Celluloid War Memorials: The British Instructional Films Company and the Memory of the Great War

By Mark Connelly

The films made by the British Instructional Films (BIF) company in the decade following the end of the First World War helped to shape the way in which that war was remembered. This is both a work of cinema history and a study of the public’s memory of WW1.

By the early twenties, the British film industry was struggling to cope with the power of Hollywood and government help was needed to guarantee its survival.  The 1927 Cinematograph Films Act was intended to support the domestic film industry by requiring British cinemas to show a quota of domestically produced films each year.  The Act was not the sole saviour of British cinema, but the government intervention did allow the domestic industry to exploit the talents of an emerging group of younger filmmakers including Michael Balcon, Walter Summers and Alfred Hitchcock, who directed the most influential of these BIF war constructions.
This book shows that the films are micro-histories revealing huge amounts about perceptions of the Great War, national and imperial identities, the role of cinema as a shaper of attitudes and identities, power relations between Britain and the USA and the nature of popular culture as an international contest in its own right.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Exeter Press
• Release date: Jul 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9780859890823

Mark Connelly

Mark Connelly is Professor of Modern British Military History at the University of Kent.  He combines his interest in films, television and visual images with his interest in military history. He is a regular contributor to BBC publications, radio and television programmes, and has been a regular presenter in the national Army Museum’s lunchtime lecture series.

Book preview

Celluloid War Memorials

Now almost completely unknown, British Instructional Films was an extremely influential film company of the 1920s; the company had a string of major box office successes across the British Empire in its series of Great War battle reconstructions. These films attempted to show the people of the Empire exactly what their soldiers and sailors had done on their behalf, and in doing so, they helped to shape the way in which the Great War was remembered.

Using thousands of sailors and soldiers and numerous ships lent by the army and navy, BIF Company was able to create epics which thrilled people whilst also making them consider the cost of the war. Such was the importance of these films that King George V made the first ever visit by a British monarch to a public cinema in order to see the 1924 film Zeebrugge.

In Celluloid War Memorials, Mark Connelly uses sources from archives in the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Belgium, Germany and France to produce the first full study of BIF Company’s battle reconstructions. He sets their films in the context of a public culture of war remembrance and commemoration in the 1920s and early 1930s.

Mark Connelly is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Kent. His main research interests are on the memory of war and the image of the armed forces in popular culture. His publications include The Great War: memory and ritual; We Can Take It: Britain and the memory of the Second World War and Steady the Buffs! A Regiment, a Region and the Great War.

Exeter Studies in Film History

Published by University of Exeter Press in association with the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture

Series Editors: Richard Maltby, Professor of Screen Studies, Flinders University, South Australia and Steve Neale, Professor of Film Studies and Academic Director of the Bill Douglas Centre, University of Exeter.

Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema, Lynne Kirby (1997)

The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939, Ruth Vasey (1997)

‘Film Europe’ and ‘Film America’: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange 1920–1939, edited by Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby (1999)

A Paul Rotha Reader, edited by Duncan Petrie and Robert Kruger (1999)

A Chorus of Raspberries: British Film Comedy 1929–1939, David Sutton (2000)

The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema, Laurent Mannoni, translated by Richard Crangle (2000)

Popular Filmgoing in 1930s Britain: A Choice of Pleasures, John Sedgwick (2000)

Alternative Empires: European Modernist Cinemas and Cultures of Imperialism, Martin Stollery (2000)

Hollywood, Westerns and the 1930s: The Lost Trail, Peter Stanfield (2001)

Young and Innocent? The Cinema in Britain 1896–1930, edited by Andrew Higson (2002)

Legitimate Cinema: Theatre Stars in Silent British Films 1908–1918, Jon Burrows (2003)

The Big Show: British Cinema Culture in the Great War (1914–1918), Michael Hammond (2006)

Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet, edited by James Lyons and John Plunkett (2007)

Going to the Movies: Hollywood and the Social Experience of Cinema, edited by Richard Maltby, Melvyn Stokes and Robert C. Allen (2007)

Alternative Film Culture in Inter-War Britain, Jamie Sexton (2008)

