[vundercind]

Veeery interesting. After realizing that Tora, Tora, Tora! and Midway might make a good double-feature (I tried it, and, they do!) it occurred to me that it might be possible to assemble a film-based curriculum to teach a great deal of the history of roughly 1933-1948, covering the lead-up to and immediate aftermath of the war, in a way that's entertaining while being more informative than misleading. There are thousands of films covering the time period from dozens of countries, and lots of those stick reasonably close to historical events, so it might work out.

The hard part, I think, would be tracking down films that give a good sense of the causes and course of more-obscure things like Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. You'd need to find two or three good films on that. Spanish civil war? The invasion and occupation of Poland? The political maneuvering between the Nazis and Soviets before they went to war with one another? The Winter War? These have to be covered by a few films that could act to "teach" the events, but I don't know what those films are and bet most are non-English and not well-known in English, making them harder (for me) to track down.

[ww2supercut]

This could work for World War II since there's so many movies, but even so a bunch of events aren't covered. I also created this spreadsheet of films with their time periods and events covered. It's not exhaustive by any means though, and new ones are coming out constantly.

[mordechai9000]

The first English language film that comes to mind for the Spanish civil war is For Whom the Bell Tolls. It's been a while, but I don't think it has much discourse about the causes or the background for the war - but films often treat those subjects either as assumed background information the audience already has, or as something that is not needed to identify with the characters and enjoy the narrative.

So you could use it, but it would need to be accompanied by supplemental factual materials. But I think that is true of many, if not most, non-documentary popular war films.

[briandear]

Interestingly, a curated collection of films in my opinion is much better than relying on a few history books that, under the cover of being "academic," are considered "authoritative," but, in fact -- there are a lot of facets that aren't easily reconciled. While film simply embraces the ambiguity (meaning a collection of films all telling the story from slightly different viewpoints is a lot better than a single textbook that might be authoritative, but also suffers from the point of view of the writer.

Here is an interesting article on the debate over when WWII actually began (this illustrates my point as "The Invasion of Poland" is often used at the "starting point" of WWII, when that is probably out of academic convenience rather than being factually correct (it's hard to say precisely when WWII began.) https://english.elpais.com/culture/2023-09-11/what-if-all-th...