The First World War was the first war that was really captured on film.
Newsreels were only a few years old when the war began, but it wasn’t very long before
the various national governments realized the power of film not only to depict the war,
but also to depict it the way they wanted it depicted, film as propaganda.
I’m Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War Special episode about Film and Propaganda
in the First World War.
Motion pictures were not very old at all in 1914.
The French Lumiere brothers, whose first public screening of motion pictures in December 1895
is often called the true birth of cinema, saw filmmaking as a novelty and left the industry
in 1905 believing that the cinema had no future.
They were mistaken.
In the early 20th century the Pathé brothers, also French, had a company that became the
world’s largest film equipment and production company, and it was they who invented the
newsreel a few years before the war.
If you’re wondering why that name might sound familiar, it’s because all of the
film footage we use in our show comes from the British Pathé archives.
Cinema had grown enormously as the years progressed.
In Germany in 1914 for example, there were over 2,500 cinemas, and that would increase
to over 3,000 by 1918, and at the outbreak of the war there were over 1.4 million viewers
a day there, and that does not count mobile cinemas, which were also popular.
But while cinema in general everywhere was most popular for entertainment, there were
a growing number of newsreels and documentaries, and one German film magazine wrote, “The
Theater has lost its magic.
We don’t want dreams, we want reality!”
So the war began, and how did film fit into it?
Well, both the public and the filmmakers expected the war to be... let’s call it “televised”,
and there was a huge demand for real footage from the front lines.
Because the war was so huge, everybody felt its economic and social consequences, everybody
knew somebody that was a soldier, and everybody wanted to know what was going on, and the
cinema promised an apparently realistic and objective perspective, seemingly unlike articles
written in the newspapers.
But the technological, ideological, and military reality made those expectations impossible
to fulfill.
Just physically, cameras in 1914 were heavy; they had to be mounted on tripods and weren’t
mobile like the hand cameras of later wars.
The film was light sensitive, and a lot of fighting took place at night, at dusk, or
in fog, mist, rain, smoke, you name it.
And very importantly, a cameraman had to risk his life to get out of the trenches and shoot
actual combat footage.
Austrian cameraman Heinrich Findeis had this to say, “When you did reach the fighting
area after lots of hardships, you are too late most of the time and won’t see anything
but an empty battlefield.
If you are in the combat zone, it’s night time.”
So the reality of film production meant that only somewhere up to 10% of all footage was
actual combat footage; the rest was staged.
News teams had to get special permission to film on the front in the first place.
And everything they produced was subject to censorship, so it was highly unlikely that
the public would ever see actual combat footage, dead soldiers, or the real front line conditions,
even if such things were never officially banned.
All sides understood very quickly the importance of film for propaganda since it could really
reach the masses on an emotional level.
The British War Propaganda Bureau, the French cinematographique de l’armeé, the Austrian
k.u.k.
Kriegspressequartier, the American Committee on Public Information, the German Bild und
Filmamt - all of these focused on film to a large degree, and when public support for
the war began to fade as it grew longer and more terrible, theatrical movies were made
to regain their support.
The Battle of the Somme, for example, was shown in both British and German films.
Now, they showed the death and destruction, sure, but the emphasis was to show that it
all makes sense and has a clear ending; the soldiers were fighting for a noble cause and
achieved victory.
The animated film about the sinking of the Lusitania - which is on British Pathé YouTube
channel, just search for “Lusitania cartoon”- was made in 1918 to remind Americans why they
were going to war, even though they hadn’t in 1915 when it sank.
It frames the call to arms as a moral duty, rather than the more mundane and reality based
economic one.
Let’s look at Britain for a minute.
Film, as a medium, was often seen before the war as an unsophisticated pastime for the
lower classes, so there was no part for movies in official propaganda at first, but the cinematographers
saw a real money making opportunity in the war, and they also felt cinema was the best
platform for arousing patriotic sentiment.
A few early newsreels actually showed British soldiers on their way to the front, but as
soon as the retreat after the Battle of the Mons began, cameras were banned from the front
lines, so they began to recreate the war in Britain.
One early example is Hepworth Studios’ “Unfit, or the Strength of the Weak”, released in
October 1914.
Two brothers try to enlist, but only one is accepted.
Undaunted, the other becomes a war correspondent and bravely sacrifices himself in France.
The problem was that recreating the Western Front in leafy Surrey with a few overage actors
gave the audience a very limited - and sanitized - view of what was actually happening in France.
It took time for Wellington House - the common name for Britain’s War Propaganda Bureau
- to change its attitude and green light official films and correspondents, but in mid 1915,
the first official war cinematographers - Geoffrey Malins and John Benjamin McDowell - were sent
to the front, though because of technical limitations, the public was disappointed.
In fact, in April 1916, the Guardian complained that the footage released offered such little
access to life at the front that it may as well have been shot in Britain.
But the film The Battle of the Somme changed everything.
It was a huge box office hit, and though the sequence of soldiers going over the top was
faked, it became instantly iconic.
The film could not hide the conditions the soldiers lived in and the toll the war took
on the countryside and this was shocking for much of the public, who still saw the war
as somehow glorious and honorable.
In America, D.W.
Griffith made a propaganda drama of his own, “Hearts of the World”.
It’s the story of a village in eastern France.
Before the war everybody is happy and content, and they even put up with an unpleasant German
tourist, Von Strohm, who displays a curious interest in the strategic position of the
village.
In August 1914 the village is occupied by the Germans and Von Strohm reveals his true
colors - he is a German officer!
Brutality and rape become commonplace during occupation, but an advance guard of heroic
French and American troops eventually drive out the invaders.
A simplistic Griffith scenario that had huge appeal for mass audiences.
Griffith, of course, was the director of “Birth of a Nation”, the enormously successful,
and also highly controversial, first 12 reel film in America in 1915; one of the most influential
and landmark films of all time.
He knew how to hold an audience.
To make Hearts look more authentic, the film opens with scenes of Griffith scouting for
locations in France and even meeting British Prime Minister Lloyd George.
Griffith did film in France and even had frontline access, but the battle sequences were on Salisbury
plain with British and Canadian Troops, and it was those scenes that provided the “realism”
to convince the public they were watching the real war.
The thing to really understand is that the movies and pictures in general in World War
One seen by the public were rarely random and were usually produced with a message in
mind.
They do give a good idea of how people looked and behaved at the time, but they should not
be mistaken for the reality of the war, and while this is true for the First World War,
especially with the technical limitations of the medium, it is also true to a certain
extent of most other wars since then, and is certainly something that should always
be kept in mind.
This was the 2nd part of our small series about Propaganda and we will look at war photographers
in another episode too.
If you missed our first episode about the organisation of Propaganda, you can click
right here to check it out.
For some classic propaganda films in the British Pathé archive, like us on Facebook and don’t
forget to subscribe.
See you next time.