Marketing Modernity: Victorian Popular Shows and Early Cinema, Joe Kember (2009)

British Cinema and Middlebrow Culture in the Interwar Years, Lawrence Napper (2009)

Reading the Cinematograph: The Cinema in British Short Fiction 1896–1912, edited by Andrew Shail (2010)

Charles Urban: Pioneering the Non-fiction Film in Britain and America, 1897–1925, Luke McKernan (2013)

Cecil Hepworth and the Rise of the British Film Industry 1899–1911 Simon Brown (2016)

The Appreciation of Film: The Postwar Film Society Movement and Film Culture in Britain Richard Lowell MacDonald (2016)

UEP also publishes the celebrated five-volume series looking at the early years of English cinema, The Beginnings of the Cinema in England, by John Barnes.

title

First published in 2016 by

University of Exeter Press

Reed Hall, Streatham Drive

Exeter EX4 4QR

UK

www.exeterpress.co.uk

© Mark Connelly 2016

The right of Mark Connelly to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Although every effort has been made to identify owners of copyright material, in some cases this has not been possible. Notification of omissions or incorrect information should be forwarded to the publishers, who will be pleased to amend any future editions of the book.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 85989 998 7 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 85989 082 3 ePub

ISBN 978 0 85989 052 6 PDF

Typeset in Caslon by

Kestrel Data, Exeter

Contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1Forging an Identity: The Battle of Jutland (1921) and Armageddon (1923)

2Twisting the Dragon’s Tail: Zeebrugge (1924)

3Filming the Holy Ground of British Arms: Ypres (1925)

4Retreating to Victory: Mons (1926)

5Praising the Not-So-Silent Service: The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands (1927)

Epilogue and conclusion

Notes

Sources and Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Front cover: Ypres Souvenir Brochure produced for premiere at Marble Arch Pavilion, 1927

Fig. 1 ‘Filming Jutland – after the event’, Illustrated London News , 4 September 1921

Fig. 2 Announcement of The Battle of Jutland trade show, Kinematograph Weekly , 1 September 1921

Fig. 3 Poster advertising release of Armageddon , Kinematograph Weekly , 8 November 1923

Fig. 4 Announcement of Armageddon premiere to the cinema trade, Kinematograph Weekly , 1 November 1923

Fig. 5 ‘The most inspiring British war film – the new Zeebrugge’, Illustrated London News , 18 October 1924

Fig. 6 The raiders advance up on to the Mole, Zeebrugge

Fig. 7 Canadian soldiers on Belle Vue Ridge, Ypres

Fig. 8 The Divisional Bathhouse, Ypres

Fig. 9 Advertisement for Ypres , Manitoba Free Press , 24 April 1926

Fig. 10 ‘A Great British War Film – the Retreat from Mons’, Illustrated London News , 25 September 1926

Fig. 11 Mons Souvenir Brochure produced for premiere at Marble Arch Pavilion, 1926

Fig. 12 ‘World’s greatest war picture coming to Dundee’, Evening Telegraph , 12 November 1926

Fig. 13 . Advertisement for The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands, Daily Film Renter , 12 September 1927

Fig. 14 Walter Summers and crew filming muster of Falkland Islands Defence Force, Stanley Green. Shot on location in Scilly Isles. Courtesy of Roger Banfield of the Isles of Scilly Museum

Fig. 15 Walter Summers and crew filming Falkland Islands Defence Force running to their posts. Shot on location in Scilly Isles. Courtesy of Roger Banfield of the Isles of Scilly Museum

Fig. 16 Die Seeschlachten bei Coronel und den Falklandsinseln , Illustrieter Film-Kurier , August 1928

Fig. 17 Tell England . HMS Queen Elizabeth and boats preparing for the assault. Production still taken on location in Malta.

