David Wittenberg

Professor Wittenberg will talk about images of war and violence in popular American film and media, and the ways in which these images are changed when very large production budgets become involved. He will use excerpts from the recent film "Pearl Harbor" as well as portions of this past year's HBO miniseries, "Band of Brothers." He will answer some basic questions about how violence and war actually work on screen: How are war scenes reconstructed within big-budget films? How is violence used within certain genres or conventions of story-telling? Why are we fascinated by images of violence and war?

Departments of English and Cinema and Comparative Literature