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War film

War film is a film genre concerned with warfare, typically about naval, air, or land battles, with combat scenes central to the drama. It has been strongly associated with the 20th century.[1][2] The fateful nature of battle scenes means that war films often end with them. Themes explored include combat, survival and escape, camaraderie between soldiers, sacrifice, the futility and inhumanity of battle, the effects of war on society, and the moral and human issues raised by war. War films are often categorized by their milieu, such as the Korean War; the most popular subjects are the Second World War and the American Civil War. The stories told may be fiction, historical drama, or biographical. Critics have noted similarities between the Western and the war film.

This article is about the genre of film. For films named "War", see War (disambiguation).

Nations such as China, Indonesia, Japan, and Russia have their own traditions of war film, centred on their own revolutionary wars but taking varied forms, from action and historical drama to wartime romance.


Subgenres, not necessarily distinct, include anti-war, comedy, propaganda, and documentary. There are similarly subgenres of the war film in specific theatres such as the Western Desert of North Africa and the Pacific in the Second World War, Vietnam, or the Soviet–Afghan War; and films set in specific domains of war, such as the infantry, the air, at sea, in submarines or at prisoner of war camps.

National traditions[edit]

Chinese[edit]

The first Chinese war films were newsreels like Battle of Wuhan (1911) and Battle of Shanghai (1913). Still in films such as Xu Xinfu's Battle Exploits (1925), war featured mainly as background. Only with the Second Sino–Japanese War from 1937 onwards did war film become a serious genre in China, with nationalistic films such as Shi Dongshan's Protect Our Land (1938). The Chinese Civil War, too, attracted films such as Cheng Yin's From Victory to Victory (1952). A more humanistic film set in the same period is Xie Jin's The Cradle (1979), while more recent large-scale commercial films include Lu Chuan's City of Life and Death (2009).[108] Chinese directors have repeatedly attempted to cover the atrocities committed by the Japanese during the Nanjing Massacre (1937–1938), with films such as the political melodrama Massacre in Nanjing, Mou Tun Fei's docudrama Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre, and the "contrived Sino–Japanese romance" Don't Cry, Nanking.[109] Zhang Yimou's epic Chinese film Flowers of War (2011), based on Geling Yan's novel, portrays the violent events through the eyes of a 13-year-old girl.[110]

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War Films

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Guts & Glory: The Making of the American Military Image in Film

Tam, King-fai; Tsu, Timothy Y.; Wilson, Sandra (2014). . Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-65046-1.

Chinese and Japanese Films on the Second World War

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Archived 2015-06-27 at the Wayback Machine

Imperial War Museum: First World War Film Collection

Documentary on the U.S. film effort during the First World War (2017)

Mobilizing Movies! The U.S. Signal Corps Goes to War, 1917-1919

2015-06-27 at the Wayback Machine

Archived

Michael Wilmington & Dann Gire: World on War: A Film Discussion

British Film Institute: 10 great battleship and war-at-sea films