Fig. 18 Tell England . Machine gunners providing covering fire over assault barges. Production still taken on location in Malta

Fig. 19 Tell England . Assault barges closing in on beach covered by artillery fire. Production still taken on location in Malta

Acknowledgements

This book owes a great deal to a wide range of people who provided inspiration, help and support throughout the research and writing process. First and foremost I must thank my wife and children for once again allowing dad to indulge in yet another Great War obsession. Much thanks are also due to Bryony Dixon and Upekha Bandaranayake of the British Film Institute for inviting me to play a role in The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands restoration project. It was great fun and also helped me sharpen my thoughts about the film enormously. I would also like to thank Ian Beckett, Tim Bowman, Helen Brooks, Will Butler, James Chapman, Quintin Colville, Zoe Denness, Dominiek Dendooven, Leen Engelen, Mark Glancy, Mike Hammond, Emma Hanna, Nick Hiley, Laurence Napper, Rebecca Nash, Bill Nasson, Jeffrey Richards and Adrian Smith all of whom helped this project reach its conclusion. I would particularly like to express my gratitude to my colleague, Dr Stefan Goebel, who took a deep interest in this project, passed on relevant material found during the course of his own research, and read the manuscript thoroughly, making many valuable suggestions.

This book is dedicated to Professor John Ramsden (1947–2009) Great British Historian.

Introduction

This book is about a British film company founded by an officer with Western Front experience, H.B. Woolfe, which grew from very humble beginnings in an old army hut at Elstree to become a highly effective producer of war films. Achieving great success across the British Empire and further afield, British Instructional Films Company (hereafter BIF Company) contributed to a wider public debate about the meaning of the Great War and the way it should be understood and remembered. As many cultural historians have shown, the Great War and in particular its dead, formed a dominant part of British and imperial public discourse and popular culture in the 1920s. This study will show that BIF Company’s output stood in a memorial landscape sharing much with the other signs and manifestations of the Great War’s cultural imprint on 1920s culture. Second, it will demonstrate how the memory of the Great War became a contested zone in which the particular target was not a former enemy but an ally, the USA. Many felt Hollywood was deliberately trying to persuade the world that the USA had fought the war pretty much alone and was thus stealing laurels that rightly belonged to Britain and its Empire. Within this facet is the important aspect of imperial culture and loyalty to Britain. The Great War is often regarded as a rite of passage for the Empire in which the Dominions and India, in particular, gained a new sense of self-worth and independent identity, but the war was also a reminder of a common allegiance, a common struggle and a common inheritance.1 Linked to this was the wider fear of Americanization through cinema and the need for a robust British response. It was a fear that connected with the concerns of middle class critics and cultural elites over the ability of cinema to shape the hearts and minds of the masses. BIF Company managed the neat trick of appealing to both a mass audience, albeit not consistently, and making cinema-going respectable to those who previously held doubts about its propriety and cultural status. It achieved this through films which stand in a unique category in British 1920s cinema—battle reconstructions. Firmly grounded in a remarkable degree of technical virtuosity, the films grew rapidly in scale and ambition and formed a hybrid between the ‘film-lecture’ format and conventional cinema.

Yet, BIF Company’s immense contribution to British cinema and its pioneering role as a creator of a distinctive national vision for cinema has only recently begun to emerge. A number of reasons can be identified for this neglect. First is the difficulty with sources: whatever archive of company papers BIF Company accumulated has long since disappeared and there appears to be no major collection of H.B. Woolfe papers in existence. Academic and research interest in British silent film has also generally lagged behind engagement with its later evolution, particularly the so-called golden years of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. As a result, the attention paid to that conflict as the moment when a truly national cinematic expression flowered led to the lionizing of a documentary-infused approach. Furthermore, it was a definition of documentary devised almost entirely by John Grierson, the leading intellectual and creative force behind British documentary filmmaking.2 Grierson teetered on the brink of contempt for BIF Company and its output and was thus indifferent to its role in British cinema. Others, including such influential figures as Ivan Butler, Paul Rotha and Basil Wright were happy to praise.3 Rotha’s praise is perhaps all the more remarkable given his difficult working relationship with Woolfe due to their very different political allegiances.4 Although BIF Company’s output failed to achieve Grierson’s definition of a documentary, its films were scrupulously researched, usually featured veterans reconstructing their original roles and were driven by an intense desire for authenticity. The key difference in BIF Company’s approach from that of Grierson was the insistence on exploration of personal motivation and psychology within a strictly controlled narrative structure in which the audience was asked to engage emotionally as well as intellectually.

