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The chapter provides a close reading of the material world captured in Eileen Chang's writings from the war period. Noting the conspicuous lack of scholarly attention to Chang's culture connection with Japan, the chapter begins by asking and answering some basic questions: Is there a place for Japan and things Japanese in Chang's literary order? How do things Japanese feature? What position do Japan and things Japanese occupy in Chang's cultural imagination? Working through a range of cultural genres including photography, fashion, graphic design, poetry, and film, the chapter re-situates Chang in her own time, highlights wartime politics as the condition of her rise to fame, and defines the unique style of Chang's writing as closely intertwined with a vibrant transnational popular culture through war and occupation.

The early 1940s constitute the third of the three periods that are especially productive and revelatory in terms of “lost and found” Hitchcock material. After moving from Britain to Hollywood in early 1939 for good career reasons, Hitchcock was torn, on the outbreak of war in Europe, between his wish to return to support his relatives and his native film industry, and his wish to stay on and use the greater resources of Hollywood to support the anti-Nazi cause. This chapter analyses the wide range of short-film propaganda that he worked on in the margins of his early Hollywood features, both in the United States and during return visits to Britain. Once again, it highlights new material (versions of some British documentaries re-edited by Hitchcock for U.S. distribution; a War Bonds appeal shown nationwide in U.S. cinemas) while also engaging in fresh detail with films already in circulation, notably the two films he came to Britain to make in 1944 in support of the French Resistance. A combination of oral history interviews, archival documents, and close analysis enables fresh light to be shed on these important films of their historical moment.

This chapter recontextualizes the most important picaresque character of the twentieth century: Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. In the wartime picaresque, unheroic, everyday soldiers are either ground up by the infernal machine of the war or they serve as monkey wrenches that temporarily stop the gears of the machine. Long before The Great Dictator, Chaplin disrupted the destruction of war by sending his “little fellow” to the front lines in Shoulder Arms (1918). Charlot, as the French called him, is skilled in the arts of Le Système D. His resourcefulness, joviality, and expertise in bricolage were traits French critics admired in Charlot and to which they pointed in their efforts to nationalize him. The Little Tramp resembles a long line of heroes “in spite of themselves” who never fail to do their duty, even as they try their best to save their precious hides. The Tramp as reluctant infantryman in Shoulder Arms celebrates life and asserts his limited personal freedom through the tremendous vitality of his gags. In Chaplin’s films the picaresque arts of survival are depicted at their most whimsical and creative, suggesting a re-enchantment of the war-weary modern world through the new medium of cinema.