In Film and Television After 9/11, editor Wheeler Winston Dixon and eleven other distinguished film scholars discuss the production, reception, and distribution of Hollywood and foreign films after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and examine how moviemaking has changed to reflect the new world climate.

While some contemporary films offer escapism, much of mainstream American cinema since 9/11 is centered on the desire for a “just war” in which military reprisals and escalation of warfare appear to be both inevitable and justified. Films of 2002 such as Black Hawk Down, Collateral Damage, and We Were Soldiers demonstrate a renewed audience appetite for narratives of conflict, reminiscent of the wave of filmmaking that surrounded American involvement in World War II.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon galvanized the American public initially, yet film critics wonder how this will play out over time. Film and Television After 9/11 is the first book to provide original insights into topics ranging from the international reception of post-9/11 American cinema, re-viewing films of our shared cinematic past in light of the attacks, and exploring parallels between post-9/11 cinema and World War II-era productions.

“[A] vital anthology. . . . Uniformly excellent, the informed, closely argued, and clearly written essays collected here demonstrate how popular films reflect not just the open issues of their day but its sunken anxieties. . . . Essential [for] all levels.”

—Choice

“Film and Television After 9/11 contributes to a new understanding both of recent American film and our reaction, as a culture, to the events of 9/11. The contributors consider the question of how these very real events were at the same time media spectacles subject to deliberate reconstruction and ideological slanting, and how this spectacle resonated throughout American culture.”

—Steven Shaviro, author of The Cinematic Body and Doom Patrols