Abstract
Higher wages, a greater desire for entertainment and reduced competition from alternative leisure activities meant that UK cinema attendance increased dramatically during the Second World War – admissions rose from 990 million in 1939 to a peak of 1.6 billion in 1946. While people personally experienced the war through blackouts, conscription and rationing, films also shaped their views, attitudes and impressions of the conflict. In War Pictures: Cinema, Violence and Style in Britain, 1939–1945, Kent Puckett selects three British films – The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1943), Henry V (Laurence Olivier, 1944) and Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) – to assess their representations of Britain’s wartime experience and the aesthetic challenges faced by filmmakers in response to total war. While the author builds on the work of empirical cinema historians who investigate the cinema as a social institution, he largely employs textual analysis to assess how these films offer a form of problematic history that ‘help us to see a more general relation between total war and cinematic representation and thus to understand the limits of aesthetic representation when faced with organized violence’ (p. ix).
Puckett argues that these filmmakers responded to wartime challenges by depicting a particular form of British eccentricity, and that these portrayals reveal contradictions in Britain’s attitudes towards the history of violence, war and combat. The first chapter assesses The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, with the author making a strong case that Powell and Pressburger used cinematic style to create an effective piece of democratic propaganda that both supported the war as a necessary response against fascism, yet also derided the violence of total war and lamented the loss of traditional values such as fair play, good sportsmanship and moderation. Chapter Two examines Henry V, which, in contrast to Colonel Blimp, was an immediate commercial and critical success that suspended ‘the difference between art and propaganda, between Britain’s long cultural history and its present experience of total war’ (p. 82). Olivier’s film, according to Puckett, demonstrates the stakes of total war and imagines some form of postwar consensus free from social, political and economic disruption. He focuses on the casting of Olivier as the titular king, George Robey as Falstaff and Robert Newton as Pistol, contrasting a king who would ‘pursue war for its own sake’, with ‘the drunks, the clowns, and the soldiers who neither return as heroes nor have the decency simply to die’ (p. 135). The third chapter provides an alternative reading of David Lean’s Brief Encounter, a film that is normally assessed in terms of its gender politics, depiction of middle-class English repression and cinematic technique. Puckett argues that while Brief Encounter is set prior to the outbreak of war, the absence of war contributes to its ‘tense, expectant, and mournful mood’ (p. 137). He contrasts Brief Encounter to Lean’s other war films and argues that its form, style and use of cinematic techniques, most notably the recurring close-up of Celia Johnson’s face, encouraged postwar viewers to reflect on the experience of war and its impact on civilian life. The temporal divide between the film’s setting and its release created ‘a critical or historiographical comment on the relation between the past and the present’ (p. 189).
Puckett makes a compelling argument that the Second World War created new aesthetic opportunities for these filmmakers, who responded to the violence of total war by promoting eccentricity as a British national value. The epilogue then successfully shows their subsequent influence on Derek Jarman, ‘one of the first British directors to look explicitly to the war cinema of the 1940s for aesthetic and technical inspiration’ (p. 193). While the author makes a strong case that the social and political context of wartime determined film style and cinematic modes of representation, there is no assessment of how these films were received by contemporary audiences. The author quotes from film reviews, yet it is difficult to get a sense of how audience responses to these films were shaped by age, class, gender and location. The emphasis on textual analysis means that this work will provide greater intrigue for scholars interested in representations of war than it will for those social historians interested in the ways that these films were circulated and received by audiences.