In terms of BIF Company’s role in British and imperial remembrance of the Great War, prior to the new wave of research so neatly summarized in Hammond and Williams’s British Silent Cinema and the Great War, it had received relatively little attention.5 Andrew Kelly barely touched upon its output in his work Cinema and the Great War, and pretty much dismissed all British 1920s war films as lacklustre and ineffective.6 This is largely because his definition of effect, influence and value seems to be the degree to which a film overtly supported a pacifist agenda and therefore ‘the truth’ about the war. Notable exceptions reacting against this standard were Michael Paris in his edited collection, The First World War and Popular Cinema, and Samuel Hynes, who almost uniquely among commentators on high culture, treated the company and its output seriously in A War Imagined, correctly identifying BIF Company’s films as part of an important expression of thought about the war and its meaning.7

This study draws upon a range of different disciplinary approaches and from what might be called the intellectual hybrid of Memory Studies. The dominant approach is historical which means a reliance on evidence, albeit of many different forms, contained in archives, museums, libraries and other repositories. Reflecting the power of the internet to supplement research in unconventional ways, eBay has proven a wonderful resource throwing up snippets, usually ephemera, which were once deemed meaningless or unimportant by archivists. Within the broad umbrella of History it has been necessary to use military, imperial, political, social and cultural history, the history of popular culture and film history. To state the obvious, each privileges a certain standpoint, and one of the most interesting facets of this study has been the plotting of the differences between them and how often the war films of the 1920s, and the output of BIF Company in particular, have fallen between the cracks. Through film history I was nudged in the direction of Film Studies, an equally broad field which I certainly did not attempt to master, but drew upon work about the construction of filmic effect and reception study, an area which has exploded among film historians and historians of popular culture as they try to map out audience reactions. Similarly, the discipline of Literary Studies has been important. As with Film Studies, it is enormously helpful for considering the ways in which texts are consumed by their audiences. Secondly, as this study explores the world of the 1920s and seeks to place a particular set of films within their wider cultural landscape, it was, of course, impossible to avoid the huge number of literary outputs inspired by the war written during the decade, which led me to revisit the groundbreaking works of Paul Fussell and Samuel Hynes and to undertake a crash course on more recent evaluations. All of these methods have contributed to a study of the Great War in memory. Memory is a hugely important concept in the academic realm and the wider world, but defining it is extremely problematic. The development of memory studies within academic studies has sought to bring some uniformity over the number of terms used and their definitions by drawing upon a very broad range of intellectual methods. Historians have been particularly enthusiastic players within this field, and also some of the most carefree in the use of terms, and I very much include myself in that category.

In an effort to bring some clarity and rigour it is therefore necessary to provide a few thoughts on the term ‘memory’ and what it means in this book. First and foremost, this study is built upon the implicit assumption that there was no such thing as a uniform, common, collective memory of the Great War linking every subject of His Majesty King George V in the 1920s. There were, however, numerous agencies, very few of them sponsored by the state or its officially constituted instruments, which sought to express the collective views of their members. Some were highly organized and were effective propagandists such as the British Legion, the Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia or the Ypres League. Some acted on behalf of others and in doing so took on the self-appointed role of spokesman for their constituency. This is perhaps best seen in the work of the St Barnabas Society, a charitable organization which ran pilgrimages for the bereaved, particularly women, enabling them to visit their loved one’s grave or place of commemoration. These groups undertook a wide range of commemorative activity, but had no powers of compulsion forcing people to participate in their projects and events. The huge numbers which participated therefore, overtly, tacitly or unthinkingly, allowed these organizations to express statements on their behalf. Accordingly, British society and culture contained a number of interlocking constructions and interpretations of the war. BIF Company sat in this landscape and offered visual interpretations of the conflict to people. This is where the concepts of memory and reception merge and throw up further methodological issues. No film is value-free and all have some kind of message, but determining what audiences made of films and how deep a footprint they left on their viewers is notoriously problematic. Although reliant on oral history interviews conducted a long-time after the event, Annette Kuhn’s study of cinema-going in the 1930s revealed that the vast majority of her interviewees rarely mentioned specific films and were much more expansive about the general experience of ‘going to the pictures’, the nature of different cinema houses and the types of film they liked.8 It is largely this kind of caveat that caused Jay Winter to urge caution in the use of film as evidence of a collective memory. Although a film might be deemed a common mediator of a common experience, it doesn’t necessarily follow that anybody gave its message a second thought once they left the cinema, undermining the idea of a uniform, common memory.

