| The Soldier's Circle: Social Documentary and the American Military, 1940 - 1945 examines the efforts of the U.S. military to expand the ever-contentious category of documentary cinema to suit its own institutional imperatives (including and especially gender integration) and to fulfill its oft-stated commitment to educating its members. This dissertation's dual aims are to uncover the military's idiosyncratic production of soldier-oriented non-fiction films and to show how such films made use of---and themselves defined---a variety of documentary devices, from reenactment to animation to voice-over narration. An expansive assessment of journalistic responses to these devices not only indicates that the military-produced social documentary was a subject of widespread debate during this period, but also suggests that the military's newly formed Bureau of Public Relations, which maintained close ties to the popular press, saw an ongoing engagement with documentary cinema as bolstering the military's public image by strengthening its ties to pedagogy. I focus on the soldier as a specific film spectator---on his or her construction as such by the U.S. military as an institution and by American World War II training films as reflexive media products. Through an emphasis on local practices of military film production and on individual strategies of documentary reception, I decenter the familiar emphasis on "great men" (such as John Huston, John Ford, and Frank Capra) and consider soldiers not as an undifferentiated mass but rather as members of a variegated social group. This dissertation shifts the discussion of military documentaries away from Hollywood and commercial exhibition, demonstrating that a single film studio, Warner Bros., was instrumental in helping to inaugurate (rather than, as is typically assumed, maintain) the military's training film program. Through close textual analyses of significant and heretofore unacknowledged World War II training films, I establish the parameters of their social projects and explore the extent to which they qualified then---and qualify now---as documentaries. As a social history, then, this dissertation shows the significance of documentary cinema for the vocation of soldiering, and vice versa. |
