ABSTRACT
Rankin analyzes the process by which Owen Crump’s Cease Fire became through the transposition of cinema an inadvertent memorial to the fighting men in America’s ʻforgotten war’ – Korea. Explicating Crump’s attempt to give a face to a war that was already in the process of being forgotten, Rankin reveals the lengths to which the director was prepared to go in order to create an aesthetic of documentary realism. Shot on location in Korea (unlike every other Hollywood take on Korean War), it was the first feature-length Hollywood war film to be filmed in an active theater of operations. Yet, what makes Cease Fire unique, Rankin argues, is that Crump fostered a convincing aesthetic of realism by both using genuine military equipment and employing real soldiers to play the characters of the film. In filming on location with real equipment and military personnel, Crump, Rankin shows, created an unduplicatable time capsule of the war in its last months, one which functions as an inadvertent ‘war memorial’ for specific soldiers fighting a specific war in a specific place and time.
