Block Cinema

Day for Night Magazine

Editor's Note: Day for Night / Winter 2009

By ADAM DORSKY, Editor-in-Chief

In 2004, the Bush Administration attempted to rename the “War on Terror” “The Long War.” Officials at the time felt that the conflict, which could potentially drag on for more than a decade, was in need of a new brand. The experiment was short-lived, but it highlighted a problem American presidents have had for centuries: how to keep America’s spirits up during a long, protracted battle. With the rise of mass communications, film has become one of America’s stalwart allies in helping us deal with, understand, and sometimes exploit international conflict.

Here at DAY FOR NIGHT, we took a look at how film both represented and affected the way American culture experienced another “long war,” World War II. Whether through explicitly ethnocentric cartoons, propagandist dramas, or haunting anti-war portraits, film, as a growing art form and industry, played a central role in shaping perceptions and attitudes toward the war.

This issue, we invite you to join our writers as they reflect on a wide variety of topics, from World War II propaganda films to Sydney Pollack’s career as an actor and filmmaker. Given the ubiquity of film today, we may often overlook how this powerful medium can shape our own perceptions and attitudes; perhaps it can even offer us a new way of looking at our own world.

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	Day for Night Magazine Editor's Note: Day for Night / Winter 2009 By ADAM DORSKY, Editor-in-Chief In 2004, the Bush Administration attempted to rename the “War on Terror” “The Long War.” Officials at the time felt that the conflict, which could potentially drag on for more than a decade, was in need of a new brand. The experiment was short-lived, but it highlighted a problem American presidents have had for centuries: how to keep America’s spirits up during a long, protracted battle. With the rise of mass communications, film has become one of America’s stalwart allies in helping us deal with, understand, and sometimes exploit international conflict. Here at DAY FOR NIGHT, we took a look at how film both represented and affected the way American culture experienced another “long war,” World War II. Whether through explicitly ethnocentric cartoons, propagandist dramas, or haunting anti-war portraits, film, as a growing art form and industry, played a central role in shaping perceptions and attitudes toward the war. This issue, we invite you to join our writers as they reflect on a wide variety of topics, from World War II propaganda films to Sydney Pollack’s career as an actor and filmmaker. Given the ubiquity of film today, we may often overlook how this powerful medium can shape our own perceptions and attitudes; perhaps it can even offer us a new way of looking at our own world.