Making Pictures Of War

This book brings together the main discussions that took place at an international conference on the iconology of war in the ancient Near East, a subject never addressed at an international meeting before.

"This book brings together the main discussions that took place at an international conference on the iconology of war, held in Lyon on 4th December 2012."--Page 1.

Snapshots taken by American soldiers of Iraqi prisoners stripped naked, humiliated and tortured shocked the world in 2004 and more have followed from the conflict in Afghanistan, but whether the public have been horrified by the soldiers' conduct or the fact they have taken pictures has not been clear. In fact, as this remarkable book reveals and relates, soldiers have taken photographs of war and its atrocities for more than 100 years. But their pictures are private, intended mainly for the soldiers themselves, as mementoes or as attempts to make sense of the chaos, brutality and boredom of war. They can be gruesome or sociable, shocking or mundane and they are seldom regarded as serious contributions to a visual culture of war, which since 1939 has been dominated by professional war photography. But with the 21st-century shift to simple digital photography, transmission by the internet available to all, and a new 'citizen journalism', soldiers' pictures are acquiring a new resonance."Private Pictures" traces this unacknowledged genre of photography from the origins of popular photography in the Boer War through to the present day; it discusses how the images have been used and it asks: what effect might the wider appreciation of soldiers' pictures have on the popular perception of war?

"The Moving Picture Boys on the War Front. Or, The Hunt for the Stolen Army Films" by Victor Appleton. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

Come on now, ready with those smoke bombs! Where's the Confederate army, anyhow? And you Unionists, don't look as though you were going to rob an apple orchard! Suffering snakes, you're going into battle and you're going to lick the boots off the Johnnie

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.

There, I think I have everything in that I'll need at Oak Farm. "Everything! Good gracious, Ruth, how quickly you pack! Why, I've oceans and oceans of things yet to go into my trunk! Oh, there are my scout shoes. I've been looking everywhere for them. I'll need them if I do any hiking in those war scenes," and Alice DeVere dived under a pile of clothing, bringing to light a muddy, but comfortable, pair of walking shoes. "I don't know what I'd do without them," she murmured. "Alice!" cried Ruth, her sister, and the shocked tone of her voice made the younger girl look up quickly from the contemplation of the shoes. "Why, what have I done now?" came in rather injured accents. "I'm sure I didn't use any slang; and as for not having all my things packed as quickly as you, why, Ruth, my dear, you must remember that you are an exception-the one that proves the rule."