Meanwhile the Topical Committee had begun work. Though a very early colour process was available, it was decided to film only in black and white. The veteran of films depicting the South African War, Charles Urban, now head of Kineto Films, and who had developed the rejected ‘kinemacolor’ process, began producing a series of films in October 1915. These were based on home military or naval subjects under the title of Britain Prepared. First shown on 27 December 1915, Britain Prepared, which ran for three hours, was uninspiring and had relatively limited appeal, not least for American audiences. When shown in Russia, it apparently had a rather different impact than intended, for Russian troops could see how much more equipment British troops possessed and how much better fed they were.
The Topical Committee then sent two cameramen, Geoffrey Malins and Edward ‘Teddy’ Tong, to France in November 1915 to begin making a series of newsreels behind the lines. Their first efforts duplicated Girdwood's film, With the Indian Troops at the Front being shown in January 1916. This proved an additional impediment to Girdwood when he eventually managed to show his own film nine months later. Tong, who worked for William Jury's Imperial Pictures, fell ill and was replaced by J.B. McDowell in June 1916. Malins was given the honorary rank of lieutenant while McDowell remained a civilian, though he later accepted a commission. Born at Hastings in 1886, Arthur Hebert Malins, as he was originally known, had been a portrait photographer before moving to the Clarendon Film Company and then joining British Gaumont. In 1914 he filmed Belgian and French troops in Flanders, and French troops in the Vosges, before being invited to become one of the Topical Committee's cameramen. Less is known about John Benjamin McDowell, but he had been born in Plumstead in 1878, and began work as an apprentice at Woolwich Arsenal before turning to cinematography. Before the war, he had gone into partnership with Albert Bloomfield to form the British and Colonial Kinematograph Company, which successfully recreated the Battle of Waterloo for the cinema in a Northamptonshire field in 1913.
Malins had an advanced sense of his own worth, later recording in his self-serving and unreliable memoir, How I Filmed the War, that ‘I have always tried to remember that it was through the eye of the camera, directed by my own sense of observation, that the millions of people at home would gain their only first-hand knowledge of what was happening at the front.’8 Nonetheless, he was not without courage, being frequently under fire and gassed at least once. McDowell was later awarded the MC. The GHQ ‘minder’ to both McDowell and Malins, the Military Director of Kinematograph Operations, Captain John Faunthorpe, wrote that they ‘necessarily have to run great risks to get good pictures, and must break down in time. It is a considerable strain to be constantly under fire armed only with a camera and taking pictures over the parapet of a front trench involves additional exposure.’9 Each hand-cranked camera, together with its tripod and magazines of highly inflammable cellulose nitrate film, weighed in excess of 100 pounds: McDowell suggested that, after carting it 4 or 5 miles up the front line and through the communication trenches, the camera seemed more like 4 hundredweight.
The intention was not originally to produce a documentary on the Somme offensive when Malins and McDowell were sent to the British Fourth Army front on 25 and 28 June 1916 respectively. Malins went to 29th Division in the north and McDowell to 7th Division in the south, merely to take general scenes. The official war photographer, Ernest ‘Baby’ Brooks, accompanied Malins. The day for the opening of the Somme offensive was postponed from 29 June to 1 July, enabling them to take additional scenes of preparation. Much of Malins's initial work on 1 July was around ‘White City’ opposite Beaumont Hamel and from ‘Jacob's Ladder’, a convenient elevation nearby. It was from White City that Malins filmed the famous sequence of the blowing of a large British mine under the German Hawthorn Redoubt at 0720 hours on 1 July. In his own account, Malins had begun turning the crank at, 0719 hours: ‘Then it happened. The ground where I stood gave a mighty convulsion. It rocked and swayed. I gripped hold of my tripod to steady myself. Then, for all the world like a gigantic sponge, the earth rose in the air to the height of hundreds of feet. Higher and higher it rose, and with a horrible, grinding roar the earth fell back upon itself, leaving in its place a mountain of smoke.’10
Malins apparently changed the film magazine during the course of his attempts to capture the subsequent advance, from which the sequence of distant figures in No Man's Land was taken. Malins then took scenes of British wounded at the ‘Tenderloin’ collecting post at ‘White City’. On the following day, Malins moved to La Boiselle, and may also have gone to the area between Carnoy and Montauban on 5 July.
