Book Description

This PhD thesis explores the representation of war and occupation in seven Dutch feature films produced between 1962 and 1986. It embraces a multidisciplinary approach, emphasising the sociological, cultural and psychological aspects of these filmic representations of war, whilst also acknowledging the contribution of history, anthropology and film studies. The research considers these films as cultural texts, reflecting the underlying concerns of Dutch society from the times the films were made. -- Rather than an emphasis on historical accuracy, attempting to verify 'what really happened' in wartime Holland via their depictions in films, the thesis utilises the sociology of representation to explore the depictions of war in subsequent Dutch films, and to show how films reveal aspects of the time in which they are made, such as Dutch society's changing attitudes, over the post-war decades, to occupation, Jewish persecution, deprivations, the resistance and collaborators. The thesis explores these concerns of society, which change over time and are reflected in its films, and it incorporates the notions of communal memory - what people choose to remember and, crucially, to forget about their collective past, the making and upholding of myths, cultural coping - in which traumatic events are re-mediated through cultural forms and the re-writing of history towards preferred versions of events. -- After a first section comprising historical background and theoretical grounding, the empirical component of the thesis consists of in-depth interpretive analysis of the film texts along four major chapter themes: the image of the enemy, Dutchness and sense of identity, friendship and family life under occupation and the resistance and collaboration. Although the starting point and focus is the film texts themselves, what is really being examined is a sociological and cultural exploration of how a nation's films re-tell its history.