It might then be asked, what is the point of this study? The answer is manifold. In the first instance, the films can be analysed for what they are in themselves, what they seek to say and how they do it through the range of effects available to filmmakers and exhibitors; of course, in bringing the latter into play, a further variable peculiar to silent film is introduced, for silent films were much more reliant on the in-house effects of the particular cinema houses that exhibited them. For instance, a large cinema often had a full orchestra and special effects teams which enhanced the experience for their viewers. By contrast, audiences at a smaller cinema would have their experience mediated by maybe one or two musicians busy improvising what they deemed appropriate accompaniments. Although these undoubtedly helped the audience with mood and were of great importance to reception, they could be a long way from the producers’ and distributors’ advice for the film’s exhibition.

The content of the films will be analysed not only by examining the extant versions, but by studying the processes behind their production, and pointing out their similarities and differences with other interpretations and statements about the war. This will place the films within both the wider landscape of 1920s war commentary and commemorative activity and the arena of film production and consumption. A central theme of this study is the concept of dual relationships. The first is between the films and other cultural and commemorative manifestations relating to the Great War; the second is where the particular genre or form of the chosen medium stands in relation to the parent medium.9 In other words, this study privileges a particular type of remembrance—the war films made by a specific company—and then places those films within the wider environment of the cinema. This dual approach is necessary before any conclusions as to their impact or significance can be offered. At the very least it is possible to deduce what one particular collective—in this case a film company containing leading figures who were ex-servicemen and veterans of the Western Front—said about the Great War through film. As Jay Winter has remarked, collectives ‘try to come as close to the microphone of public discourse as they can, and this prise de la parole is part of what defines their collective character’. In this instance, the collective is a film company with all the concerns of a commercial operation, but also driven by a self-motivated mission to provide cinematic acts of remembrance and histories of the war.10 In deploying the medium of cinema it had the potential to reach vast numbers of people, and a significant part of the appeal it made to the public was in its relationship to the British state. As will be shown, BIF Company believed, probably for reasons of both commercial prudence and moral authority, that it was vitally important to demonstrate its acceptance by the British War Office and Admiralty as a responsible and respectable company which made its projects worthy of their assistance and support.

The second aim, as outlined above, is to offer possible explanations of the way audiences interpreted BIF Company’s output. The audience we know most about are the critics who gave their opinion, often with great vim. Of course, this privileges the views of a highly unrepresentative audience sample and so their views have to be deployed with care. Although film critics, who were very much an emerging breed in the 1920s, never totally shaped audience reading of a film, they at least fed ideas into the process of consumption. Occasionally, they also give other details such as audience reaction, size and composition. We can therefore gain glimpses of a collective immediate reaction to a film as it played. Far harder to determine is what large numbers of individual viewers felt, as we have very little evidence here other than in the forms of letters to journals and newspapers. Newspapers can also be used for their advertisements which reveal the ways film exhibitors attempted to sell the product. As commercial outputs these films were designed to be box office successes and so every part of the production and selling process was about making them attractive to a mass market. Through attention to the advertisements something about the dominant discourse on the war can be detected, for they were communications deliberately designed to appeal, and by implication not contradict or offend the wider public taste and sensibilities.

