The Postwar Cinema of Loss and Healing

Explore the mythic imagination, our cultural history, and the language of film through clips from classic movies produced immediately after World War II. A remarkable array of movie masterworks were released in 1946, in the immediate aftermath of World War II. In response to the profound emotional, moral, and physical reverberations of the war, the cinematic imagination went into overdrive – covering the gamut from gritty realism to fantastic allegory, telling tales of initiatory descent, transformation, and renewal, invoking archetype and myth across genre and style. With an eye to the power of movies as collective post-war medicine, we’ll study and discuss pivotal film scenes with motifs of traumatic loss and healing. In this multimedia lecture, we’ll explore the mythic imagination, our cultural history, and the language of film through clips from 1946 classics by legendary auteur directors: Jean Cocteau, Michael Powell, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Orson Welles, William Wyler, and Frank Capra.