1st Edition
Sokołowska-Paryż - Transnational Film and the US Wars in Iraq & Afghanistan
This book offers insights into diverse non-American national perspectives on the US-led military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq within the generic frames of the war film.
While the best-known films about the post-9/11 wars in the Middle East are American productions, various other national cinematographies have responded to these conflicts, which is not surprising given the fact that international coalitions were formed to support the US military effort. However, non-American war films about these US-instigated interventions have received little attention outside their own national contexts. This volume fills in the gap in the existing war film criticism by offering insights into how the Afghanistan War (2001–2021) and the Iraq War (2003–2011) have been represented in popular and documentary filmic productions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Great Britain, Germany, Denmark, Poland, Spain, and Australia. The contributions prove the need for transnationalism as an eye-opening perspective on the war film genre by underscoring nationally-specific social, political and aesthetic differences alongside important correspondences between cultural productions across nations.
Transnational film and the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be a key resource for scholars and researchers of film studies, media and cultural studies, film history, war studies, literary criticism and sociology. It was originally published as a special issue of Journal of War & Culture Studies.
Introduction: Transnationalism and the War Film Genre
Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż
1. The Traumatic Mirror and the Asymptote: Cinematic Representations of American Intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan
Samir Dayal
2. Guilt and Grievability at War: Military Accountability and the Other in Mark of Cain and Battle for Haditha
Holger Pötzsch
3. Burdens of History, Ethics of Engagement: German Film and the Afghan War
Florian Zappe
4. Beyond ‘Us and Them’? National and Global Themes in Danish Afghanistan Films
Ib Bondebjerg
5. Heroic Soldiers, Justified Wars: Depictions of the Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in Polish Popular Film
Marek Paryż
6. From Inculcation to Liberation: Pop Culture-Addled Snipers in Clint Eastwood's American Sniper and Alba Sotorra's Game Over
Fareed Ismail Ben-Youssef
7. ‘War is Like This’: Jirga, History and Genre Tropes
Emma Hamilton and Paul Chojenta
Biography
Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż is Associate Professor of British Literature at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw. She is the author of Reimagining the War Memorial, Reinterpreting the Great War: The Formats of British Commemorative Fiction (2012) and The Myth of War in British and Polish Poetry, 1939-1945 (2002), and co-editor of The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film (2014) and The Enemy in Contemporary Film (2018).
Marek Paryż is Associate Professor of American Literature at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw. His current research focuses on the Western across narrative arts, and he has co-edited The Western in the Global Literary Imagination (2022).
