The premiere screening ofPearl Harbor(Michael Bay, 2001) in May 2001 took place aboard a US Navy aircraft carrier, moored in the naval base of the film’s title. This production, commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the attack which prompted America’s entry into World War II, represents one of the most recent and explicit linkages of national, naval and cinematic history. This is by no means an isolated example of the mutually beneficial connections between the US Navy and the American film industry, and the promulgation of preferred national images and histories via the war film genre. During the past...

The generic war film’s frequent resemblance to documentary drama, and the naval film’s tendency to assume the form of drama documentary, are characteristics of special significance in relation to British wartime filmmaking. During World War II, a fertile and complex relationship developed between the ideals and practices of documentary filmmaking, the narrative and aesthetic staples of the commercial feature film industry, and the demands for and control of positive propagandist content in film entertainment made in cooperation with the Ministry of Information. The redirection of the documentary movement’s zeal for social reform towards the bolstering of the nation’s resolve, and...

The treatment of World War II in British cinema persisted and even extended in the post-war period. The insistence of British films of the 1950s and 1960s on promoting and prolonging the war, as a common experience and familiar subject within the popular national consciousness, has been examined and explained in subsequent accounts of cultural and cinematic history. During the 1950s, the recent war underwent revision and romanticisation in literature, biographies and magazines as well as within the national cinema.² This return to past glories may honour ambiguous or contradictory ‘feelings’ about the war, and has been read as a...

The contribution of the American film industry to the war effort can be divided chronologically between preparatory propagandist films made before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and combat films made after it, and formally between non-fiction (newsreels, documentary and instructional films) and feature film productions. As in Britain, a convoluted relationship between the propaganda arm of government and the filmmaking establishment was wrought to mobilise and exploit the entertainment industry for national purposes. Although factual films occupied the majority of the industry’s wartime output, it was the feature films which constituted the most visible, accessible and influential product for home...

The campaign conducted by US Navy submarines against enemy shipping in the Pacific was a crucial (and according to some accounts, decisive) factor in Japan’s capitulation.² For the purposes of filmic representation, this aspect of America’s naval war has the virtue of outstanding success (Japan’s merchant fleet totalled 6 million tons in 1941, but despite the addition of 4 millions tons of captured shipping, by August 1945 barely half a million tons remained afloat).³ It also enjoys the benefits of the portrayal of an elite arm within the Navy, which also suffered higher casualties (22%) than any other branch of...

Representations of naval operations, up to and including actual combat, in films made during the Cold War appear as varied and problematic as the political and operational complexities afflicting the navies themselves in that period. The moral clarity and narrative certainty sought in the war film genre, as it had evolved during the Second World War (in the clear delineation of goals, the unity to be sought and the enemies to be defeated in order to achieve them), were not readily or universally applicable to the circumstances of political confrontation, military posturing, or wars by proxy in which the United...

While the US Navy’s varied and controversial roles in the Cold War received partial, negative, evasive or allegorical representations in the feature films of that period, a positive and celebratory depiction of the Navy’s activities and traditions can be found in the contemporaneous television series,Star Trek. Initially broadcast in America over three seasons between 1966 and 1969, the series then considered insufficiently successful to be re-commissioned has become a ubiquitous popular cultural phenomenon, encompassing supplementary sequel and prequel television series and an additional feature film franchise. The iconography, phraseology and self-spawning mythology of theStar Trek‘megatext’² have become...

The return of the war film to popular cinema over the past decade has been accompanied by the continued revision (and in some cases retrenchment) of the genre’s conventional and ideological facets. After several years of avoidance, the Vietnam War underwent repeated representation in American cinema during the late 1970s and 1980s. The ambiguous treatment of this particular conflict in American film (with the war conceived as metaphorical Dante-esque journey inApocalypse Now(Francis Coppola, 1979), as purgative morality play inPlatoon(Oliver Stone, 1986), and as arena for wider institutional critique inFull Metal Jacket(Stanley Kubrick, 1987) )...

Clear consistencies, and significant differences, are discernible within the films addressing sea warfare and other naval operations considered in this study. What remains to be accomplished is an interpretation of their consistencies, an overall accommodation of any divergences, and a definition of the naval film, as an operable and recognisable set of conventions, both within and apart from other representations of combat and the armed services. A series of motifs, narrative concerns, aspects of characterisation and specifics of representation have been noted throughout. While these communal features suggest a kinship with and extrapolation from the form and meaning of the...