There is a shape to the history of war films, and a set of directorial choices which have changed over time. War cinema realism is a style of filmmaking which enables a viewer to leave behind the knowledge that the violence and destruction are staged and accept while watching it that the film is portraying war as it actually is. In contrast, war cinema indirection is a style of filmmaking which never lets the viewer leave behind the knowledge that the violence and destruction on screen are staged, and never lets the viewer accept the illusion while watching it, that the film is portraying war “as it actually is.” The spectacle of war has become less dominant in cinematography than the pathos of victimhood.

Jay Winter is Charles J. Stille Professor of history at Yale University. He came to Yale from the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History; Remembering War and Dreams of Peace and Freedom. He received an Emmy for ‘The Great War and the shaping of the twentieth century ,’ broadcast on PBS and the BBC. He is one of the founders of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, the international museum of World War I. He is editor-in-chief of the Cambridge History of the First World War, to be published in 2014.

• November 15: K. Scott Wong - Americans First: Chinese Americans and the Second World War