McDowell filmed around ‘Minden Post’ close to the main road between Albert and Peronne at Carnoy on 1 July, first filming the British wounded, and German prisoners. He then moved forward to film the forward German trenches captured between Carnoy and Mametz. No footage by McDowell has been positively identified as filmed after 3 July, but both men seem to have left the front on 10 July. They appear to have each taken about 4,000 feet of film, a cartridge of 400 feet lasting some six minutes. Based on Malins's own estimate, it is usually suggested that 80 per cent of the footage eventually used was his, but the latest careful shot-by-shot analysis has concluded that the balance was rather more even.
The first negative rushes were seen in London on 12 July and it was at this point that William Jury of Imperial Pictures, who was on Wellington House's cinema committee, realised that the film could be made into a documentary rather than used for a series of newsreels. The faked ‘over the top’ scenes were taken at the Third Army's Mortar School at Ligny- St-Flochel near St Pol sometime between 12 and 19 July, presumably once the initial unedited film had been viewed. Malins was probably the cameraman, going back to France expressly to film the added scenes. The War Office accepted Jury's offer and settled for 40 per cent of the profits for war charities. Jury and Charles Urban worked quickly: Urban liked to edit whilst smoking a cigar, despite the risks of the film catching fire. Malins claimed to have helped edit the film, but this is unlikely. With its five reels lasting seventy-two minutes, The Battle of the Somme was given its trade screening on 7 August. There was a swift censorship check by the military authorities in London and at GHQ, with some alterations to captions, and some deletions of scenes of dead and wounded at the request of Lieutenant General Sir Henry Rawlinson of Fourth Army, who had commanded the offensive.
The completed film had a special premiere screening to an invited audience on 10 August at the Scala. The film then opened in thirty-four London cinemas on 21 August 1916. It became available in the provinces a week later in a general release of one hundred prints, Jury dropping the hiring charges to maximise distribution. He also endorsed the ‘musical suggestions’ of J. Morton Hutcheson, musical director of the Premier Electric Cinema chain, to accompany the film. Jury reminded accompanists that they ‘must realise the seriousness and awfulness of the scenes depicted most realistically, and even where the scenes are showing the brighter side of events in this Great Push, the “accompaniment” must not be too bright’.11 Hutcheson had selected over thirty pieces of suitable music including Suppé's ‘Light Cavalry Overture’ for the ‘over the top’ scene. It would appear, however, that the music varied from region to region, with full military bands on occasions. Rather less suitably, the screening at the Theatre Royal Hippodrome in Dublin was part of a variety programme including a singing comedienne and a one-legged dancer. The film was also accompanied by the publication of an illustrated booklet, Sir Douglas Haig's Great Push: The Battle of the Somme, which included stills no longer in the surviving copy of the film.
Quite what the film's purpose was meant to be is uncertain. Strictly speaking, it was not a propaganda film, since it had been made at very short notice and was assembled from film not intended to provide a continuous narrative. It had not been determined in advance to record the offensive, but it seems there was some intent to use the example of men at the front to rally civilian support for the w
ar. This is suggested by a letter from Lloyd George read to the audience at the premiere at the Scala, in which he wrote, ‘I am convinced that when you have seen this wonderful picture, every heart will beat in sympathy with its purpose, which is no other than that everyone of us at home and abroad shall see what our men at the Front are doing and suffering for us, and how their achievements have been made possible by the sacrifices made at home.’12
The juxtaposition of images from different parts of the battlefield, which appears confusing and effectively patternless to historians, was probably not of significance for the contemporary audience. There were five distinctly labelled ‘parts’ to the film and it was edited sufficiently well to convey not only narrative progression but also visual breaks in the narrative to create cinematic ‘surprise’. Again, it has been suggested that there was no particular conception of an enemy, since Germans appeared only as prisoners or bodies and the film showed only the humanitarian behaviour of British soldiers towards German prisoners. There was just one moment where a British soldier reacted aggressively to a German, who had jogged his wounded arm. However, the captions referred repeatedly to the Germans. Certainly, the sequences filmed by Malins in the ‘sunken road’, of the Lancashire Fusiliers waiting to go into action, was a significant contrast from the early scenes of smiling and waving troops. In one sense, these early scenes were as staged for the camera as the faked sequences of going over the top. Exhaustion, however, was very clear in the later scenes, including one sequence of a soldier clearly suffering from shell shock. Some 13 per cent of the footage was also devoted to the wounded and the dead, and though the total of British casualties was never revealed in any way, even the relatively careful selection of footage of the wounded still had much impact. Only one British general appeared, Major General Henry Beauvoir de Lisle being shown in long shot addressing troops before the battle: shots from two different parades were combined.
