Cinematic historicity: World War II in Hollywood Cinema

This transdisciplinary project is situated within the larger scope of cultural studies; it works towards conceptual encounters of film and media studies with historical theory and touches on political philosophy. The overall topic is the cultural imaging of modern war: the generation of meaning in media cultures experience of war. The topic is approached via the question how cinema has contributed to the formation of public memory dealing with historical experiences of war. The part of mainstream cinema in the popular mediatization of history is investigated with a historiographic as well as interpretive/analytical focus on a large, although clearly defined group of films: The present project deals with the perspectives and retrospections which Hollywood cinema has offered on World War II, i.e., with war films (combat movies) from the 1940s up to the current war film revival in the wake of "Saving Private Ryan". The research is based on material of approx. 150 American films (genre fiction and selected documentary productions). The sample is not restricted to any stylistic or auteurist canon. The films will be analyzed by interpreting the experiential, aesthetic and (in both senses) "sensational" dimension of key sequences, specific images and temporal modulations. Theoretically and methodically, the project offers a philosophically accented approach, inspired by Siegfried Kracauer, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière, to "cinematic historicity". Cinemas specific bearing on the past is investigated along five conceptual axes: 1) the public cultivation of sensory affect in cinematic images; 2) the exploration of historical virtualities through "a-personal" cinematic memory; 3) the images status as deterritorialized event and its role in political subjectivization; 4) the inherently traumatic temporality of contemporary mainstream cinema, as suggested in Thomas Elsaessers notion of "retroactivity"; 5) cinemas part in exploring new modes of cooperation and "affective labor" in mass subjects - the post-Fordist dynamic within cinematic "bio-politics". The sample of WWII combat films to be studied will be divided historiographically in three groups according to the cultural logic dominant in US cinema in a given period, and with respect to each periods "historicity". The project starts out from the thesis that the perspective on WWII in Hollywoods classicism (films until 1950) aims at a collective future, while the retrospection on WWII in the crisis period of American cinema (1950-80) is dominated by social conflicts of the present. For todays cinema, it can be diagnosed that Hollywoods dominant blockbuster logic "re-members" WWII with a focus on a hidden, virtual past to be explored within an already historicized past. The observation of current cinematic visions of war also suggests an interpretive attention to traumatic temporalities. Further, the entanglement of "postheroic" aesthetics with the imaginary of recent military theory will form a conceptual background to the investigation.

This transdisciplinary project, focused on film studies and theory of history, has a topical and a conceptual aspect. Looking at Hollywood films on WWII (150 "war movies" from 1941-2009), the issue of cinematic historicity is unfolded. This concept, reformulated as cinematic "aesthetics of historicity", designates the image-conception of history according to which "being in history" can be experienced and events are staged and in films: eg, the attack on Pearl Harbor, or D-Day in Normandy 1944. Usually, it is assumed that cinema`s aesthetics of historicity is a matter of storytelling (this claim presupposes that history is about narratives structured by causes, effects, goals), or a matter of an immersive film experience of `being in the presence of` (but in this perspective one assumes that history can be reduced to presence/present felt by the senses). This project`s key terms of cinematic aesthetics of historicity are "politics of affect" and "retroactivity"/"afterwardsness". These concepts are developed in a dialogue with films which highlights the role of cinema as a site of knowledge formation: films are not mere objects of investigation, for they harbor thremselves a knowledge that is surprising, less reassuring than what circulates in common sense or in sciences bent on facts, on firm grip or on security. Film figures as a mode of experiencing contingencies, activities of the unforeseen and overlooked. This is what film and history, both understood as modes of experience, have in common: a lesson of cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer, whose work is of great importance to this project. What does this mean for speaking about "WWII combat films"? From its outset, 1942, the genre is not really about celebrating heroic deeds of individuals; rather, it routinely exposes the vulnerability of everyday bodies in groups as a democratic way of being in history. Around 1950, Hollywood makes postheroic war films highlighting crises of action that are comparable to Italian Neorealism. Film, Kracauer claims, turns our very passivity into images of experience. Beginning in the 1920s, Kracauer shows how much cinema acts as a kind of alternative school or factory of affects; this perspective is nowadays pursued with respect to the culture of flexible capitalism, or post-Fordism. Drawing on this discourse, the project investigates the ways in which films look back upon WWII by refiguring it as a site, sometimes a playground, for the probing and rehearsal of new, flexible, affective modes of sociality and creativity. This goes for blockbusters such as The Longest Day or Patton that mirror in each other forces of cinema and of war; it goes for reflexive films from the turn of the millennium (eg, Saving Private Ryan, which reworks war into rescue and redemption), but also for those 60s/70s dirty team-work films (The Dirty Dozen etc.), which are retroactively turned on their heads in Inglourious Basterds. With an eye on Tarantino`s film, and on Valkyrie, which is also a complex film on anti-nazi resistance, a political aesthetic of afterwardsness and affect is conceptualized (following Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière) and put up for discussion. This approach focuses on the way in which image-concepts of history that try to ground themselves on "the nation" or on "the authentic" are thwarted by unforeseen, unfounded acts of empowerment.