John Ford’s and Greg Toland’s December 7th: Shaping the image of war

Abstract

John Ford’s films show the changes in the cultural context of the Pacific War and the image of war in combat films from 1941–1945. By the time the U. S. entered World War II, Hollywood and Washington had had a long established relationship: both were well versed in the use of propaganda and had readily employed it on the citizens of the United States. John Ford’s films are a good example of this cooperation. This article is about the “reflection” of the image of the Pacific war, and about key moments in the glorification of the history of World War II in U. S. cinema and media. The article sets out the task of analyzing the connection between the images of war in the film December 7^th and the images of war in newspapers, cartoons, politicians’ speeches — this will help to study the problem of visualizing war not in isolation, but in a wider socio-cultural context. The nature and mechanisms of mutual influence of these images of war have been determined: for example, how materials of periodicals influenced the film; how speeches of American politicians were refracted and reflected in the Ford film; how the visual images of cartoons influenced the director’s work.