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This volume of essays is partly produced from the ongoing work of a group of scholars in Catalonia and Spain, who work on representations of masculinity and are based largely at the University of B...

In the Introduction to Heroism and Gender in War Films, Karen A. Ritzenhoff and Jakub Kazecki offer an interesting insight into the editorial process in compiling the essays for this volume. 'In se...

Introduction -- Narratives of power. Gallivanting round the world -- Masters and commanders -- American hearts of darkness -- The special relationship -- Science fiction. The enclave and the border -- Dystopia and the post-apocalyptic scene -- Alien nations -- Everybody runs -- Annihilations -- Gothic/ horror/ the fantastic. Tape spectra -- Orpheus descending -- Lecter -- The angels and the damned -- Conclusion

This chapter will consider the representation of personal and national trauma in Terence Mallick's Palme d'Or-winning film The Tree of Life (2011). It begins with the news of the death of a favourite son, a trauma so profound that none of the surviving family members seem able to recover. Though this seems to denote the death in combat of a young soldier, the radical interiorization of this event marks a steadfast refusal to connect the father's overbearing patriarchal presence with a structure of feeling that allowed the drafting of their son to fight (though without explicit historical markers, it seems to be in Vietnam). While generically diverse (a long, cinematically sublime sequence presents a cosmological 'creation'), the film's core is a male melodrama (a form considered by Mulvey, Schatz, and Mercer and Springer among others) wherein the traumatic event is foreshadowed by the Oedipal struggle between an authoritarian father and an elder brother within a prototypical nuclear family. Trauma in The Tree of Life is at once irrecuperable and the means by which emotional (and thereby political) conflict may be resolved, particularly with recourse to notions of sacrifice, grace and salvation clearly drawn from the Christian tradition. This chapter will read The Tree of Life as a mediation of two American 'national traumas', the war in Vietnam and the post-9/11 War on Terror, through the generic means of the melodrama (in the AFI's definition, 'Fictional films that revolve around suffering protagonists victimized by situations or events related to social distinctions, family and/or sexuality, emphasizing emotion'). Through the suffering and redemption of masculine characters, The Tree of Life proposes a theological solution to contemporary political and social traumas.

This paper will be oriented around twin poles: the aesthetics and politics of destruction, and the problematic of genre. The Island begins as a dystopia, drawing visually on the totalized and enclosed worlds of THX1138 (1971) and Logan's Run (1976), but also drawing on the grey-blue visual palette of The Matrix (1999) and Minority Report (2002). It is the latter film that The Island more nearly approximates, accelerating from a conventional dystopian trajectory (alienation of the protagonist leading to the revelation of the true state of the world) into the tropes and kinetic action sequences of the chase movie. These intertextual borrowings foreground the motif of the inauthentic in the narrative, with the very fabric of the film replicating the status of the 'agnate' clones that are central to the film: The Island makes no claim to originality, and in fact consistently sides against the authentic and 'original', privileging the experience of the inauthentic or 'copy', throughout the film. Consistent with this is a self-conscious staging, particularly in the first half of the film, and central to the conceit of 'the island' itself, of the massive power of imaging technologies which (through ILM) form the fabric of the cinematic spectacle of The Island as a film. This staging works to fold both imagined worlds (the underground dystopia and the near-future USA) into analogous relation to the security apparatus and biopolitical circuits of the contemporary West (and, by extension, contemporary sf films such as Code 46).

Poison gas was one of the most feared weapons of its day and added a terrifying new dimension to modern warfare. In 1915, the only item a soldier had to protect himself from the harmful effects of gas was a shell dressing, soaked in his own urine and then tied around his face. By 1918, the British Army had developed a range of innovative protection methods that heralded the birth of the modern day military respirator. Throughout both World Wars, Great Britain led the way in developing anti-gas technologies and today, items such as respirators and anti-gas equipment are highly sought after b