Introduction

Abstract

Cinema together with novels and short stories can provide valuable insights into war and military conflict. These include conflicts fought by insurgent movements and the various counter-insurgencies waged by states to resist, contain, and, on occasions, defeat them. Film and literature can be valuable aids in the teaching of unconventional or irregular wars and the examination of their wider public mythologies. Cinema is necessarily a great simplifier, often taking myths from stories, legends, and plays and transforming them into spectacles for popular audiences. Some of the major themes tackled by this war cinema derive from various military conflicts both ancient and modern: courage, heroism, and honour along with cowardice and incompetence; romance and the frequent breakdown of domestic relationships of some of those involved in military conflicts; the strategic rationale and competence of senior commanders and political leaders; the traumatic impact of warfare on those fighting in it and the frequently shabby treatment of veterans returning home. The theme explored in this short special issue is the myth of the warrior and soldier hero and its replacement in several films since the 1960s of antiwar images of the soldier as victim and aggressor. The shift is interesting for the way it has often occurred in films that are not situated in interstate wars and grand set piece battles, such as those of World Wars One and Two, but in messier and protracted smaller-scale conflicts such as the Anglo Boer War of 1899–1902, post-war British colonial ‘emergencies’, the Vietnam War and ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland. The four papers published here thus mark a useful addition to the scholarly study of cinema and irregular or unconventional war in contrast to the wider and better-known work on conventional war. Guerrilla Warfare has only recently begun to be examined by film studies analysts and cinema critics after a long period when it was largely subsumed within the wider rubric of war cinema. While there may be some rationale for this approach in terms of a tidiness of subject matter, those studying guerrilla