[ecrea] New book: War Pictures - Kent Puckett

A new publication from Fordham University Press

Free postage to UK customers

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/war-pictures

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*War Pictures***

*Cinema, Violence, and Style in Britain, 1939-1945***

/Kent Puckett///

In this original and engaging work, author Kent Puckett looks at how 
British filmmakers imagined, saw, and sought to represent its war during 
wartime through film. The Second World War posed unique representational 
challenges to Britain’s filmmakers. Because of its logistical enormity, 
the unprecedented scope of its destruction, its conceptual status as 
total, and the way it affected everyday life through aerial bombing, 
blackouts, rationing, and the demands of total mobilization, World War 
II created new, critical opportunities for cinematic representation.

Beginning with a close and critical analysis of Britain’s cultural 
scene, /War Pictures/ examines where the historiography of war, the 
philosophy of violence, and aesthetics come together. Focusing on three 
films made in Britain during the second half of the Second World 
War—Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s /The Life and Death of 
Colonel Blimp/ (1943), Lawrence Olivier’s /Henry V/ (1944), and David 
Lean’s /Brief Encounter/ (1945)—Puckett treats these movies as objects 
of considerable historical interest but also as works that exploit the 
full resources of cinematic technique to engage with the idea, 
experience, and political complexity of war. By examining how cinema 
functioned as propaganda, criticism, and a form of self-analysis, /War 
Pictures/ reveals how British filmmakers, writers, critics, and 
politicians understood the nature and consequence of total war as it 
related to ideas about freedom and security, national character, and the 
daunting persistence of human violence. While Powell and Pressburger, 
Olivier, and Lean developed deeply self-conscious wartime films, their 
specific and strategic use of cinematic eccentricity was an aesthetic 
response to broader contradictions that characterized the homefront in 
Britain between 1939 and 1945. This stylistic eccentricity shaped 
British thinking about war, violence, and commitment as well as both an 
answer to and an expression of a more general violence.

Although /War Pictures/ focuses on a particularly intense moment in 
time, Puckett uses that particularity to make a larger argument about 
the pressure that war puts on aesthetic representation, past and 
present. Through cinema, Britain grappled with the paradoxical notion 
that, in order to preserve its character, it had not only to fight and 
to win but also to abandon exactly those old decencies, those 
“sporting-club rules,” that it sought also to protect.

*Kent Puckett*is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley.

Fordham University Press | World War II: The Global, Human, and Ethical 
Dimension | May 2017| 288pp | 9780823276509 | PB | £28.99*

20% discount with this code: CSL17WARP**

*Price subject to change.

  **Offer excludes the USA, South America and Australia.


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