Time and again the media re-portray historic events, perhaps World War II more than any other. In the years following the end of the Second World War an enormous amount of movies and television series have been focused on the war. Their content was vastly varied covering all aspects of the battles fought on the land, air and sea. However, as the stories of the war are retold or created, we lose or obscure part of the truth of the war, which is what I wanted to explore by contrasting media representations of WWII and a primary source from the war. For the primary source I selected the recording of President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressing a joint session of Congress the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. This extraordinarily powerful speech perfectly addressed the mourning nation and quieted their fears while simultaneously encouraging the nation to find their strength to bring the fight to the Japanese.

Contrasting this I have sound clips appropriated from a varied landscape of World War 2 media portrayals. This included musical elements such as the theme from the Steve McQueen movie “The Great Escape” and the defiant whistling of British P.O.W.s from “The Bridge at River Kwai.” Piercing these layers are the dramatized explosions and gunshots from shows and movies such as “Saving Private Ryan,””Tora! Tora! Tora!” “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific.”

While these movies represent the battlefronts of World War 2 I also wanted to utilize other movies that contained plots that were related to, but not directly representing in entirety, the war. To do this I took snippets from a movie about women playing baseball, “A League of Their Own,” and the musical “The Sound of Music.” I wanted to include these to represent the range of media inspired by the war and how playing them at the same time would sound a bit absurd. On the matter of absurd, I wanted to include the Quentin Tarantino film “Inglourious Basterds” to illustrate how historical fiction is very much a part of the media surrounding every major conflict, in some way or another.

As for creating the piece, I utilized my DJ software and equipment in order create a live recording of all of these elements. Parts of the recording were planned but for the most part the piece was improvised and could never be performed the exact same way. In addition to giving the recording a sense of chaos it allowed me loop sections of individual tracks and apply effects to various tracks and the same or different times. This often has surprising and unexpected results as in the instance where the phrase “dastardly attack” begins to sound like “bastardly attack” when looped