The War Genre research

removed. (August 2010)

War films are a film genre concerned with warfare, usually about naval, air or land battles, sometimes focusing instead on prisoners of war, covert operations, military training or other related subjects. At times war films focus on daily military or civilian life in wartime without depicting battles. Their stories may be fiction, based on history, docudrama, biographical, or even alternate history fiction.

The term anti-war film is sometimes used to describe films which bring to the viewer the pain and horror of war, often from a political or ideological perspective.

One of the most influential silent films from the beginning of the twentieth century is Birth of a Nation (1915), the first half of which established many conventions for War films and Motion Pictures in general. This film has been described as a great movie for a terrible cause. Protests and violence erupted in the wake of its opening and it became one of the first films to raise the issue of cinema's potentially detrimental effect on mass culture.

The effects of the Vietnam War tended to diminish the appetite for fictional war films by the turn of the 1970s. American war films produced during and just after the Vietnam War often reflected the disillusion of the American public towards the war. Most films made after the Vietnam War delved more deeply into the horrors of war than movies made before it (This is not to say that there were no such films before the Vietnam War). Later war films like Catch-22 (set in WWII) and the black comedy MASH (set in Korea), reflected some of these attitudes.

In the decades following the War, the American film industry produced many war films either critical of American involvement in Vietnam, depicting American war crimes or the negative effects of war on combatants. These films included works by the most prominent actors and directors in American film and garnering the highest accolades and commercial success including:

Taxi Driver (1976) — nominated for four Academy Awards, directed by Martin Scorsese.
Coming Home (1978) — winner of three Academy Awards, directed by Hal Ashby.
The Deer Hunter (1978) — winner of five Academy Awards, including Academy Award for Best Picture, directed by Michael Cimino.
Apocalypse Now (1979) — winner of two Academy Awards, directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
Full Metal Jacket (1987) — directed by Stanley Kubrick.
Casualties of War (1989) — directed by Brian De Palma.

The success of Steven Spielberg's realistic Saving Private Ryan in 1998 helped to usher in a revival of interest in World War II films. A number of these, such as Pearl Harbor and Enemy at the Gates were aimed at the blockbuster market, while others, like Enigma, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, and Charlotte Gray, were more nostalgic in tone. Others were trying to represent a more gritty side of the reality of the war such as Joseph Vilsmaier's Stalingrad, Wolfgang Petersen's Das Boot and Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line

Codes and conventions

There are many codes and conventions in war films, however there are some that are used mroe than others.
Beach scenes are seen a lot in some films as it is a vast space that is used to make trenches with vehicles and hundreds of soldiers, such as Red Car beach in Attonement.

Easier things to identify is Equiptment, uniforms and guns. There will always be guns and army uniforms in war films, in MASH the cast are usually wearing army uniforms even thought the film focuses on the casualties of war rather than fighting. Also Jarhead's soldiers always have uniforms and guns with them even thought they encounter no fighting (which is what you would expect in a war film).