War fiction
Related: adventure novel - aestheticization of violence - fiction - war
Titles: Heart of Darkness (1902) - Joseph Conrad
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) - Lewis Milestone [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
War novel
As the prose fiction novel rose to prominence in the seventeenth century, the war novel began to develop its modern form, although most novels featuring war were picaresque satires in which the soldier was rakish rather than than realistic figure. An example of one such work is Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus, a semi-autobiographical account of the Thirty Years War. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_novel#Origins [Jan 2006]
War film (genre)
Films of the war film genre deal primarily with actual warfare, usually featuring sea, air, or land battles and their combatants, or on daily military or civilian life in the midst of battle or the threat of battle. Their stories may be fiction, historical re-enactment, docudrama or documentary in nature. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_film [Nov 2005]
All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) - Erich Maria Remarque
All Quiet on the Western Front is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I, about the horrors of that war and also the deep detachment from German civilian life felt by many men returning from the front. The book was first published in German as Im Westen nichts Neues in January 1929. It sold a million copies within a year in Germany and a further million abroad. In 1930 the book was turned into an Oscar-winning movie of the same name, directed by Lewis Milestone. Although it is unrelated to the novel, "all quiet on the Western Front" has become a popular slang for the lack of action, a reference to the Phony War in World War II's Western Front. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Quiet_on_the_Western_Front [Nov 2005]
The aesthetics of war
See Daniel RothbartApocalypse Now (1979) - Francis Ford Coppola
Marlon Brando as Kurtz
[His last words]
Kurtz [Marlon Brando]: "The horror. The horror."
Words spoken by the dying adventurer Kurtz in Heart of Darkness (1902), by Joseph Conrad.
Apocalypse Now (1979)
Apocalypse Now is a 1979 American film by Francis Ford Coppola, inspired by Joseph Conrad's classic novella Heart of Darkness. Set in the Vietnam War, a taciturn American soldier is sent to "terminate with extreme prejudice" a rogue Green Beret colonel. The narrative of his journey and its culmination is studded with events which, while bizarre, partake of real Vietnam stories. The soldier's journey becomes increasingly nonlinear and hallucinatory. Coppola's agenda clearly includes larger themes of life and war. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apocalypse_Now [May 2005]
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