This dissertation argues that the U.S.’s World War I experience helped condition Americans to relate to war primarily through cinematic recreations. The country’s geographical distance from the fighting provided Americans a degree of geopolitical spectatorship from which they could imagine their nation’s role in an ever-changing world through film. Onto that blank screen D.W. Griffith projected three spectacular epics—Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), and Hearts of the World (1918)—that helped reconfigure America’s modern global identity. Together, Griffith’s military spectacles created what I call the antiwar war film, the generic template for American war cinema from which few productions have deviated since. Griffith’s antiwar war film taught Americans what to expect and even desire in representations of war on screen. Aesthetically, Griffith’s World War I movies introduced the burden of producing elaborate, realistic depictions of battle and delivering authentic portrayals of war’s physical, psychological and emotional toll, a standard of legitimacy that arguably remains the most distinctive feature of the war film genre. At the same time, Griffith housed his sensational war imagery within familiar, potent national myths. In so doing, he developed the possible actions, dramatic crises, and resolutions that, through repeated use, would constitute the generic world of all subsequent films about U.S. military conflicts. Griffith’s World War I epics deployed narratives premised on a popular allegory of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction. Specifically, this parable blamed the war on nineteenth-century Americans’ inheritance of the original sin of slavery, for which they were forced to atone through senseless bloodshed that needlessly divided them. Only a righteous paramilitary race war between (black) tyranny and (white) democracy during Reconstruction reunited Americans from the North and South in defense of their common ideals. Out of this violent but necessary historical crucible, the U.S. emerged a redeemed whole, and a nation uniquely devoted to peace. Griffith’s films further reinforced national mythology by evoking connections with the current European war. His images visualized President Woodrow Wilson’s admonition that, furnished with the lessons of its tragic past, the U.S. now stood as the singular model of healthy civilization in a world ravaged by war. Applying the mythical logic of sectional reunion to a devastating contemporary world conflict combined Progressive-era ideas about war and history with Progressive-era faith in the essential value of technological progress. Griffith’s films thus showcased America’s technical prowess and asserted its global altruism by making visceral the aspiration that underwrote Wilson’s argument for taking America to war in 1917: armed conflict was the only path toward lasting peace. The paradoxical reasoning that peace required war became the impetus of modern U.S. foreign policy and the foundational mythology of the antiwar war film. Since World War I, American war cinema has consistently turned on a narrative that the U.S. military participates in world affairs only reluctantly and only when violence proves the only means to service the greater good for humankind. By making war palpable and palatable to audiences, Hollywood war films regularly condone the U.S.’s perpetual military presence around the globe. As such, the overwhelming impact of the antiwar war film has been to generate and sustain a remarkable tolerance for state-sponsored violence among the broader American public.

Creator

• Hepworth, Mariah

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-sw8f-gr18

Subject

• American history
• American studies
• Film studies

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_654330
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:14562

Keyword

• World War I
• D.W. Griffith
• War Film
• Antiwar

Date created

• 2019-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright