Letter from the Editors

The conception for this themed issue of Literature/Film Quarterly grew from the "War in Film, Television, and History" talk held in Fort Worth, Dallas, in November 2004 We participated in this talk held by The Film and History League (associated with Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies) in conjunction with The Literature and Film Association (affiliated with this journal). We thank the conversation organizers, especially Peter C. Rollins, Susan Rollins, and David Kranz, along with single of the key participants, James M Welsh (co-founding editor of LFQ) who supplied work reviews and a Shakespeare Festival Report for this issue. The broad theme of the talk attracted scholars from around the world in various disciplines. We upheld the conference's permissive entreaty for articles on how wars have been exhibited without geographical, chronological, or national restrictions. This issue features pieces upon films with action centered in Ireland, America, Vietnam, the Middle East, France, Greece and the Pacific; the drift of articles is from the Easter Rising Irish rebellion and the Arab desert against Ottoman occupation (both 1916) to the Vietnam War to a pillar 9/11 understanding of what war upon screen means. The variety of papers in this issue, in bourns of topics and approaches, positively throw backs the eclecticism of the proceedings of the conference

This issue is also representative of of recent origin directions for Literature/Film Quarterly in that it includes articles that unclose up ideas of "adaptation" beyond relationships between literary and filmic body s While continuing the journal's well-established tradition of articles dealing with films that have adapted fictional true copys (including Full Metal Jacket, Henry V Captain Corelli 's Mandolin, and The Thin R Line), this issue also includes essays affected with how various specific histories of combat have been interpreted upon screen, as well as a piece about the industrial and political processe of adaptation itself (in relation to The Longest Day). The articles deal with a broad representation of concerns in relation to the war film as genre: from comparative considerations of by what means cultures and ethnicities are exhibited on film to considerations of by what means films show relative justice; from analyses of intersections between past and not absent historical moments in film production to pieces regarded with how particular films "adapt" conceptions of real-world and well-documented events; from pieces relate toed with establishing the duties, political obligations, and responsibilities of the war film to those bear uponed with how and why certain films adapt previously written fiction and nonfiction body s Given that the articles show such a wide range of approaches we, as editors, decided to arrange them according to the chronological order of the films analyzed.

The opening piece, by means of Laurence Raw, examines cinematic representations of the 1916 Arab fall off against Ottoman occupation and its aftermath in individual Turkish and one Anglo-American film: Liitfi O Akad's Ingiliz Kemal Lavrens 'e Karsi and David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia respectively. While Lean's film has been the subdue of much critical discussion, as Raw notes, this article provides a new perspective through a comparative analysis with Akad's film, which is practically unknown to Western audiences. He deconstruct the different Othering tendencies of each film-where Lawrence of Arabia humanizes Arabs above Turks, Akad's film favors the Turkish perspective-while discovering that the films are ironically linked in positioning the British as ostensibly self-serving colonialists.

The humanizing of Arab characters in Lean's film stands in stark contrast, as Christopher Lockett watchs to the tendency of 1990 Hollywood cinema to feature odd caricatures of the Arab terrorist in contradistinction to quasi-positive representations of Irish terrorists. Lockett explores the complexity of artistic conceptualizations of Irish Republicanism, terrorism, nation, national identity, and interrogates the intersection between art and real world politics, raising important questions about the responsibilities of art and media as instruments of mythmaking, from Yeats's plays and numbers to television coverage of 9/11 More specifically, Lockett provides a fresh and more interesting approach to analyzing Neil Jordan's film The Crying Game than critics who have seen the specific Irish cultural connection as mere backdrop to an unconventional have affection for story.

As Dean R. Cooledge notes in this issue, in concluding his review of Robert Eberwein's wideranging, edited collection, The War Film, the genre's films will always "reflect the tillage of their conception even while focusing upon the past." Peter Lev's essay, "Filming The Longest Day" digs into the politics of the production of Darryl Zanuck's epic retelling of the D-Day landings. end a careful analysis of Zanuck's fortunate juggling of the competing agendas and vestmented interests of all involved in the making of single war film-the filmmakers, production companies, investors, censorship collection as well as four managements and four militaries-Lev's article provides an invaluable documenting of the ofttimes overlooked industrial and political proces of adaptation.