War Films

Overview
War films are a genre of film based on fictionalized or historical wars. Films that are based on wars typically involve actual battles, personal stories of the soldiers invovled in a war, politics behind the causes of war, or exciting, creative plot lines of fictionalized war. Common topics include, a narration of the war, daily struggles of war life, survival and escape stories, effects of war on people post-combat, and controversial viewpoints of what should be done in the war.

The purpose of war films is to entertain the audience but also show the effects of war. War films that are not based off of an actually war are usually meant to entertain the audience. Those that are based on actual wars, such as World War I, are written to be a combination of entertainment  influential, as it teaches the audience about the negative effects of war. The movies can depict battles and show the lives of soldiers while giving the audience a different perspective on the attitude towards war. Usually, war is glorified, which is known as romanticism, and can give soldiers a sense of self pride; however some films’ depictions show how war is not an event to revere.

Conventions of War Films
Typical conventions or features of war films include the following: a plot line with an established protagonist and antagonist, soldiers, setting: home front and/or war front, and the daily struggle of soldiers. The conventions that are necessary in making a war film can even be broken down more. For instance, typical war films will have a group of male soldiers. Often there are no women soldiers in war films because most of the films were made in a time when women had no rights. Amongst this group of soldiers, there would always be a typically rich soldier, one soldier who has a family, wife and kids, back home and one soldier who acts aggressively to most of his combat members. There is also a general or combat officer that is either a protagonist, very helpful to the soldiers, or an antagonist, brings most of the soldiers down. Regardless of this fact, the soldiers try their best to impress him. The loss of innocence after war is also often explored, often accompanied by the idea of the term “lost generation”. The term "lost generation" was coined from something Gertrude Stein witnessed; the owner of a garage saying to his young employee, which Hemingway later used as an epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises  (1926): "You are all a lost generation”. The setting in war films ae usually located on the home front of the war, the battle grounds, or flip back and forth between the war grounds and the home front. Other settings of war films may be the home of a soldiers' loved ones as the movie depicts the struggle of living life without their loved one. Displaying the home of a soldier gives a sense of familiarity and hope to return home. Some war films even take the time to show the side of the opposing side in the war just to show their point of view or make them seem as if they are the antagonist in the film. The war front serves as a contrast; ideas of losing loved fellow combatants, the confrontation of the reality of death and loss, and new found cynicism. Furthermore, the side of effects of war are mentioned to be such things as post traum0a stress disease (PTSD), overall disillusionment of war, but overall new found compassion towards human beings.

History
One of the most famous war films is "Birth of a Nation", which now remains a controversial film because of its characterization of “racist misrepresentation”. The film is a dramatized account of the American Civil War and remains controversial because of white actors in black face and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) as a somewhat noble force in the war. However, the film is used as a teaching piece for film classes because of its capability to have a strong effect on the audience without the use of sound. Furthermore, this film is distinct from other war films because a key factor in many war films is the manipulation of narration to produce an effect on the audience.



Another notable work was the film adaptation (1930) of the novel  "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque. The film focused on a different, a non-American viewpoint, a characteristic of war films. The film showed how the new use of trench warfare, barbed wire, and machine guns ultimately changed how nations fought with one another. The film also emphasizes the necessity of change from the romantic perspective of war to a more serious and tragic perspective of war.

World War II also brought more films and explored the idea of the perspective of a prisoner of war (POW). The British film titled ''“The Wooden Horse” (1950), ''directed by Jack Lee, is based on the book of the same name by Eric Williams, who also wrote the screenplay.[2]The film depicts the true events of an escape attempt made by POWs in the German POW camp Stalag Luft III. The wooden horse in the title of the film is a piece of exercise equipment the prisoners used to conceal their escape attempt. "Saving Private Ryan" is a 1998 American epic war film set during the Invasion of Normandy in World War II. Directed by Steven Spielberg, the film is notable for its graphic and realistic portrayal of war, and for the intensity of its opening 27 minutes, which depict the Omaha Beach assault of June 6, 1944. It follows United States Army Rangers Captain John H. Miller (Tom Hanks) and a squad as they search for a paratrooper, Private First Class James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon), who is the last-surviving brother of four servicemen.