Reading the Postwar Future by Kirrily Freeman;John Munro;

Author:Kirrily Freeman;John Munro;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350102606
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Reconstructions

A 1944 Hollywood war film, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, dramatized the April 1942 Doolittle Raid and one airman’s quest to get home to his pregnant wife.1 The raid, in retaliation for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, saw a small group of American flyers drop bombs on Japan, before running out of fuel and crash-landing off the coast of China. The crew’s wearying journey to first reach the Nationalists in China, and then return home to the States, sets up many emotionally and politically charged scenes: a group of Chinese school children sing “The Star Spangled Banner,” an American airman reassures a Chinese doctor, “We’ll be back . . . you’re our kind of people,” and at the end of the film the protagonist tells his wife, “When things were the worst, I could see your beautiful face.” The film’s heavily patriotic and propagandistic tone was intended to inspire faith in the American cause and sympathy for the Chinese Nationalist one, to help viewers imagine a future in which the Japanese threat was eliminated and the United States and its allies—including Nationalist China—prevailed, but also to personalize the war and postwar in a way that emphasized beauty and emotion.

Two of the three chapters in this section take films as their central text and, between them, reflect many of the themes evident in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. In the first chapter, on the 1944 Akira Kurosawa film The Most Beautiful, Chikako Nagayama argues that, while most scholars identify the film’s overt militarism as central to its propagandistic character, the film’s engagement with beauty, emotion, and humanity is also central to its mobilizing message. Kurosawa intended the film to be, literally, “the most beautiful” and—especially—more beautiful than American films. The beauty of the Japanese war effort reflected in Kurosawa’s film was meant to mobilize the viewing public through their affective response.

National governments were not the only ones to use film as propaganda to mobilize support for their cause. In the second chapter of this section, Suzanne Langlois describes the internationalist propaganda films of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) including the 1944 National Film Board of Canada (NFB) film In the Wake of Armies and a follow-up filmstrip UNRRA goes into Action (1945), both of which highlighted the plight of displaced persons and the continued need for aid and intervention in Europe. UNRRA’s cinematic message was, above all, that a coordinated, large-scale “aid effort”—in continuation (and not only as an outcome) of allied involvement in Europe—would require the same structures, commitments, and sacrifices as the “war effort.”

Indeed, on the Allied side, the militarization of the future peace had its roots in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s radio broadcast of December 9, 1941, on the American declaration of war with Japan, when Roosevelt promised the American people, “we are going to win the war and we are going to win the peace that follows.”2 The idea of “winning the peace” resonated widely—as we saw in the title of Frank Lugard

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