We must also remember where these individual films sat within the wider culture of filmmaking and film consumption, other leisure habits and the shadow of the war in disparate walks of life. Film was invested with an almost mystical grip on the hearts and minds of people, particularly lower class people, by political and cultural elites and so they did indeed reify it—the very thing Jay Winter warns modern commentators to avoid when studying film and memory. By considering the discourses of the elite we can also see how film, and in particular BIF Company’s output, was viewed as a weapon in a cultural struggle for the soul of both the war and the cultural and economic bonds of the British Empire. The study is therefore as much about the discourses surrounding the films as the films themselves. When combined, it will, hopefully, address some of the criteria highlighted by Winter. He urged ‘a more complex and textured approach to works which are simultaneously artistic, thematic, formulaic, commercial, and political. And, above all, visual . . . the visuality of film is [often] given less attention than its textuality [by historians]’.11

Many of these themes were addressed in the essays collected and edited by Michael Hammond and Michael Williams, British Silent Cinema and the Great War (2011). In her essay, ‘Remembering the War in 1920s British Cinema’, Christine Gledhill persuasively suggests that cinematic ‘remembering involves two processes: imagining (for those not at the front) and assigning meaning’.12 Lawrence Napper posited subtle graduations within these processes by using the terms ‘remembrance’, ‘re-membering’ and ‘recollection’. For Napper, ‘remembrance’ is the scenario in which the private memory is connected to a ‘public discourse of meaning’ such as the individual participating in a public act of commemoration. ‘Re-membering’ was the process of placing individual memories into a cohesive narrative. He argues this can be seen in the work of BIF Company, a concept this study very much supports. Finally, ‘recollection’ in cinematic terms grew out of ‘re-membering’ through the reconstruction of events, scenarios and locations which could be traumatic, every-day or comic, and again can be seen in the output of BIF Company.13 As Michael Williams points out in his study of Sinclair Hill’s 1928, The Guns of Loos, these films contain both trauma and nostalgia. For Williams both are a ‘resistance to history, disturbing and rejecting the present with images of the past’.14

A massive problem for all veterans was not just the phenomenon of survivor guilt, but the deeper guilt of actually remembering the war with fondness. Recollection of its enjoyable, escapist, exciting, sociable aspects had the potential to spark feelings of nostalgia, which must have induced guilt when set against the misery and loss caused by the war. It was the combined elements of sheer survival, camaraderie and pride in their achievements which led to Armistice Day having a dual nature in the early twenties divided between solemn remembrance and joyful celebration, ex-servicemen seemingly comfortable with both. However, the celebratory element which included victory balls and dances was driven out of existence by the mid-twenties largely at the insistence of the bereaved, particularly the female bereaved. A hybrid replacement came in the form of the British Legion Festival of Remembrance, first held in 1927. For ex-servicemen it was a scenario in which they could indulge in all the old songs and slang, but within the controlled atmosphere of a non-party-political organization with the Prince of Wales as its President.15 All of the paraphernalia of the armed forces and their traditions were included, flags and banners, medals, insignia, crests and badges, but they were in tension with the by turns cheeky, sentimental and self-deprecating lyrics of the songs. It was a celebration of unheroic heroism, which was very much the register of BIF Company’s output. Broadcast by the BBC, the Festival of Remembrance allowed ex-servicemen to say ‘this is our private world, recalling our old private world, and you can eavesdrop on it’. BIF Company’s films said ‘this was their private world, and you can now look at it and understand it’. In watching the films a friend or loved one could take the fragments of what they knew about their veteran, living or dead, and reconstruct the war. BIF Company gave them the wider framework for their snippets of knowledge and information, and in a film like Ypres (1925) with its deliberately episodic nature, it both reflected their own fragmentary knowledge and contextualized it at the same time. A vast, public, animated photographic album was held up to be compared and contrasted with the private discourses of an ex-serviceman, his family or the bereaved. But, whether BIF Company’s films, or any other interpretation of the war, offered a soldier the opportunity to escape trauma by reliving it in a controlled manner is highly debatable. Veterans who wrote up their war experiences often claimed they did it as an act of catharsis, but very few of them seem to have escaped the war’s lingering hold on them through writing about it.

