scholarly journals The Coming of the Projectionettes

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Harrison

This article investigates women's roles as cinema projectionists, and transformations in women's spectatorship, in Britain during World War II. Between 1939 and 1945 the British Cinematograph Exhibitors' Association (CEA), among other organizations, encouraged women to train as projectionists when the government conscripted men into the armed forces. The “projectionettes” experienced unequal pay, often chaotic training programs, and patronizingly sexualized portrayals in contemporary press reports. Yet without women projectionists, British cinemas would not have been able to operate during the war. This essay traces their histories and daily working lives through archival materials and the trade press. Moreover, by situating their work in a broader narrative about gendered spectatorship, the article proposes that owing to changing labor conditions, women gained new perspectives through their experiences in the movie theater. Investigating women projectionists is a valuable strategy in a broader reexamination of British film exhibition, points of view, and the proliferation of “women's cinema” during wartime.

2021 ◽  
pp. 107-118
Author(s):  
N. Zaletok

Comparative studies on the experiences of female representatives of different countries in WWII remain relevant today. They not only deepen our understanding of the life of women at war, but also allow us to explore the power regimes of different states at one stage or another. After all, the government organized the activities of various groups of the population aimed at winning the war. Women were no exception in this respect, regardless of whether they worked in the rear or defended their homeland with weapons in hand. For centuries, the navy for the most part represented a purely masculine environment, and the presence of a woman on a ship was considered a bad omen. However, the scale of hostilities during the world wars and, as a consequence, the need for a constant supply of personnel to the armed forces made their adjustments – states began to gradually recruit women to serve in the navy. The article compares the experiences of Great Britain and the USSR in attracting women to serve in the navy during WWII. The countries were chosen not by chance, as they represent democracy and totalitarianism, respectively, and studying their practice of involving women in the navy can deepen our knowledge of these regimes. After analysing the experience of women’s service in the navy in 1939-1945, the author concludes that their recruitment to the navy in Great Britain took place through a special organization – the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS). Its personnel were trained mostly separately from men and then sent to military units of the navy. The USSR did not create separate women's organizations for this purpose; women served in the same bodies as men. The main purpose of mobilizing women to the navy in both the USSR and Great Britain was initially to replace men in positions on land to release the latter for service at sea. However, in both countries there were cases when women also served at sea. The range of positions available to them in the navy expanded during the war, and in the USSR reached its apogee in the form of admission of women to combat positions. In Great Britain, women in the navy did not officially perform combat roles, and there was a ban on them from using lethal weapons.


Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex examines how the American military has used cinema and related visual, sonic, and mobile technologies to further its varied aims. The essays in this book address the way cinema was put to work for purposes of training, orientation, record keeping, internal and external communication, propaganda, research and development, tactical analysis, surveillance, physical and mental health, recreation, and morale. The contributors examine the technologies and types of films that were produced and used in collaboration among the military, film industry, and technology manufacturers. The essays also explore the goals of the American state, which deployed the military and its unique modes of filmmaking, film exhibition, and film viewing to various ends. Together, the essays reveal the military’s deep investment in cinema, which began around World War I, expanded during World War II, continued during the Cold War (including wars in Korea and Vietnam), and still continues in the ongoing War on Terror.


1949 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 534-543 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sidney W. Souers

The National Security Council, created by the National Security Act of 1947, is the instrument through which the President obtains the collective advice of the appropriate officials of the executive branch concerning the integration of domestic, foreign, and military policies relating to the national security. An outline of the genesis of this new governmental agency will indicate in part its present rôle.Even before World War II, a few far-sighted men were seeking for a means of correlating our foreign policy with our military and economic capabilities. During the war, as military operations began to have an increasing political and economic effect, the pressure for such a correlation increased. It became apparent that the conduct of the war involved more than a purely military campaign to defeat the enemy's armed forces. Questions arose of war aims, of occupational policies, of relations with governments-in-exile and former enemy states, of the postwar international situation with its implications for our security, and of complicated international machinery.


Author(s):  
MILAN KOLJANIN ◽  
DRAGICA KOLJANIN

There are various doubts and ambiguities regarding the dispatch of the memorandum by the Government of the Independent State of Croatia (ISC) to the Western Allies asking for military intervention in early May 1945, giving rise to different interpretations in historiography. These varying interpretations are related to the circumstances of the dispatch of the memorandum, its text, the actions of prominent representatives of the Ustasha government, relations between the new Yugoslav authorities and Western allies, especially the British and the role of Archbishop Stepinac and the Holy See in the ISC. In order to understand the memorandum, it is necessary to consider the most important political and military circumstances at the end of World War II in Yugoslavia, especially the politics of the new Yugoslavia and the Western powers, primarily the British. The representatives of the Holy See in the ISC and the Archbishop of Zagreb, Alojzije Stepinac, played an important role in efforts to preserve the Ustasha state. This paper was written based on unpublished and published archival sources and relevant historiographical literature.


2013 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 55-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niklas Foxeus

The achievement of independence in 1948 was in many ways a watershed in Burma’s history. At this time, a variety of Buddhist movements emerged that were part not only of a ‘Burmese Buddhist revival’, in which even the government was involved, but also a general re-enchantment of Asia. In the period following World War II, projects of nation-building and further modernization were implemented in many newly independent Asian nation states. The theories of modernization adopted by the rulers had presupposed that a new, rationalized and secularized order that had set them on the path of ‘progress’ would entail a decline of religion. However, instead there was a widespread resurgence of religion, and a variety of new, eclectic religious movements emerged in Southeast Asia. In the thriving religious field of postcolonial Burma, two lay Buddhist movements associated with two different meditation techniques emerged, viz.; the insight meditation movement and the concentration meditation movement. The latter consisted of a variety of esoteric congregations combining concentration meditation with esoteric lore, and some of these were characterized by fundamentalist trends. At the same time, the supermundane form of Buddhism became increasingly influential in the entire field of religion. The aim of the present article is to discuss how this supermundane dimension has reshaped the complex religious field in Burma, with particular emphasis on the esoteric congregations; to present the Burmese form of esoteric Theravāda Buddhism, and to situate the fundamentalist trends which are present in these contexts.


