Bodily Violence and Resistance in Wojtek Smarzowski’s Rose (Róża, 2011)

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-55
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Ostrowska
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
World War ◽  
Gendered Violence ◽  
Historical Drama ◽  
Modes Of Representation ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
War Experience ◽  
Female Experience

Abstract The article argues that Wojtek Smarzowski’s film Rose (Róża, Poland, 2011) undermines the dominant bigendered logic of screen death and suffering in the Polish films depicting the experience of World War II. In these films, there is a significant absence of images of female suffering and death, which is striking when compared to the abundant images of wounded and dying male bodies, usually represented as a lavish visual spectacle. This unrepresented female death serves as a ‘structuring absence’ that governs the systematic signifying practices of Polish cinema. Most importantly, it expels the female experience of World War II from the realm of history to the realm of the mythical. This representational regime has been established in the Polish national cinema during the 1950s, especially in Andrzej Wajda’s films, and is still proving its longevity. As the author argues, Smarzowski’s Rose is perhaps the most significant attempt to undermine this gendered cinematic discourse. Specifically, the essay explores the ways in which Smarzowski’s Rose departs from previous dominant modes of representation of the World War II experience in Polish cinema, especially its gendered aspect.1 Firstly, it examines how Rose abandons the generic conventions of both war film and historical drama and instead, utilises selected conventions of melodrama to open up the textual space in which to represent the female experience of historical events. Then the author looks more closely at this experience and discusses the film’s representation of the suffering female body to argue that it subverts the national narrative of the war experience that privileges male suffering. A close analysis of the relationship between sound and image in the scenes of bodily violence reveals how the film reclaims the female body from the abstract domain of national allegory and returns it to the realm of individual embodied experience. The article concludes that Rose presents the female body as resisting the singular ideological inscription, and instead, portrays it as simultaneously submitting to and resisting the gendered violence of war.

Measuring the War Experience: Ghanaian Soldiers in World War II

1987 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrienne M. Israel
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
West African ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Implications ◽  
War Experience ◽  
The Impact

During World War II, some 65,000 Ghanaians were under the command of British officers in the Royal West African Frontier Force, and since India was the transit and refuelling station for those en route to Burma, the 30,000 who served there briefly experienced life in both countries. There has been much conjecture about the impact of the war on participating African soldiers,1 and this article focuses on the nature and socio-economic implications of their experience as later revealed by the veterans themselves in two rather overlooked sources of information: oral interviews and locally published materials.

scholarly journals The Development of Australian Culture in the XX Century: Australian Film Industry

2020 ◽  
pp. 174-200
Author(s):  
O. Zernetska
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Drama ◽  
Film Directors ◽  
Production And Distribution ◽  
Film Productions ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
Film Development

This article represents the first attempt in Ukraine of complex interdisciplinary investigation of the history of Australian film development in the XX-th century in the context of Australian culture. Analysing films in historical order the peculiarities of each decade are taken into consideration. The periods of silent films, sound films and colour films are analysed. The best film productions, their film directors and prominent actors are outlined. Special attention is paid to the development of feature films and documentaries. The article concentrates on the development of different film genres beginning with national historical drama, films of the first pioneers’ survival, adventure films. It is shown how they contribute to the embodiment in films of the main archetypes of Australian culture, the development of Australian identity. After World War I and World War II war films appear to commemorate the courage of the Australian soldiers in the war fields. Later on the destiny of the Australian women white settlers’ wives or native Australians inspired film directors to make them the chief heroines of their movies. A comparative analysis of films and literary primary sources underlying their scripts is carried out. It is concluded that the Australian directors selected the best examples of Australian national poetry and prose, which reveal the historical and social, cultural and racial problems of the country's development during the twentieth century. The publication dwells on boom and bust periods of Australian film making. The governmental policy in this sphere is analysed. Different schemes of film production and distribution are outlined to make national film industry compatible with the other film industries of the world, especially with the Hollywood. The area of a new discipline - Australian Film Studios - is studied as well as the works of Australian scholars. It is clarified in what Australian universities this discipline is taught. It is assumed that the experience of Australia in this sphere should be taken by Ukraine.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Inger L. Stole
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Relations ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Success ◽  
The Public ◽  
Consumer Activism ◽  
Consumer Movement ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
War Experience ◽  
The Impact

This concluding chapter discusses the impact of wartime events on advertising and consumer activism after World War II, and examines their reverse trajectories in the 1950s. With a few notable exceptions, it was not until the later 1960s that advertising came under new scrutiny by a nascent consumer movement. The key factor in the transformation of advertising’s image was the (War) Advertising Council’s tireless work on behalf of the advertising community. Displaying an excellent sense of timing and direction, the WAC coached and chastised individual advertisers, pleading for their compliance in what it believed to be a fantastic public relations opportunity. The war experience had shown that just as advertisers were capable of providing the keys to social success, they were equally adept at guiding the public through issues of political magnitude.

