The Forgotten Cinematographer of Mount Suribachi: Bill Genaust’s Eight-Second Iwo Jima Footage and the Historical Facsimile (original) (raw)

Chapter 1: Melodrama, Dying and the Sacred: The Cult of Iwo Jima

Combat Death in Contemporary American Culture, 2021

Chapter One focuses on melodrama and the cultural politics of dying for one’s country. The national icon at the heart of the chapter is the photograph by Joe Rosenthal, of Marines (and a figure long believed to be a Navy corpsman) planting a flag on Mt. Suribachi, Iwo Jima, in 1945. By carefully unpacking both the image and its reception context, I argue that its enduring iconic power is grounded in the circumstances of its production and original reception, the most important feature of which is the background of mass death against which the image was taken and transmitted. After discussing the battle itself and recent revelations about its causes and lack of clear purpose, I take a close look at Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), the highly melodramatic film that commemorated that battle more effectively for American audiences, and which elevated John Wayne to military hero status by associating him with it. I also discuss the Marine Memorial version of the flag-raising image, which transformed the photo into a massive sculpture that now stands in Arlington Cemetery.

The Great War Photographs: Constructing Myths of History and Photojournalism.

This chapter discusses the nature of iconic pictures of war, emphasizing a picture's transformation over time from a historically specific photograph of particular events in time and space to an image largely stripped of specific historical context and embedded instead in mythic narratives of collective memory. Iconic photographs discussed include, among others, the American Civil War pictures of Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan, the Spanish Civil War and World War II photos of Robert Capa, Robert Steichen's World War II photos form the Pacific, Joe Rosenthal's "Raising the Flag at Iwo Jima", Yvegeny Kaldei's "Raising the Flag over the Reichstag," and the Vietnam War photos of Larry Burrows, Eddie Adams, and Nick Ut. Issues of government censorship, media framing and filtering, and collective public memory are addressed.

Re-Viewing D-Day: The cinematography of the Normandy Landings from the Signal Corps to Saving Private Ryan

Media, War & Conflict (Sage), 2014

In that it privileges the grand perspective (the landscape, and the battalion arrayed in all its splendour), The Longest Day (1962) is typical of big-picture World War II films produced up until the mid-1970s. There are few close-ups, and takes are ponderously long. The focus is on grand strategy, and an attendant grand narrative; the lens offers a blow-by-blow assessment of the massive assault. Shot in 1998, Saving Private Ryan periodically echoes this perspective but reflects modalities informed by changing technologies and a hyper-mediated culture. The result is more intimate framing, punctuated by shots sometimes adapted from the source material: footage captured on Omaha Beach, 6 June 1944, by the Signal Corps cameramen. This portrayal serves two purposes: it opens the film in spectacular fashion, introduces the main characters and prefaces their mission. This article identifies and examines filmic frames from the day of the landings; from the grand narrative of The Longest Day; and from Spielberg’s confronting representation Saving Private Ryan. The aim is to show how, through the lens alone, cinematographers approximate the character of a tumultuous and terrifying day in ways that are surprisingly similar and profoundly different.

Framing Narratives: Opening Sequences in Contemporary American and British War Films

Memory Studies Vol. 5(2), 2012

This article analyses the function of opening sequences in war films. With reference to Erll's studies on film and memory, the author suggests that, besides initiating processes of framing film worlds, opening sequences also activate a certain memory-making rhetoric that enables potential impacts on historical discourse and memory politics. He subdivides this last function into three rhetorical modes of cultural memory -an objectifying, subjective and reflexive approach. Subsequently, the author provides close readings of the opening sequences of various contemporary war films to exemplify and illustrate each function and rhetorical mode. In conclusion, the author connects a recent surge in films employing a subjective and reflexive rhetoric to changes in imaging technologies.