The Spanish-American War in US Media Culture

-----

Spanish-American War Films

While many film scholars do not focus on the the ideological function of early cinema, Michael Chanan's The Cuban Image provides a notable exception to the rule. Referring to the Spanish-American War films, he writes:

It was sufficient for early audiences to be presented with the crudest images,. . .and they were engaged by them. If scenes like these became a genre, an established term in the vocabulary of screen rhetoric, this is because they functioned first and foremost not on the level of information but like religious icons; they aroused the devotion of an audience to an idea. This is the source of some of film's first ideological functions, and it comes from something more than the automatism of the camera, its mechanical capacity to record whatever it is exposed to--as Albert E. Smith, for one realized very rapidly. (30)
Elizabeth Grottle Strebel's "Imperialist Iconography of Anglo-Boer War Film Footage" (although concerned with a different war) also is instructive for elaborating the specific ways in which Spanish-American War films engaged and aroused their audiences. She writes,

Anglo-Boer War films. . .exhibit the dual preoccupations of the cinema at its birth, the realism of Lumiere and the magic of Melies. There is both the obsession with recording true events. . .and the desire to make the cinema perform feats. . .to dramatize the cause. Even though the Boer War ultimately troubled many a conscience and generally shook imperial confidence, the cinema only served to gloss over that which was disturbing, perpetuating the myths of the Empire and satisfying the emotional needs of a populace at war. (271)

[About This Article] [Film Studies and the Spanish-American War] [Media Culture and Representations of War] [Early Cinema and the Spanish-American War ] [Receptions of War] [The War at Home] [The Spanish American-War, 1898-1998] [Notes] [Works Cited] [Further Resources] [American Quarterly]