WWII on the Screen: Memory, Politics, and Representation

Catalog description

This course will explore how cinematic portrayals of the Second World War—the largest and deadliest armed conflict in human history—have shaped our understanding of the war and its aftermath. As a requirement for this class, students will watch and discuss films depicting the events of World War II in a variety of temporal and national contexts. Class discussions will examine cinema not only as secondary source that can be used to learn more about historical events, but also as a primary source that reveals the changing nature of political memory surrounding the war. Students will examine the mass psychology of the cinematic experience and consider how the ascendance of cinema as both an art form and a means of mass political communication that shaped political and social life in the twentieth-century.