Re-presenting war

Abstract

This article examines a cycle of British drama-documentaries about the Second World War broadcast in 2004-5: Dunkirk, D-Day, When Hitler Invaded Britain D-Day to Berlin and Blitz: London's Firestorm. It places these films in the context of the drama-documentary tradition in British film and television; it considers the institutional and cultural contexts of their production; it analyses their formal properties, especially their combination of actuality film with dramatic reconstruction; and it examines the extent to which they offer a revisionist perspective on the British historical experience of the Second World War. The article argues that these films represent a significant new direction for representing history on television.