2105-2b
The First World War on Screen: Film Representations of Britain’s ‘Great War’
dienstags, 11.15-12.45 Uhr, Seminargebäude S 327, Böhnke, Dietmar
Reading list:
Chapman, J. (2008), War and Film. London: Reaktion Books; Hanna, E. (2009), The Great War on the Small Screen: Representing the First World War in Contemporary Britain. Edinburgh: EUP; Kelly, A. (1997), Cinema and the Great War. London/NY: Routledge; Korte, B./R. Schneider/C. Sternberg (2005), Der Erste Weltkrieg und die Mediendiskurse der Erinnerung in Großbritannien: Autobiographie - Roman - Film (1919 - 1999). Königshausen & Neumann; Löschnigg, M./M. Sokolowska-Paryz, eds. (2014), The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film. De Gruyter; Paris, M., ed. (2000), The First World War and Popular Cinema: From 1914 to the Present. Edinburgh UP; Winter, J. (1995), Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. CUP; ----, ed. (2014), The Cambridge History of the First World War. CUP.
For British identity and cultural memory, the ‘Great War’, as the First World War (WWI) is commonly known in the UK, clearly rivals the Second World War in significance and in its continued presence in culture and the media. One indication of this is the relevance of Remembrance Day in British culture, celebrated every November on the anniversary of the end of WWI in memory of the fallen soldiers and civilians in all armed conflicts. It was also the first large-scale war to be captured on the new film medium, and has spawned innumerable representations on screen, from the actual war documentaries like The Battle of the Somme (1916), through classics such as All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and the landmark BBC series The Great War (1964) to more recent examples like Regeneration (1997), The Trench (1999), War Horse (2011), the second series of ITV’s Downton Abbey (2011), the BBC’s Parade’s End (2012), and 1917 (2019). In this course, we will be watching and discussing (extracts of) these and other screen representations of the conflict (such as – time permitting – King and Country (1964), Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), Gallipoli (1981), the BBC series The Monocled Mutineer (1986), War Requiem (1988) or Blackadder Goes Forth (1988)) with a view to their aesthetic, political and ideological meanings and structures. This might lead to a better appreciation of WWI’s exalted place in British culture, as well as to the recognition of the media’s role in memory and identity construction.
