Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2006 Sommario / Contents

they would also suffer heavy casualties together, decimating whole
sections of a community. As a result of the Somme, grief was
widespread in hundreds of communities across the UK.
Not surprisingly, the battle, the tactics employed, and the leadership of
the Army remain a controversial subject with professional historians,
who these days tend increasingly to defend the generalship of the Army,
pitted against the widespread belief, reinforced by many family
historians, that the men were callously thrown against the German
trenches in a pointless and ill-conceived battle. Apart from the historical
facts that have made the story of this battle so enduring, much of the
reason why the battle, and particularly the opening 24 hours, has
remained in the public conscience is because it was recorded on film.
Material for Battle of the Somme was the work of just two
cameramen. Geoffrey Malins, one of the first official cinematographers
sent to France, filmed the opening of the offensive from positions near
Beaumont Hamel, in the northern part of the battlefield. The second
cameraman, J.B. McDowell, a more recent arrival, was based further
south, near Fricourt and Mametz.
Filming a major battle in 1916 was difficult. Not only was it obviously
impossible for two cameramen to cover some 16 miles of front, but the
capabilities of the cameras, lenses, and film stock available at the time
made it difficult to film in certain conditions – for example, in poor light
or at great distance. It was almost certainly the unsatisfactory nature of
the footage actually filmed at the start of the Battle of the Somme on
1 July 1916 that led to the inclusion of a staged “over the top” scene in
the final completed film. Nonetheless, cinema audiences in 1916/17
believed that films were giving them an unprecedented opportunity to
see and share the experiences of soldiers fighting on the Western Front.
This belief – endorsed by Secretary of State for War David Lloyd George
in a statement read to the audience at the first screening on 10 August
1916 – made the film hugely popular. It has been calculated that 20
million cinema admissions to Battle of the Somme were sold in the
first 6 weeks of its release. (The population of Britain at this time was
some 43 million.)
The same belief took hold in the press.The amount of coverage which
Battle of the Somme attracted is itself remarkable, given that there
was as yet no tradition of film reviewing in the general press, and the
emphasis on reality is striking.The trade journal Cinema News wrote:
“There is no make-believe. This is the real thing. This is war, rich with
death.”The Manchester Guardian spoke of “the real thing at last”; the
Daily Express said, “For sheer realism there has perhaps never been
anything to excel this wonderful film”; and the Daily Sketch claimed,“it
is war, grim, red war; the real thing.” Taking a longer perspective, The
Times wrote, “In years to come, when historians want to know the
conditions under which the great offensive was launched, they will only
have to send for these films and a complete idea of the situation will be
revealed before their eyes, for we take it as a matter of course that a
number of copies of them will be carefully preserved in the national
archives.”
The possibility of a more awful form of reality – that people might
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recognize loved ones among the wounded and dead, or see someone fit
and healthy on the screen whom they knew to have been killed
subsequently – was also a concern.A debate in The Times was initiated
when the Dean of Durham wrote a letter about the film on 1
September 1916, saying, “I beg leave respectfully to enter a protest
against an entertainment which wounds the heart and violates the very
sanctities of bereavement.” Most of those who responded disagreed,
arguing that the film gave the bereaved some idea of what their loved
ones had experienced, and would help strengthen the bond between
Flanders and the home front.
It is a credit to the skill, bravery, and sincerity of purpose of Malins and
McDowell that images from the film have proved so useful to
succeeding generations of film and television producers who wanted to
quickly, powerfully, and realistically convey the nature of trench warfare
on the Western Front. In fact, the footage is so effective that it is
generally used to illustrate not just this battle, but to evoke the nature
of trench warfare at any stage during the First World War, and often to
symbolize the drama and agony of war itself. Sequences from the film,
usually unacknowledged, have been used in countless documentaries,
propaganda films, and dramas. As a result, a handful of sequences, such
as the explosion of a British mine under the German positions at
Beaumont Hamel, the “over the top attack”, the trench rescue scene,
and the “field of dead”, are so familiar and ubiquitous that they could
be described as iconic, or even clichéd.
For all these reasons – the value of the film as a record of the events it
portrays, its role in giving contemporary audiences the sense they were
sharing the “reality” of those events, its influence on the development of
documentary and propaganda coverage of conflict, and its continuing
role in shaping the image of the First World War for succeeding
generations – the Imperial War Museum nominated Battle of the
Somme for inclusion in UNESCO’s “Memory of the World” register, and
the film was formally inscribed in 2005.
Despite the familiarity of the scenes in Battle of the Somme, few have
had the opportunity to see the complete film, still less to have seen it in
the way it would have been experienced by its first audiences: projected
on a large screen, at the correct speed, and with a live musical
accompaniment. Although the IWM has endeavoured to recreate these
conditions with occasional musical screenings in its cinema, and by
selling a video version with an improvised piano accompaniment (by
Andrew Youdell), until recently it was hard for us to imagine how cinema
musicians would have interpreted the film for an audience in 1916.
However, in 1999, in The Bioscope, the British cinema industry’s trade
paper, we finally came across a list of musical recommendations to be
played to the film. In August 1916, William Jury, a commercial film
producer who had been appointed by the government to distribute
Battle of the Somme, asked cinema musician J. Morton Hutcheson to
select suitable music to accompany screenings of the film.The medley
Hutcheson suggested was published in The Bioscope on 17 August
1916, three days before the film went on general release. The IWM
decided to reconstruct this medley for a screening in Belfast on 1 July