How important is realism

How important is realism in constructing the narrative of Steven Spielberg’s Band of Brothers?
The television series Band of Brothers is the story of Easy Company of the US Army Airborne Paratrooper Division and their mission in WW II France during Operation Overload. Like any other war/anti war series, it represents the horror and heartbreak of war. Common generic conventions of war series are POW camp experiences, submarine warfare, espionage, heroism, air dog fights, tough trench/infantry experiences, and in the majority of episodes of the ten hour series, they represent one of more of these elements.
The iconography of Band Of Brothers such as the wartime music, 1940s clothes and uniform, German and American tanks and war time weapons, the majority being originals dating back to 1939, all reinforce the idea or realism and help associate it to the war genre. A number of war films are actually historical epics, authentic attempts to recreate the experience of war on screen, rather than pure war films. War films as a major film genre emerged after the outbreak of World War I. A number of films were produced to inspire anti-German feeling in the US-one of the first to portray the atrocities of the enemy was ‘The Battle Cry

The television series Band of Brothers has a massive emphasis on the representation of American soldiers. Based on a book by Stephen E. Ambrose named ‘Band of Brothers, its narrative describes the experiences of members of an elite company from their start as raw recruits to battle hardened soldiers, and tells it from a very personal point of view. In the television series there is a reoccurring format, every episode having a lead character where the audience sees the war from their point of view. This way the audience gets to see very different representations. Recent war films such as Saving Private Ryan and also in the television series ‘Band Of Brothers’ have a mixture of races represented. Motion pictures reflect not simply the state of cinema but also the nature of their creators and the culture in which they are made. Thus is not surprising that war films, like other film genres, often have variations in different times and places. Janine Basinger, author of ‘The World War Two Combat Film: Anatomy Of Genre’, reveals among other details how Hollywood invented the squad or other military team which was supposed to reflect American ethnic and regional diversity; the wise cracker from Brooklyn to drawling Southerner and the Midwestern farm boy, the Protestant, the Catholic and the Jewish American. These are all common representations of the US Army in the 1940’s and this concept of variation of races is seen in Band Of Brothers and primarily in Saving Private Ryan. However, black people were not represented. On both occasions Spielberg took a realistic approach by not using black soldiers because during the 1940’s, American society segregated black people and so there were few mixed regiments, if not any. Nevertheless, black soldiers were an important source of man power for the armed forces in World War II but were all put into all black regiments.