Michael Paris (ed.),
The First World War and Popular Cinema. 1914 to the Present.
Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 1999.
ISBN 0-8486-1099-5 (pb)
240pp
£stg 15.95
(Review copy supplied by Edinburgh University Press)
Uploaded 30 June 2000

In many respects the relation between war and media, and more specifically war and cinema, is one of the most interesting and richest areas of film studies and film history. The field is an intersection which not only touches upon fundamental human feelings of suffering and sacrifice, but involves extended areas of history, culture and media representation in general. It allows outstanding scholars to explore the field using concepts and notions as diverse as: technology and perception (Paul Virilio), modernity and modernism (Walter Benjamin, Modris Eksteins), memory and mourning (Jay Winter), commemoration (George Mosse), narrativity and literature (Paul Fussell, Samuel Hynes) and front experience (Eric John Leed).

Though these particular scholars have focussed their intellectual labour primarily on the First World War, this line of scholars can be extended at length when applied to wars in general. Although this new book on the First World War and popular cinema does not contain any essays submitted by these scholars, they have provided most of the contributors with the intellectual background necessary to ask questions concerning the problematic relation between war and cinematographic representation. Still this book is certainly not a theoretical exercise on the topic. Although there is no mention of this in the book, I can guess that it is for a good reason, namely, because of the fact that the field of cinematic representations of the Great War has not been fully explored (although from a historiographical point of view nothing ever is really fully explored!). By glancing at the list of sources, it appears that most sources used by the authors of the book are primary, substantiating that there is indeed still a great deal to investigate. Most articles are not only the result of searching the film archives for hitherto unknown films on the Great War, but also written documents offering new insights into the understanding of how cinema functioned during the First World War.

The chapters in the book are organised around different national cinemas. Choosing this angle is not surprising. In fact, Andrew Kelly applied this in 1997 in his book Cinema and the Great War. However where Kelly concentrated mainly on a canon of anti-war films, this collection of articles focuses not only on many unknown films, but also on countries which did not receive much attention in the context of representing the Great War. Much is still unknown about the Polish (Ewa Mazierska), Italian (Giovanni Nobili Vitelleschi) , Canadian (Tim Travers), Austrian (Franz Marksteiner) and Soviet (Denise Youngblood) national cinema during this war – although a few of these national cinemas received some attention in the book Film and the First World War (edited by Bert Hogenkamp and Karel Dibbets, 1995). There is yet a great amount of research to be done, not only on how these national cinemas functioned but also about the films they produced during, as well as after, the war. In this sense the book is a distinct contribution. Besides chapters on these national cinemas one also finds chapters dedicated to much better known cinemas such as the French (Pierre Sorlin), British (Nicholas Reeves and Michael Paris), American (Leslie Midkiff Debauche), German (Rainer Rother) and Australian (Ina Bertrand) cinema. These parts of the book also offer mostly new or different insights and knowledge. Still this book is certainly not a theoretical exercise on the topic, except for Pierre Sorlin’s introductory chapter.

Although national cinema is taken as a starting point – and indeed the First World War was a period in which for the first time national cinemas came into existence – there are some important similarities in most of the wartime produced films. Sooner or later the official machinery of propaganda and military censorship put its mark on the films produced, particularly on official films which were often factual or news films. This caused an effect which can be defined as “the inverted telescope” (164). The war was not so much represented as something near and present, but more as distant and absent, obscuring atrocities or images which were too brutal. Almost all wartime films – including patriotic films of “fiction” – displayed a sanitised view of the war. At the beginning of the war most audiences – still in the spirit of patriotism – were curious and enthusiastic about images of the battlefield where their sons and husbands were fighting, even when most of the battlescenes were staged. But when the war dragged on and an end didn’t seem to come, people got bored with the repetitive shots of marching, “relaxing” or wounded soldiers. This was at least true for the British, Italian, Canadian, German and French war films.

How some of the national mechanisms of propaganda and censorship functioned is well clarified in detail by Reeves and Travers. Interesting also is the chapter by Midkiff Debauche wherein she describes how producers, distributors and exhibitors developed a “practical patriotism” (139) and closely cooperated with governmental war programs without losing sight of their own business interests. The important role of national films in constructing identity becomes very clear in the contributions by Marksteiner and Bertrand. Whereas the Austrian film mainly focussed on its past through the construction of the “Habsburgian Myth” (252), in Australia the war took on mythical proportions – especially in feature films; as it seemed to function as a kind of initiating process for the Australian nation.

It almost speaks for itself that visualising the war was a problematic matter because of all the regulations the cinema underwent. But at least there is a body of films we can discuss and which we know audiences watched. Still there are national cases in which the war was more or less absent from the screen: Russia (because the Great War belonged to the era of the Tsar) and Austria (because of the concentration on its past). Youngblood’s concluding remark that historians have not yet invented a language to describe the culture of absence is certainly true. (187) I would argue that, with some exceptions, the most interesting films on the Great War were made after the war. In most cases filmmakers were allowed to construct more truthful images of the war which often resulted in anti-war films. Perhaps even more interesting is to look at how representations of the war were utilised for political purposes, as well as the ways in which they were entrenched in contemporary social and historiographical discourse. One extreme example is presented in the chapter by Mazierska in which she convincingly argues Polish World War One films were used as “vehicles to glorify a vision of Poland which is xenophobic, class-ridden and patriarchal.” (202) Other examples are German war films made during the Weimar and Nazi period. Rother could have stressed more how filmmakers and producers had to operate in a diplomatic minefield (also related to foreign policy) caused by the debate on the war guilt and the Versailles Treaty. In my opinion this was one of the reasons why German war films, for example, did not display a clear image of the enemy. In general the book is well written, although some articles are too enumerative. But despite minor flaws, this book edited by Michael Paris, is a valuable addition to other studies on First World War films.

Bernadette Kester