ABSTRACT
A scene in the 2008 Norwegian war film Max Manus (Rønning and Sandberg 2008) shows a group of civilians lined up in front of a firing squad. They are to be shot as part of a Nazi retaliation for sabotage actions performed by Norwegian resistance fighters. The shots are fired, and the bodies of the men, all young, slump to the ground. The scene is short, brutal, and can at first appear to be a generic execution scene. However, the site of the execution bears striking similarities to the location of a memorial commemorating just these forms of war-time killings. Through these images, the film evokes a site already invested with a specific symbolism, anchored in civic religion and the larger commemorative context. The scene of the young men being lined up and shot, while powerful in its own right, is thereby conscripted into a memorial field whose iconography spans wider than the specific film the scene pertains to.