There was no attempt to hide the physical destruction of a battlefield. In this sense, therefore, as Roger Smither has commented, emphasis on the faked scenes, which lasted for less than twenty seconds, does a disservice to the film-makers ‘in obscuring a very real achievement in pioneering the battlefield documentary’.13 There was some attempt to include as many national representative types of soldier as possible, with eighteen different regiments mentioned in the captions, although battalions were not specified and only three were seen repeatedly: 1st Battalion, the Lancashire Fusiliers and 2nd Battalion, the Seaforth Highlanders, both filmed by Malins; and the 2nd Battalion, the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, filmed by McDowell. The captions provided by the War Office were bald statements of fact and place, though only six towns or villages were mentioned, and there was little subtlety in any message conveyed. A map, suggesting that the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg line in April 1917 was a direct consequence of the Somme offensive, was only added at that time. No follow-up to the film was planned. There was another feature, The King Visits His Armies in the Great Advance, shown in October 1916, but it was not until January 1917 that The Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of the Tanks appeared, filmed by Malins and McDowell in the autumn of 1916, and introducing audiences to the new weapon, the tank.
The Somme film caused a sensation and, although no overall viewing figures are extant, it was clearly widely seen. It has been suggested that a million people saw the film in the first week and 20 million saw it in the first six weeks. If true, then it would be quite remarkable given that the total British population was approximately 43 million. Nonetheless, the film was enormously popular. It was shown in at least 2,000 cinemas, and made some £30,000. The film was still being booked regularly fifteen months after its premiere. It was shown simultaneously, for example, in twenty cinemas in Birmingham, and 10,000 saw it at Dublin's Theatre Royal alone in a matter of days. Huge queues were reported in towns like Edinburgh, Glasgow and Swansea, with crowd control having to be introduced outside the cinema in West Ealing. Even Jury, Malins and the secretary of the Topical Committee, Joseph Brooke Wilkinson, had difficulties getting into the cinema at Finsbury Park when the film opened there. People were being turned away regularly from full houses. Overseas, it was shown in eighteen different countries, though the film was not well received in the United States, where isolationism still ran strongly and where there was less favourable reaction to scenes of death and destruction.
The response evoked in audiences was generally a mixture of pity and horror. Whatever Lloyd George's intention, the domestic reaction suggests that sacrifice on the Western Front was seen as immeasurably greater than that on the home front. Far more than censored letters home, censored newspaper reports, and perhaps veiled allusions in the comments by those servicemen on leave, film images conveyed a much greater reality than even lengthy lists of casualties in the provincial press or acquaintance with those convalescing from wounds. The images were far from the conventional depictions of high Victorian battle art in which saving the guns or saving the Colours was utterly devoid of any real sense of death. The greatest reaction was to the faked scenes purporting to show men leaving the trenches. The audience and the press universally took these as genuine, the Manchester Guardian announcing on 11 August that the film was ‘the real thing at last’. The Daily Mirror reported one woman calling out, ‘Oh, God, they're dead.’ The Spectator commented on 26 August, ‘It is a wonderful example of how reality – remember this is no arranged piece of play acting but a record taken in the agony of battle – transcends fiction.’ In the same way, The Times suggested that, if historians in the future wanted to know what the war was like, ‘they will only have to send for these films’. The Bioscope, a leading trade journal, proclaimed it ‘the most remarkable film ever made in this country’.14 Henry Rider Haggard wrote of the faked scenes in his diary on 27 September 1916, ‘There is something appalling about the instantaneous change from fierce activity to supine death. Indeed, the whole horrible business is appalling. War has always been dreadful, but never, I suppose, more dreadful than today.’15 The Dean of Durham, Hensley Henson, expressly condemned the film as presenting war's tragedy as entertainment. A leading zoologist, Professor Ray Lankester, supported him, and a few other dissenting voices were heard. A few reports of screenings, for example, suggest some limited expressions of the need to avoid any future wars.
