De laatste voordracht in Ieper in het kader van de reeks ‘open seminars’, een samenwerking tussen het IFFM en de University of Kent, vindt plaats op 11/02/2016.

Zoals steeds is de  inkom gratis, moet niet vooraf worden ingeschreven en is de voertaal Engels. Deze laatste lezing heeft het over de films War Nurse en The Mad Parade, die gebaseerd waren op het werk van Mary Borden en andere getuigenissen van verpleegsters uit de Eerste Wereldoorlog. Dit is een mooi opstapje naar De Geschreven Oorlog, de tijdelijke tentoonstelling die dit najaar loopt in het In Flanders Fields Museum.
 
Donderdag 11 februari, conferentiezaal van het stadhuis van Ieper (Grote Markt 34), 20u15
Dr. Michael Hammond (University of Southampton – Department of Film Studies)
Forbidden Zones: War Nurses in Hollywood 1931-32 

In 1929 Mary Borden published The Forbidden Zone, a book of poems and short stories drawn from her experiences as a volunteer nurse with the French Army. The title referred to ‘the strip of land immediately behind the zone of fire’ where she worked. In 1930 Rebecca West wrote four monthly instalments for Cosmopolitan about her experiences as a nurse on the Western front under the title "War Nurse: An American Woman on the Western Front”. This popular series drew the attention of MGM’s Irving Thalberg and resulted in War Nurse, released in November of 1930. The following year another war nurse film, The Mad Parade, was produced by minor production company Liberty. Both films were scenarios based on the experiences of frontline nurses adapted and/or written by women. This paper will examine the particular challenges that war subjects presented for these scriptwriters both in terms of their representation of the horrors of war, and in terms of the cultural myths which circulated in this period around the role nurses played (or were supposed to have played) during the war.