The Enemy in Contemporary Film

Description

While filmic representations of 'enemies' are legion, film studies have so far neglected the way in which filmic mediations of enemy images have contributed to shaping cultural memories. The present volume investigates the (de)(re)constructions of enemy images in international film since the 1970s. The three parts deal with (re)configurations of the enemy in contemporary global cinemas, analysing films on the two world wars, on regional military conflicts, ethnic, racial and gender conflicts, socio-political conflicts and forms of terrorism. The essays concentrate on film aesthetics and contemporary (geo)politics, on filmic renderings of identity crises caused by troubled national pasts, and on the way films explore the collective psychological mechanisms at play in the construction, perpetuation or problematizing of enemy images. The volume aims to show how in spite of the diversity of national cinemas, moving images are constitutive of national collectivities by rendering conflicts involving an external or internal enemy as the defining points in national or communal histories. It also points out how the dynamics of internalism and exteriority (of 'we' and 'they') has proved vital in this process. Table of Contents......Page 6 Introduction......Page 10 New Enemies, New Cold Wars: Reimagining Occupation and Military Conflict in Norway......Page 28 ‘A Murky Business’: The Post-Soviet Enemy......Page 44 Of Monsters and Men: Forms of Evil in War Films......Page 62 The Domestic Enemy in British TV Documentaries on the Iraq War......Page 82 Britain’s Muslims as the Enemy Within in Contemporary British Cinema......Page 100 (Re)Framing the Disembodied Public Enemy: The ‘War on Drugs’ in Contemporary Narrative Screen Media......Page 114 From ‘Ivan’ to Andreij: The Red Army in German Film and TV......Page 130 Enemies within: Reimagining the ‘Fallen Women’ of World War II in Contemporary Finnish Documentary......Page 154 The Collaborator as Enemy during the French Occupation in (Auto‐)Biographical and Post-Memory Cinema......Page 168 False Idyll: Siri’s L’Ennemi Intime......Page 186 “Femme, je ne vous aime pas”: The Enemy Within in Joachim Lafosse’s A perdre la raison......Page 206 The Past as Enemy in Argentine Cinema, 1983–2000......Page 228 Who Attacked Whom? The Year 1981 in Twenty-First Century Polish Feature Films......Page 242 Redefining the Enemy in Contemporary Australian Anzac Cinema......Page 262 The Fading of Enemy Images in Contemporary Latvian Cinema......Page 280 Looking for an Invisible Enemy in Israeli Film......Page 302 Bonds Across Borders: A Fictional Enemy in Motion on the Israeli Screen......Page 318 Bosnia Beyond Good and Evil: (De)Constructing the Enemy in Western and Post-Yugoslav Films about the 1992–1995 War......Page 336 Forbidden Bonding at the Time of the War on Terror: the Enemy as Friend in Camp X-Ray and Boys of Abu Ghraib......Page 354 Canadians and the Pacific War 1941–1945 in Anne Wheeler’s A War Story and the War Between Us......Page 370 Lost Pasts and Unseen Enemies: The Pacific War in Recent Japanese Films......Page 386 Contributors......Page 404 Index......Page 410