Memory of the World; 2012 - unesdoc - Unesco

on its release and it was deposited with the Imperial War
Museum on the museum’s establishment in 1920, one
of the earliest films to be so archived.
However, alongside its value as a historical document
on film is its importance in human and social history.
The British army was largely a volunteer force, many
of them ‘pals’ regiments with strong links to their
local areas, and troops from Britain and Ireland fought
alongside those from the dominions, including Canada,
Newfoundland, Australia, New Zealand and other
countries of the Empire, including India; historians have
claimed most families in Britain and large numbers
overseas were affected directly by the battle. Against this
background, the power of its imagery was such that the
film shaped and defined the picture of trench warfare, and
by extension the First World War, in popular imagination
not only in Britain but across the world.
It has also seared the particular experience of the Battle
of the Somme into the collective and cultural memory of
Britain and the now-Commonwealth countries. The battle
still holds the record for the largest number of British
losses on one day (more than 58,000 on the first day) and
as one of the bloodiest military operations in history, with
more than a million dead over its course.
The film recorded front-line conditions for fighting
men for the first time and the destruction visited on the
French landscape, so raising questions on the morality
of depicting the reality of warfare and death, and of
trespassing on bereavement. The writer Arthur Conan
Doyle, who himself would lose his son in the war, wrote
to The Times on the subject on 4 September 1916: ‘The
film is a monument to their devotion. The theatre is
filled constantly with the relatives of the men portrayed,
and I do not think they feel there is any desecration in
the performance’.
Within weeks of being shot, the film was being shown in
the open air to troops in France still fighting in the battle,
which lasted from 1 July to 18 November. One British
officer admired it, declaring that though it lost something
from the absence of sound, he could hear the real thing
booming some distance away as he watched.
Preserved trenches at the Newfoundland memorial
on the Somme battlefield. �
440 The Battle of the Somme