Serving soldiers had equally mixed reactions. Some clearly felt that it was useful for civilians to know something of the reality, whereas others believed it better not to expose women and children to such images. Lieutenant Colonel Rowland Feilding of 6th Battalion, the Connaught Rangers, wrote on 5 September 1916 after seeing the film in France, ‘This battle film is really a wonderful and most realistic production, but must of necessity be wanting in that the battle is fought in silence, and moreover, that the most unpleasant part – the machine gun and rifle fire – is entirely eliminated.’ Feilding doubted at first whether it was wise to show the film to soldiers until he overheard two newly arrived recruits discussing it: ‘Said one, “As to reality, now you knows what you've got to face. If it was left to the imagination you might think all sorts of silly b-things”. I wonder where his imagination would have led him had he not seen the Cinema.’16
Those who had lost relatives in the war seemed to feel that the film helped them to understand the sacrifice. As one wrote, ‘I came away feeling humiliated and ashamed, for at last I was able to realise what Britain's soldiers were doing for her. If my turn comes, I hope that the memory of that film will stay with me to keep me as brave and smiling as they are.’17 Inevitably perhaps, some audience members claimed to recognise relatives. At a screening in Droylsden near Manchester, a woman claimed to see her husband being carried wounded from the front, having just been notified that he had died of wounds. Others in the audience also identified him, though the most recent careful analysis of the film has suggested that it is impossible, since the sequence was filmed on 1 July and the unfortunate soldier in question was mortally wounded five days later o
n an entirely different part of the battlefield. A pet dog lying dead in No Man's Land, filmed by McDowell on 2 or 3 July, is almost certainly that of Lieutenant Colonel Harold Lewis of the 20th Battalion, the Manchester Regiment. It is not certain the body next to the dog is Lewis, as was claimed by his niece when she saw the film. Subsequently, a number of soldiers have been identified with some certainty, but only as a result of substantial research, which has even used lip readers to identify what some men filmed are saying.
Unlike other films of the time, the audiences viewed The Battle of the Somme often silently, with considerable intensity of emotion, sighing audibly or weeping. As Lloyd George's secretary, Frances Stevenson, wrote in her diary, it reminded her of the loss of her brother, ‘I have often tried to imagine myself what he went through, but now I know, and I shall never forget. It was like going through a tragedy. I felt something of what the Greeks must have felt when they went in their crowds to witness those grand old plays – to be purged in their minds through pity and terror.’18 As Nicholas Reeves has suggested, the film may have fulfilled its purpose in bridging the chasm between front and home, and in demonstrating that the sacrifice was worthwhile for, as he puts it, the film was ‘incorporated within the audience's own existing ideology’.19
The depiction of death in the sense of seeing falling soldiers, as opposed to dead bodies, was not repeated in other British wartime films. Moreover, the Topical Committee was reorganised in November 1916, with a new War Office Cinema Committee being established consisting of Max Aitken, Brade and Jury, partly as a result of the Topical Committee's failure to pay the War Office the agreed royalties to war charities. After a third film, The German Retreat and the Battle of Arras, was produced in June 1917, Aitken, now Lord Beaverbrook and head of the Ministry of Information, into which Wellington House had been subsumed in February 1918, ordered a change in policy. It was believed that the novelty of battle films had worn off, and that the public was jaded. Attention turned to twice-weekly newsreels such as ‘The Pictorial News’, to cartoons, and to fictional films. The latter included The Leopard's Spots, also known popularly as ‘Once a Hun Always a Hun’, and The National Film, a somewhat tawdry drama filmed in Chester, with British troops drafted in as extras to play brutal and licentious Germans. Interestingly, the German authorities were so impressed by the films’ impact that they had their own Somme film, Bei Unseren Helden an der Somme (With Our Soldiers on the Somme) produced and premiered on 17 January 1917. However, much of it was staged in training areas, and it was widely condemned in Germany for not looking sufficiently authentic.
The Making of the First World War Page 13