Making Memory

2-28-16 Military Movies and Making Memory

I’ll start with honesty; I don’t like military history. I find it, boring, tedious, and usually far to detail focused to find holistic truths in. I find that more than any other topic I’ve had to teach, it bears to least relevancy to my students lives and gets most bogged down in dates, statistics, and place names. Perhaps I don’t like it because I’ve never learned it well. Perhaps my students don’t find it relevant because I don’t teach it as well. Watching this film had made me reflect a little more on military history and how it can be taught. While I found this movie generally disengaging due to it’s lack of cohesive plot (a strength of historical fiction), and not entirely informative (due to its blockbuster dramatization moments) I do think it addressed multiple perspectives of the historic event in an interesting way. In failing to have a central narrative, the film was able to touch on the multiple and multifaceted experiences of warfare. The French civilians, French Resistance, Allied forces, and German forces were all represented. Though I would not teach with the film by showing it’s entire scope (both because I find it tedious and because it would monopolize

Campbell muses, “He's dead. I'm crippled. You're lost. Do you suppose it's always like that? I mean war.” This powerful lines provokes the questions if people on every side have died, been injured, or are lost…than who, if anyone has won. This brief nod to the futility of war might be a interesting clip to show when teaching a war that is so often taught as an American success story that was unquestionably necessary. When I taught WWII in Manchester our EQ for the unit was along the lines of “How is war glorified, justified, and condemned?” This clip might have added some complexity to such