Mobilizing Music in Wartime British Film

In Mobilizing Music in Wartime British Film, author Heather Wiebe traces a preoccupation with art music and total war that animated British films of the 1940s. In acclaimed films such as The Red Shoes and Brief Encounter as well as experimental documentaries, colonial propaganda films, and largely forgotten melodramas, music was persistently given a central role in the action. As this book demonstrates, these films were driven by questions around the efficacy of art music, not just in the conventional sense of uplift or morale-building, but as a sonic force acting on bodies, minds, and materials, and as a resource to be mobilized or demobilized. Wiebe explores what these films tell us about the experience of World War Two, but also about more contemporary pressures on the arts to be useful and productive. In their concerns with music and wartime life away from the battle front, these films offer insight into the affective experience of war: not just as violence and trauma, but as everyday boredom and melancholy, as loneliness, helplessness, and disappointment. Most of all, they show how music was used to test the limits of "total war," and to conceptualize its new reach into all corners of life