When honoring the fallen this Remembrance Day, don’t be shocked if gung-ho images of a Hollywood war movie spring to mind.

“A lot of the images that we have of effective combat or camaraderie established during the war come from the cinema,” said University of Toronto Cinema Studies Director Charlie Keil.  “There was a direct alliance between the film industry and the government.”

When the Office of War Information formed in 1942, Hollywood coordinated closely with the government department in order to keep a struggling film industry afloat by recording and propagating the Second World War. As such, rallying movies like Bataan (1943) or the Howard Hawks-directed hit, Air Force (1943) popularized images of heroic GIs fighting the good fight.

“The war wasn’t fought on American soil,” explained Keil.  “So it was necessary to really show the Americans what they were fighting for.”

Hollywood’s role doesn’t end there, however. History is full of anti-war films like All Quiet on the Western Front, Bridge on the River Kwai and Apocalypse Now. But interestingly, these “message” movies were all produced during peacetime.

“When it’s clear that its necessary to support the war, then there are supporting-the-forces kinds of films,” said Keil. “When there’s some distance from the war, there tend to be pacifist films.”

Which cinematic example best tributes the brave soldier is debatable, but Keil suggests that Jean Renoir’s The Grand Illusion (1937) perhaps fittingly captures the complexity of memorializing war.

 ”It doesn’t engage in easy ‘us-versus-them’ dichotomies,” said Keil of Renoir’s drama about the commonality between prisoners of war and their captors. “It’s more about (our) frailties and, in a way, we decide from our perspective who the enemy is and who the heroes are.”