ABSTRACT
This chapter explores two war films that were produced in the post-war period in Norway and Britain, Arne Scouen’s Ni Liv of 1957 and Charles Frend’s The Cruel Sea. It seeks to develop ways of thinking about male subjectivity, memory and war trauma in the context of different national frames of story-telling. The chapter focuses on the complex ways in which war-narratives both approach and disavow such fraught problems and discusses the two films’ explorations of male subjectivity and trauma. A striking example of this is evidenced in the controversial psychiatric work of William Sargant who, in Britain during the Second World War, endeavoured to establish the most efficient programme possible for curing servicemen suffering from war neurosis. Cross-cutting between close-ups of Captain Ericson’s face and the pipes, the sequence enacts a repetition of the original event, transposing the sounds of screaming and yelling on to the present scene.
