all too often erupts into a military conflict: Smiling In a War Zone (dir. Simone Aaaberg Kærn, 2005),Vores lykkes fjender (dir. Eva Mulvad, 2006), Afghan Muscles (dir. Andreas Dalsgaard, 2006), Mit Afghanistan—livet i den forbudte zone (dir. Nagieb Khaja, 2012), and the animated documentary Flugt (dir. Jonas Poher Rasmussen, 2021). Overall, two Danish perspectives emerge from this analysis, one that focuses on the strictly national perspective on the war in Afghanistan and the other which aims to humanize the Afghan people to the Danish public.

Marek Paryż’s ‘Heroic Soldiers, Justified Wars: Depictions of the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in Polish Popular Film’ takes as its subject matter the TV series Misja: Afganistan (dir. Maciej Dejczer, 2012) and the feature film Karbala (dir. Krzysztof Łukaszewicz, 2015). These are (so far) the only two productions responding to Poland’s military participation in Afghanistan and Iraq. Similarly as in the case of Germany or Denmark, the political decision to send the Polish troops abroad as part of the Operation Enduring Freedom was not met with unanimous social approval. However, typically for the Polish national(ist) variant of the war film, the genre has always been particularly immune to public opinion and more attentive to the dominant tradition of representing the Polish soldier. The Polish myth of national martyrdom evolved across centuries on the basis of its history of lost independence. The partitions of Poland took place in the late eighteenth century and it would not be until 1918 that the state would reappear on the European map. The Second World War only seemingly meant a victory of the Poles, for post-1945 Poland remained within the USSR-controlled sphere until 1989. Hence the ideological construction of ‘military romanticism’ as the core ideological paradigm of the iconic Polish war film, depicting the Polish soldier as an upholder of the most sacred of national values, namely the willing sacrifice of one’s life for freedom. As Paryż emphasizes, many of Polish war films are largely uninterpretable for international audiences, even shocking in their blatant glorification of the soldier in combat without even the slightest questioning of the ethics of war itself. Yet, Afghanistan and Iraq posed a problem. After 1989, conscription was replaced by a professional army. The idea of a soldier going on a paid mission to a foreign land in the name of another country’s political interests did not add up to the ideal of the willing sacrifice for Polish independence which—in this case—was not in any way threatened. Paryż’s analysis of Misja: Afganistan and Karbala revolves round how Polish filmmakers have struggled to address the new realities of an entirely different type of war and, concomitantly, to embed the representations of these wars within recognizable tropes of not only the Polish war film but also the American film. Misja: Afghanistan, as Marek Paryż argues, is a genetic appropriation of the ‘platoon film,’ with director Jan Pawlicki overtly admitting the American TV series Over There (2005) and Generation Kill (2008) to be his prime inspirations. The differences between the Polish and the American TV series are more than obvious, for the American collective ‘platoon’ protagonist celebrates social, racial, and religious diversity, whereas the Polish version underscores the homogeneous ‘Polishness’ of the unit, where all the soldiers are all too strikingly similar to each other. It appears that the iconic US Vietnam war films depicting the detrimental impact of war on the soldier’s psyche were not as inspirational for though we have a case of PTSD included, this is but an incident in the amalgam of all the experiences portrayed, and therefore without any effect on the final ideological viewpoint of the series. The issue of war crimes has become a recurring focus of war films but, as Paryż persuasively argues, the actual case of Polish soldiers killing Afghan civilians in the village of Nangar Chel in August 2007 is re-written in the series so as to ensure that the Polish protagonists will be fully exonerated in the eyes of the viewers. We may see similarities to other national war films as regards interrelating the combat and civilian zones, yet once again there is a crucial difference insofar as all family crises in the Polish series are resolved with a happy ending. Karbala was inspired by the actual event of the defence of Karbala City Hall by the joined Polish and Bulgarian troops in 2004. This film is discussed as an example of reinterpreting an event according to the ideological determinants of a national culture. As Paryż points out, this film is an appropriation of the siege motif, often featured in Polish literature and film, a contemporary version the iconic defence of Westerplatte in 1939 which has become the epitome of unwavering commitment to the cause of freedom Westerplatte (dir.Stanisław Różewicz, 1967; Tajemnica Westerplatte, dir. Paweł Chochlew, 2013). The Polish films under discussion depart from what may considered the dominant ideologies of the contemporary war film, be it overt pacifism or the so-called ‘just war film,’ and yet one needs also to acknowledge that the heroic version of war is by no means an obsolete phenomenon, and it is precisely why transnationalism—as a means of recognizing the vital differences between national culture and the reasons for these differences—should be accepted as a necessary perspective.

