“A Treacherous Tightrope”

This chapter, by Alice Lovejoy, chronicles the United States Office of War Information’s plans to distribute forty Hollywood feature films in liberated Europe under the auspices of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force’s Psychological Warfare Division (PWD-SHAEF). From the comparative perspectives of OWI and the Allied countries for which the films were destined (Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, and Czechoslovakia, its central case study), it examines the economic, ideological, and pragmatic questions that intersected in these films’ selection and distribution, focusing on the tensions caused by OWI’s close relationship with the American film industry. The chapter argues that the case study of these forty films highlights Europe’s fraught political, cultural, and diplomatic relationship with American cinema on the cusp of the Cold War, as well as the complex logics underpinning film distribution in this period.

Occupation, Diplomacy, and the Moving Image

This chapter, by S. Park-Primiano, examines the use of noncommercial films by the U.S. military to facilitate its diverse roles during its occupation of South Korea in the aftermath of World War II. Used by the American Military Government in Korea, educational films aided the U.S. military's efforts to Americanize the Korean population and combat Communism. Films were also used to inform and rally support for its policy in Korea from American military and civilian personnel at home as well as abroad. For this purpose, the U.S. military sought cooperation from and enlisted the assistance of Korean filmmakers in the production of films about Korean culture and history that challenge any straightforward interpretation of Americanization or a unidirectional influence. Moreover, such conflicting efforts had a long-lasting effect in South Korea. It was a practice that was continued by the succeeding information apparatus of the U.S. State Department and the United Nations during the Korean War and beyond to further expose the need for a closer examination of U.S. control of the Korean cultural imaginary.

Framing the Bomb in the West

Focused on the period of atmospheric (above-ground) nuclear weapons testing in the continental United States, from 1945 to 1963, this chapter, written by Susan Courtney, does two things. First, it describes some of the basic conditions and infrastructure that shaped the proliferation of films of nuclear weapons tests, including the U.S. government’s secret military film studio dedicated to this work in the hills above Los Angeles, known as Lookout Mountain Air Force Station or Lookout Mountain Laboratory. Second, it turns to the representational legacy that resulted, which was by no means limited to films made by or for the military. More specifically, it considers how footage of atomic tests in New Mexico and at the Nevada Test Site helped to shape the filmic record of nuclear weapons—and popular cultural memory—by framing the bomb in the desert West, arguably the screen space of American exceptionalism.

War in Peace

The American Legion emerged in March 1919, in the immediate aftermath of world war, a point at which the focus of conservative discourse and government policy shifted from overseas campaigns to domestic threats, from military to political targets. This chapter, by Tom Rice, examines the myriad ways in which the hugely influential American Legion used film at this critical juncture, extending military activities and imperatives into the postwar nation. Whether appropriating wartime government films; becoming an influential and respected voice on film reform; or—after the establishment of a designated film service in 1921—producing, distributing, and exhibiting movies, the American Legion used film to mold American citizens and to visualize, project, and shape the postwar nation. The American Legion’s initial uses of film reveal an industry—and a nation—challenged and torn apart by anxieties about immigration and foreign threats and by a wider battle over American national identity.

An Army of Theaters

This chapter, by Ross Melnick, examines the history of the Army Motion Picture Service (AMPS) and the intricate relationship between the U.S. Army and motion picture exhibition during both war and peacetime. Focusing on the industrial, logistical, and economic formation of AMPS, this chapter focuses on three key periods in the history of U.S. Army film exhibition. It argues that AMPS’s early status as independent of Army Morale, Welfare, and Recreation created unique challenges that hindered its early growth on U.S. Army bases and ultimately led to its withering amid the coming of digital projection and other contemporary challenges.

Experimental Viewing Protocols

This chapter, by Haidee Wasson, addresses the development and use of portable film projectors by the American military during World War II and after. It examines the close ties to the technological wing of the American film industry and situates the innovation and use of film projectors in the context of ongoing experiments with projectors, projection, and film viewing within the armed services. This includes a discussion of standard operating equipment that became widely integrated into military operations as well as more specialized devices: gunnery trainers, consoles, data analyzers, and dynamic projection devices that made moving images into elastic, animated performance pieces. This chapter demonstrates that the military developed an expansive, global viewing platform that normalized film presentation and viewing within a wide range of military activities. This was an unprecedented use of portable film technology, and it helped to catalyze its postwar proliferation in military and civilian life thereafter.

The Military’s Cinema Complex

This chapter, by Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson, establishes a framework for studying the American military, a singularly powerful institution, and its relationship to cinema. It first lays out a brief history of the American military and its rise to prominence and power, and then situates the enduring use of cinema across the broad remit of the armed forces alongside previous work in this area. Special attention is paid to the economic and industrial developments that have been intertwined with the military historically. This chapter also summarizes the breadth of the military’s use of cinema, ranging from propaganda to training and from war funding to munitions testing. Knowledge about the military’s use of film helps us to understand more about the history of film and its technologies and also the various ways cinema has been implicated in the complex geopolitical dynamics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Between the Front Lines

This chapter, by Florian Hoof, describes how the military utilized vocational training films in the 1910s and how producing, promoting, and selling such films turned into a profitable business model for filmmakers. It specifically looks at vocational training films produced by Frank Gilbreth for the U.S. Army in the context of the Great War. Due to the development of industrialized warfare, concepts from Gilbreth’s industrial work proved to be newly relevant for the military. Film addressed the problem of how to organize the transfer of complex topics in military training. The chapter sheds new light on the interrelations between film, the organizational culture of the military, and educational theory. Lastly, the utilization of film in the military is situated in the broader context of a film history on nontheatrical film.

“A Campaign of Truth”

This chapter, by Katarina Loukopoulou, discusses the Marshall Plan (MP) documentary films about Greece in the post–World War II geopolitical context. Drawing on archival research, it explores documentaries that propagated the beneficial impact on Greece of the U.S.-funded European Recovery Program (1948–52, widely known as “Marshall Plan”) both in terms of economic reconstruction and geopolitical stability. It then analyses the audio-visual rhetoric of two MP films about Greece—Victory at Thermopylae (1950) and Island Odyssey (1950)—in relation to the ideological context of the Greek Civil War (1945–49), during which U.S. military intervention played a decisive role. The chapter contributes to the growing literature about the MP publicity campaign and Cold War cultural propaganda.

Epistemology of the Checkpoint

When the U.S. invaded Iraq, they acted according to their standard doctrine of using overwhelming force to incapacitate and destroy the enemy. Despite their initial success, the U.S. forces quickly lost control and faced an insurgency, a kind of warfare for which they were ill prepared both in terms of doctrine and institutional culture. Lacking an up-to-date counter-insurgency doctrine, in the fall of 2003, the Pentagon turned to Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 anticolonial docudrama The Battle of Algiers for instruction. This chapter, by Vinzenz Hediger, traces the role the film played in the elaboration of the COIN doctrine and discusses why, despite the considerable intellectual efforts of the authors of manual FM 3-24, the film’s lessons went largely unheeded by the American military.