Reconsidering the Victory Bike in World War II: Federal Transportation Policy, History, and Bicycle Commuting in America

2018 ◽  
Vol 2672 (13) ◽  
pp. 29-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Longhurst
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Transportation Policy ◽  
World War ◽  
Policy History ◽  
Federal Intervention ◽  
Bicycle Commuting ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Historical Accounts

The largest federal intervention in bicycle transportation policy in the 20th century damaged the popularity and prospects of adult cycling in the United States. But in contemporaneous publications and in historical accounts, the World War II “Victory Bike” program has been described positively and fondly, even by bicycle advocates. Using the methodology of the discipline of history, this paper contrasts published literature on the Victory Bike against the unpublished, archival records of the federal government’s Revised Ration Order 7 of July, 1942. A first-ever close analysis of month-by-month rationing demonstrates the deeply restrictive nature of that program, which contradicts both early promises and later accounts. By the end of the war, civilian bicycle production and sales had halted completely, the industry had been decimated, and adult cycling was increasingly associated with wartime sacrifice and deprivation. Recovering this 20th century policy history is a necessary part of understanding American bicycle culture in the 21st, partially explaining the comparative lack of adult bicycle commuting today.

Changing perspectives: France’s post-war laureates and the Nobel Prize for Literature

2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 399-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phoebe Weston-Evans ◽  
Colin Nettelbeck
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
International Perspectives ◽  
Post War ◽  
War Experience

This article identifies and examines the largely overlooked corpus of the introductory and acceptance speeches relating to the French Nobel Literature Prize laureates in the post-World War II period. Following a broadly chronological development, it illuminates the tensions between the national and the international perspectives inherent in the process, analysing how individual laureates negotiate their creative trajectories within a longer-term historical shift towards a transnational literary paradigm. Within that context of a changing ethos, the war experience itself is shown to be of pervasive and persistent importance, informing both the writers’ construction of their imaginary worlds, and the reception/perception of those worlds within the Nobel framework. Such special problems as Sartre’s attempted refusal of the prize and Beckett’s ambiguous national identity are used to propose a different viewpoint on France’s recent literary history, from the era of Gide and Mauriac to the more contemporary one of Simon, Le Clézio and Modiano.

scholarly journals Tetyana Dzyadevych, Rape in World War II film: comparing narrations

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-94
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
Dramatic Effect ◽  
Narrative Film ◽  
Cross National ◽  
Female Experience

The objective of this paper is to show how the filmmaker’s genre of choice shapes the main discourse of the film. The author compares Helke Sander’s documentary Liberators Take Liberties (1991-1992) and Max Farberbock’s narrative feature A Woman in Berlin (2008) both dealing with the dramatic effect of the end of WWII, in particular with the instances of German women having been raped by the Allied troops, a theme first publicized in the anonymous diary A Woman in Berlin (1953). There is a clear connection between the book and the two films, but if Sander focuses on the rape itself and on the extraordinary female experience of war, Farberbock is more concerned with cross-national revenge. The author looks closer at the genre elements, particularly at the genres of the diary, the (feminist) documentary, and the narrative film. Then, the author draws some parallels between the Helke Sander film and the diary A Woman of Berlin and discusses the documentaries within the feminist framework inspired by Sander’s accomplishments.

“Orange Plague”: World War II and the Symbolic Politics of Pro-state Mobilization in Putin’s Russia

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (5) ◽  
pp. 822-839
Author(s):  
Matthew Luxmoore
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Symbolic Politics ◽  
World War ◽  
Youth Movement ◽  
War Memory ◽  
Mass Gatherings ◽  
War Experience ◽  
State Mobilization ◽  
War Commemoration ◽  
Great Victory

AbstractThis article examines the symbolic politics of three pro-state movements that emerged from the “preventive counterrevolution” launched by the Kremlin in response to Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. In 2005, youth movement Nashi played upon war memory at its rallies and branded the opposition “fascist”; in 2012, the Anti-Orange Committee countered opposition protests with mass gatherings at Moscow’s war commemoration sites; in 2015, Antimaidan brought thousands onto Russia’s streets to denounce US-backed regime change and alleged neo-Nazism in Kiev. I show how evocation of the enemy image, through reference to the war experience, played a key role in the symbolism of the preventive counterrevolution. Interviews with activists in these movements discussing their symbolic politics reveal an opposing victim/victor narrative based on an interplay of two World War II myths—the “Great Victory” and the “fascist threat.” Moving beyond approaches that view the Soviet and Russian World War II cult as a triumphalist narrative of the Great Victory over fascism, I conclude that its threat component is an understudied element.

scholarly journals From Japanese Soldiers to Chinese Rebels: Colonial Hegemony, War Experience, and Spontaneous Remobilization during the 1947 Taiwanese Rebellion

2017 ◽  
Vol 77 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-179
Author(s):  
Victor Louzon
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
World War ◽  
Qing Empire ◽  
Mainland Chinese ◽  
War Experience ◽  
Historical Accounts

A former part of the Qing Empire, Taiwan was colonized by Japan in 1895 and returned to China, upon Tokyo's defeat, in 1945. Two years later, a revolt broke out against the mainland Chinese authorities and was brutally crushed. This episode, known as the February 28 Incident, has been at the center of memory wars in Taiwan since democratization. Historical accounts have tended to focus on the background causes of the Incident and on the role played by the Taiwanese elite. This article argues that devoting more attention to grassroots participants and their repertoire of action can shed new light on the events. During World War II, many young Taiwanese were mobilized in the Japanese army and paramilitary structures. This experience persisted in collective memory after Japan's defeat. During the revolt, young Taiwanese spontaneously “remobilized” the repertoire of actions and symbols formed during the war, with important consequences.

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