Postheroic frames of war in 21st-century European cinema: The Case of The Grey War (Szürke Senkik,2016)

Abstract

This article explores recent shifts in the cinematic representation of war, with a special focus on 21st-century changes in notions of heroism, heroic narratives and heroic masculinities through analysis of the Hungarian film The Grey War (Szürke Senkik, dir. István Kocsis, 2016). The article’s starting point is the recognition that war films are parts of complex entanglements of power, popular imagination, mediatized cultural mythologies, ideology, specific cinematic traditions, concepts of heroism and formations of masculinity. Therefore, the article puts The Grey War in the context of the pacifist trends of European memory politics, highlighting its influence with the help of Thomas Elsaesser’s (2019) theorization of postheroic narratives in European Cinema and Continental Philosophy: Film as Thought Experiment, Kaja Silverman’s (2017) concept of de-idealized male characters in Male Subjectivity at the Margins and Steve Rose’s (2020) notion of the 21st-century pacifist war film in his Guardian article ‘Peace in our time: Why “pacifist war movies” such as 1917’ are on the march. In order to indicate how the Hungarian film relates to these changing international trends in the cinematic representations of war, the article compares The Grey War with the three film adaptations of Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front.