Cold War Film Impact

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During most of America's wars the film industry made a positive contribution to the war effort. This was achieved in a variety of ways: explaining the causes of the war, revealing the evil nature of the enemy, and the sacrifice of Americans. Feature films also created a realistic image of the battlefield for non-combatants, often using actual combat footage for realistic take on portraying to the public. How has the film industry impacted American society during times of war, for instance, during World War One,Vietnam, and the Cold War? The Cold War became a dominant influence on many aspects of American society for much of the second half of the 20th century. It escalated due to antagonist values between the United States, representing capitalism…show more content…
Each company had one or more production plants, rosters of popular actors, actresses and creative personnel under contract and massive publicity/advertising. Remarkably, artistic expression was not considered under such conditions. Striking, lyrical achievements were in fact commonplace during the 1910s. This was the time of D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance in 1916. It was the era of star and director Charlie Chaplin grazing at poverty and the class system in his brilliant 1917 comedy shorts Easy Street and The Immigrant. It was the decade that had launched the remarkable careers of John Ford, Frank Borzage and Raoul Walsh. In the 1910s, it was still possible to make a studio film without too much front office interference. That the director Intolerance would turn around and make the pro-war Hearts of the World two years later. It illustrates the political and economic pressures facing US filmmakers and their corporate subsidizers after 1916. During the first three years of World War I, the US film industry suffered losses by the closing off of certain European territories, war shortages, regulations and war-related disasters. Shrewd studio leaders understood the long-term value of the war. Unlike European film companies, the US studios enjoyed an unimpaired home market and predicted a decline in film imports as a result of the…show more content…
A professional soldier, Willard (Martin Sheen), is sent to execute Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a once brilliant officer who has turned renegade and, is now leading his own army of the Montagnard tribesmen. Willard and his companions set out to find Kurtz and it is through their experiences that Coppola presents his images of the war. Overriding all else is the sound of the helicopter gun-ships; and these provide the most memorable image of all, Colonel Kilgore's attack on the Viet Cong village, Wagner blaring from their external speakers. Kilgore is the very soul of psychotic militarism, a modern-day Custer heading for his own massacre. The remaining sequences are a strange mixture of originality and cliché, a Playboy show in a jungle clearing, the massacred innocents and so on. At Kurtz's camp nightmare reigns supreme, bodies lie everywhere and madness pervades the camp. Having so far gloried in his condemnation of the war, the director now introduces us to Kurtz and this adds a new dimension. Kurtz knows the Communists will win because they are more ruthless, only utter terror can achieve victory. Because Kurtz adopted their tactics he was judged to have gone beyond the limits defined by the US Army and must be terminated. Certainly its cost was enormous and it did take over three years to complete. As cinema, Apocalypse is a magnificent spectacle: as a statement about the
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