Remembered/Replayed

Cinema, as a mass-medium, responds to, reflects upon and explores central issues of popular experience and consciousness. As Nicholas Pronay says in his survey of films relating to the Second World War made in Britain during the post-war era, cinema may have offered ‘ways to tackle deeper problems without direct pain … in the aftermath of a major war and especially of a total war which involved most people directly in some form or another’. ¹ This chapter explores two war films that were produced in the post-war period in Norway and Britain, Arne Scouen's Ni Liv (Nine Lives) of 1957 and Charles Frend's The Cruel Sea (1953). Taking this dual focus, I seek to develop ways of thinking about male subjectivity, memory and war trauma in the context of different national frames of story-telling