Fareed Ben-Youssef’s ‘From Inculcation to Liberation: Pop Culture-Addled Snipers in Clint Eastwood's American Sniper and Alba Sotorra's Game Over’ is a study in Spanish national culture as affected by the processes of globalization (or more specifically, Americanization), but also expanding our understanding of the war film genre. The article takes the Hollywood feature film American Sniper (dir. Clint Eastwood, 2014) as a point of reference for the Spanish documentary Game Over (dir. Alba Sotorra, 2015). What connects these productions is their comparable focus on the protagonist’s fascination with a very simplistic form of ‘Americanness’ as a ‘culture’ of the Western and the superhero. Clint Eastwood’s version of Chris Kyle foregrounds the inadequacy of film-conjured images of the hypermasculine ‘hero’ in the Western genre when confronted with the traumatizing effect of being a sniper. Alba Sotorra documents the life of the young Afghanistan veteran Djalal Banchs as a means of exposing the global range of American pop culture and the consequences of an uncritical acceptance of media-conjured ‘realities’ as a thrilling adventure or captivating game. Sotorra is not interested in the politics behind the Spanish government’s decision to send its troops to Afghanistan in support of the US military intervention. Sotorra depicts Djalal Banchs as the victim of his childhood fascination with virtual worlds where all was possible, only to be confronted with the real world of war he was unable to understand. This is also a veiled criticism of Spanish involvement in the US-led ‘War on Terror’ since neither of the young Spanish men understand the purpose of fighting in a far off foreign land. Game Over is analysed within the wider context of the realistic versus the allegorical tradition of the Spanish war film mostly concentrated on the Spanish Civil War as the historical traumatic cornerstone of the Spanish national identity. In Ben-Youssef’s words, ‘as a documentarian of the traumas facing contemporary Spain,’ Sotorra became the first Spanish director to scrutinize the impacts of military engagement in Afghanistan upon Spanish society, with Game Over disclosing how this war not only affected the soldiers but also their families. What is more, the choice of the protagonist was not coincidental and Djalal Banchs is more than just a war-haunted disillusioned veteran. He symbolizes the specifically Spanish Generation Nini which emerged as a result of the economic crisis. And his estrangement from his own national culture signifies the threat caused by the US cultural imperialism.

Finally, Emma Hamilton’s and Paul Chojenta’s ‘“War is like this”: Jirga, History and Genre Tropes’ offers an in-depth analysis of a 2018 feature film, directed by Benjamin Gilmour, as both an emblematically Australian production and a film that forces one to reconsider the hitherto ruling generic determinants of the war film. In terms of its ‘Australia-ness,’ Jirga was deliberately constructed as a cultural anti-thesis to Hollywood blockbusters. Hamilton and Chojenta provide an extensive historical background as regards both Australian politics and film traditions in relation to war. If the Great War testifies to a strong Australian-British alliance, the Second World War marks the beginning its new political affiliation with the United States which resulted in Australian troops fighting in the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and, decades later, also in Afghanistan in support of the ‘War on the Terror.’ In spite of its political ties with Great Britian or the United States, the Australian war film evolved independently in accordance with the nation’s defining cultural tropes. Larrikinism and the specifically Australian form of mateship have rendered the filmic image of the Australian soldier as incomparable to any other. Significantly, there is a glaring lack of overtly anti-war films, for one of the most defining characteristics of the cinematic Australian soldier is willing sacrifice. As Hamilton and Chojenta emphasize, the entire history of the Australian war film proves that this genre has always served an apotheosis of a ‘white’ and ‘male’ Australia. A survey of contemporary Australian Westerns is included as an ideological juxtaposition to the Australian war film. The issue of genre constitutes the core of the article, considering that Jirga appears to defy the conventional prerequisites of the war film. And yet many critical voices have appeared suggesting that one needs to do away with the understanding of a genre as governed by clear-cut and unambiguous rules. Genres are constantly evolving, intersecting with each other, appropriating new forms, and including new themes—all reflecting the changes taking place in the real world. As regards the war film, the genre has obviously responded not only to new technological means of waging a conflict but also to means by which a war can invade the social space of civilians far away from the battlefield. War films are about the nation but also about their global impact. If Jirga is about a veteran who returns to Afghanistan to expiate his own guilt, than this is a war film in the extended sense of depicting the psychological price which the soldier continues to pay long after having left the combat zone. Jirga is also a very Australian film, though with a critical twist of the veteran-protagonist symbolically representing ‘white guilt’ to be absolved by an Afghan.

Overall, I hope that the articles included in this special issue will facilitate future work in the field of the national and generic aspects of the war film. In her seminal study of the (American-focused) combat film, Jeanine Basinger made the following claims: ‘War is a vague category, and it is too broad to contain a basic set characters and events, the hallmark of the genre,’ ‘the war film itself does not exist in a coherent generic form’ (2003 [1986]:9). On the one hand, one is tempted to agree, but, on the other, the transnational perspective offers the opportunity to redefine the war film genre encompassing its diverse national forms as regards ideology or aesthetic formats. At the core of this special issue resides the crucial conflict between transnationalism and cultural globalization (i.e. Americanization) in its respective potential impact on public opinion as reflected in filmic representations, be they cinematic or feature films, or documentaries. The articles included in this special issue also collectively testify to the need to redefine and extend the definition of the war film genre, acknowledging the contributions of national cinematographies to this genre.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż

Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż is Associate Professor at the University of Warsaw, Poland. She is the author of Reimagining the War Memorial, Reinterpreting the Great War: The Formats of British Commemorative Fiction (2012) and The Myth of War in British and Polish Poetry, 1939-1945 (2002). She has co-edited with Martin Löschnigg, The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film (2014) and The Enemy in Contemporary Film (2018). She is the author of numerous articles and chapters in edited volumes on the subject matter of war in literature and film.