Siegfried Kracauer wrote that ‘the films of a nation reflect its mentality’ (2004: 5). He considered that the collective nature of film was crucial in this. His contention that ‘films are never the product of an individual’ (2004: 5) but instead are organic, collaborative projects referred both to the production processes of films and to their ultimate audiences. Pervading a film's narratives and visuals, ‘the “unseen dynamics of human relations” are more or less characteristic of the inner life of the nation from which the films emerge’ (Kracauer 2004: 7). This suggestion that society's collective attitudes operate at more or less unconscious levels and that film is one of the strongest cultural means of unveiling our innate ‘psychological dispositions’ (2004: 6) echoes strongly the thread running through this book: that images of war in Dutch films reveal facets of society's changing attitudes from the times the films were made whether society wants them to or not. My focus on shifts in cultural (specifically, filmic) representations of these communal undertows—about the enemy, national identity, the hardships of occupation, the persecution of Dutch Jews, and resistance and collaboration—over the arc of the films’ production eras, distinguishes my work from “peri”-conflict research addressing films made during the occupation years, or contemporary (wartime) personal journals and accounts.

My aim in this chapter, and the three that follow, is to analyse Dutch feature films about the war according to one key theme per chapter, interpreting textual instances of, in this case, images of the enemy, with films discussed in chronological order. Working chronologically helps to illuminate patterns of change in a theme over time. Zooming in on selected film scenes or ‘snapshots’ for detailed analysis allows us to better identify shifts in the depiction of these aspects of the occupation. The visual and aural evidence identified can be considered in terms of its reflection—or refraction—of parallel shifts in Dutch society's attitudes to the war. This allows for an interpretation of the films in terms of what they might reveal about myths surrounding the occupation, remembrance and forgetting of the war, and the drive towards re-writing the past in film.