Mobilizing Music in Wartime British Film

Abstract Mobilizing Music in Wartime British Film traces a preoccupation with art music and total war that animates 1940s British films. From acclaimed films such as The Red Shoes and Brief Encounter to experimental documentaries, colonial propaganda films, and largely forgotten melodramas, music was persistently given a central role in the action. These films are 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—as a resource to be mobilized or demobilized. Their elaborations of these questions have much to tell us about World War Two Britain, but they also speak to issues around the efficacy of music more broadly, and to more contemporary pressures on the arts to be useful and productive. In their concerns with music and wartime life away from the battlefront, these films offer insight into the affective experience of war—not just as violence and trauma, but also 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.