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Tragedy, Bleakness, Cynicism, and Existentialism in British War Cinema, 1956–1982

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War Representation in British Cinema and Television

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on a mode of existential war tragedy that thrives during the period under consideration. It provides an intellectual and genre context for this emphasis and surveys key films to explore these themes and moods. In this post-World War II moment, absent an urgent propaganda mandate, war films begin to feature hopeless and bleak endings more generally. A case study comparing two films directed by Joseph Losey, King & Country (1964) and Figures in a Landscape (1970), investigates two radically different representational and stylistic treatments of this modality.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The issue is Cahiers du Cinema no. 111 (Septembre 1960).

  2. 2.

    For a discussion of Brecht’s realism, see Polan (1974, n.p.).

  3. 3.

    I understand commitment in terms similar to Raymond Williams, who writes: “Commitment still meant, at its best, taking social reality, historical reality, the development of social and historical reality, as the centres of attention, and then finding some of the hundreds of ways in which all those processes can be written” (Williams 1980, 22–23) .

  4. 4.

    Mark Broughton points out that Losey replaced Peter Medak as director, and Medak and previously attached star Peter O’Toole left Figures in a Landscape to make another film concerned about landscape, The Ruling Class (1972) (2010, 243).

  5. 5.

    See BAFTA Database, http://awards.bafta.org/keyword-search?keywords=king+and+country.

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  1. George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, USA

    Kevin M. Flanagan

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Flanagan, K.M. (2019). Tragedy, Bleakness, Cynicism, and Existentialism in British War Cinema, 1956–1982. In: War Representation in British Cinema and Television. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30203-0_2

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