2018 ◽  
pp. 130-138
Author(s):  
Volodymyr Chornyi

The article analyses one of the most grievous chapters in the history of Ukrainian nation – the Great Famine (Holodomor) of 1932–1933. It is referred to the massive famine that was deliberately organized by the Soviet authorities, which led to many millions hu-man losses in the rural area in the territory of the Ukrainian SSR and Kuban. Planned confiscation of grain crops and other food products from villagers by the representatives of the Soviet authorities led to a multimillion hunger massacre of people in rural area. At the same time, the Soviet government had significant reserves of grain in warehouses and exported it abroad, since without collectivization and Ukrainian bread it was impossible to launch the industrialization that demanded Ukrainian grain to be contributed to foreigners in return for their assistance. Ukrainian grain turned into currency. The authorities of that time refused to accept foreign assistance for starving people and simultaneously banned and blocked their leaving outside the Ukrainian SSR. The so-called “barrier troops” were organized in order to prevent hungry people from flee to the freedom and not let anyone enter the starving area. The situation is characterized by the fact that the idea and practice of barrier troops tested on Ukrainians were lately used on the battlefields of the World War II. Among three Holodomors, the government did not conceal only the first one (1921–1922), as it could be blamed on the tsarist regime that brought the villagers to the poverty, and post-war devastation. The famine of 1946–1947 was silenced, but the population generally perceived it as a clear consequence of two horrendous misfortunes – the World War II and dreadful drought. Especially rigid was position of the government regarding the very fact of genocide in 1933–1933 not only its scale. The author emphasizes that the Great Famine is refused to be admitted not because it was unreal but to avoid the assessment of its special direction against Ukraine and Ukrainian nation, saying instead that it affected the fate of all nations. The article describes the renovation of internal passports system and the obligatory registration at a certain address that took place in the USSR in 1932. Decree of the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR stipulated the fact that people living in rural areas should not obtain passports. Therefore, collective farmers of the Ukrainian SSR actually did not obtain passports. The villagers were forbidden to leave collective farms without signed agreement with the employer, that deprived them of the right to free movement. Even after the introduction of labour books the collective farmers did not obtain them either. The author describes the destruction of the collective farms system that his parents dedicated their entire labour life to. Instead of preserving productive forces, material and technical base and introducing new forms of agrarian sector management and the whole society to the development path, this system has been thoughtlessly destroying and plundering. Keywords: Holodomor, Ukrainian villagers, collectivization, genocide, confiscation, barrier troops.


2006 ◽  
pp. 253-270
Author(s):  
Jovan Ilic

The Serbs are first mentioned in the west part of the Balkan peninsula in 822. They populated the regions east of the river Cetina, mountain Pljesevica and the area between the rivers Una and Kupa. It means that the significant part of the present Republic of Croatia had been populated by the Serbs since the settlement of the Slavs. The main regions mostly populated by the Serbs were north-west Dalmatia, the larger part of Lika and Kordun, Banija, west Slavonia and smaller sections in east Slavonia, west Srem and Baranya. Social-political circumstances for the life of the Serbs in Croatia were mostly very unfavorable. Extremely unfavourable circumstances were during World War II in The Independent State of Croatia, when the Croatian ustasha fighters carried out an extensive, systematic, comprehensive and bestial genocide, that is ethnocide over the Serbs. The second genocide, that is ethnocide over the Serbs in Croatia was carried out in the civil ethnic-religious war 1991-1995, specially in 1995. In these years, the nationalist- chauvinist, antiserbian movement and war suddenly flared up in Croatia. The Serbs living there were forced to defend, so on December 19 1991 they proclaimed The Republic of Srpska Krajina. However, the Croatian armed forces were military stronger. The Serbs were defeated and punished by the total destruction of their property and mass expulsion. In that cruel civil-ethnic war, about 276.000 Serbs were expelled from Croatia, several thousand of them were killed. About 40.000 Serbian houses were destroyed and 380 Serbian villages were burnt. Hundreds of Serbian-Orthodox religious edifices were burnt or destroyed. The value of the destroyed or plundered Serbian property in Croatia was estimated at about 30 billion euros. According to the official Croatian data, in the last several years about 60.000 Serbs-refugees returned from Serbia to their native land, mostly older persons or those who returned to sell their property and leave Croatia again. About 40.000 of them went to live abroad. However, the Serbs-returnees still live in very difficult conditions, discriminated in all segments of life primarily when it comes to employment.


Author(s):  
Andrew Preston

Assessing the application of the liberal consensus idea to postwar foreign policy, this chapter contends that myths about the bipartisan spirit of U.S. foreign policy have too long found ready acceptance from historians. Politics did not stop at the water’s edge, even when bipartisanship was at its supposed zenith during World War II and the early Cold War. While there was unanimity during the post-war era that the growth of international communism was a threat to U.S. interests, this did not mean that foreign policy was free of political conflict, and partisan charges that the government of the day was losing the Cold War were commonplace. Meanwhile, non-elite opinion evinced little support for confrontation with the main Communist powers, reluctance to engage in another land war like Korea, and concern about survival in the nuclear era. The divisiveness wrought by Vietnam was supposed to have brought an end to the “Cold War consensus,” but uncertainty over its meaning was evident well before this.


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