In my work The United States goes to war. Hollywood and the Great War (1915-1997), I try to make an approximation about the image of North America and its inhabitants, through the fiction films that deal with the First World War. I decided on this subject, because in our historiography said subject is almost nonexistent, so it would come to fill a small space.
This research is also a work in the path of the use of films as a historical document, a field in which the Universitat de Barcelona is a pioneer in our country. Finally, the work would fill a small personal aspiration, by combining my two passions, film and history, dealing with an unusual topic in Spanish historiography, the Great War.
By way of conclusion, the films played a very important role in the awareness of the Americans on the eve of their intervention in the first world conflict. These films faithfully reflected what the public wanted, and not what happened in Europe. If it had been like that, would so many volunteers have enlisted?
On the other hand, the films examined offer a portrait of North America and its citizens, just as they do the same with Europe. The Old Continent and its inhabitants will be portrayed by Hollywood cameras, to bring it closer to the American public. It will be a bucolic place, unreal, sometimes fantastic and rarely infernal, as it should be in 1914-18. Hell is brought by the Prussians, or the Austrians. The United States and its soldiers have a clear mission, to restore order and to bring to Europe democracy and good government, absent in a continent populated by monarchs and regimes of dubious reputation.
The war helped Hollywood and Hollywood helped the war. Without the film Mecca, the American government could have done little to influence the American population; and without the war, Hollywood would not have reached such high levels of success and the hegemonic position it still holds in our days.
