British Feature Films and the Second World War

As soon as film began to be taken seriously by a small number of historians, a major part of their attention from the beginning was given over to the events and immediate antecedents of the Second World War. The film record of this war is at present the most complete body of visual source material of the war and the postwar reaction to it. This article aims to explain how film became so prolific during this period and how the medium came to comprise such a large volume of evidence still in existence about World War II. The article also considers historically some of the feature films produced in Britain during the Second World War.