Taking the films as acts of remembrance also means exploring agency, power and motivation. By focusing on BIF Company’s œuvre this means studying those who made the films and the processes behind production; it also means determining the reception of the film by those who formally responded to them, usually as professional journalists employed by mass circulation newspapers, and through studying the much less extensive archive of responses from ‘ordinary’ viewers. Within these overarching approaches, the study has to take account of both the specific circumstances and status of each individual and any organizations or groups to which they were answerable or belonged. This demands awareness of class and economic status, gender, individual life histories and age of each individual and the corporate agenda or identity of any group to which they belonged. To borrow from terminology often used in gender, imperial and post-colonial studies, it is also about dominant and subaltern discourses and narratives in which agency and motivation are crucial. This creates space in which to explore the phenomenon of collective remembrance and the extent to which doing something as a group was motivated by common beliefs which were then buttressed by the experience.

However, studying cinema-going as an act of collective remembrance throws up a significant caveat. When people went to the cinema, especially to see a BIF Company film, to what extent did they go consciously knowing that they were joining other people who felt it was not merely a pleasurable leisure time experience, which was the commercial cinema’s raison d’être, but as participation in a collective act carried out as a duty? There is evidence of groups, particularly ex-servicemen’s organizations, attending the cinema to see BIF Company’s films as a collective, and spokesmen from these groups occasionally addressed the audience or made some other kind of statement to the press thus indicating some sort of group response, or at least a response which the members were disinclined to dissent from publicly. BIF Company made the cinema a remembrance site. Entirely different to war memorials, war cemeteries and battlefields which became sacred ground, BIF Company’s films turned the cinema into a temporary sacred space in which they invited the audience to engage in a remembrance act. Just like the two minutes’ silence, that act involved moments of solitude and communal experience at one and the same time. By turns audiences were left alone to contemplate in the semi-darkness of the cinema the images on the screen and then joined in collective singing along with piano and orchestra, cheering and clapping the heroic scenes, laughing at the comic interludes and sometimes sobbing. A constant dialogue took place between the moments when the internal, individual memories ticked away within a communal framework of remembrance during the two minutes’ silence on Armistice Day; how much greater was that effect when someone sat in silence for the running time of a silent film bathed in the added sounds of music and special effects? It is impossible to provide a definitive answer to this question, as there is not enough evidence, but we can find scraps. What can be demonstrated far more boldly is the message delivered by other agencies, particularly journalists in newspapers, as to what their readership should think about the experience.

Anyone trying to understand what people thought about the war and how they remembered it is very quickly drawn to the large number of studies analysing the war and literature. Arguably, the outpouring of literature, particularly poetry, was a phenomenon more prominent in the British Empire than for any other combatant, and as a topic it has attracted a wide range of commentators. Given the enormous literary output its primacy as a legacy of the conflict is understandable, but if relied upon as the only expression it becomes problematic. Randall Stevenson’s highly thought-provoking recent study, Literature and the Great War 1914–1918, shows an awareness of over-investment in literature based upon the wartime realities of Britain. Commenting on the way in which people engaged with the war he noted the shift from the dominance of the printed word, which he encapsulates in the tremendous impact of the 1916 film, The Battle of the Somme.16 The studies that emphasize the literary legacy often create a metanarrative about the nature of the war and its interpretation. Its first component is to stress the almost insuperable challenge the war threw down to literature: how was the indescribable described? From this position of communicative breakdown, it is often argued that those who took up and met the challenge did so not only to engage with the awful reality of war, but also with the moral imperative of condemning its futility, stupidity and immorality. This leads to the conclusion that the interpretations produced by such writers and poets became the dominant, accepted vision of the war shared by the vast majority of the population. Over-reliance on a certain kind of literature can then imply that it contained the objective reality of the Great War as opposed to other, pernicious or misleading, accounts. Again, Stevenson has perceptively picked a different path in emphasizing a point made by the war veteran writer, H.M. Tomlinson, ‘the Great War was almost as many different wars as there were men in it’.17 Because much of this material was produced towards the end of the 1920s there is often an emphasis on the cultural silence about the war that lasted until the great writers had percolated their thoughts and felt ready to commence work. It is my contention that no such silence existed: the war was constantly talked about, written about, painted, modelled, exhibited, broadcast, re-enacted; its battle sites visited, memorialized and commemorated. Through a close examination of a particular set of films and the reactions to them, this study contends that interpretations of the war in the 1920s cannot easily be delineated into types and that competing narratives and discourses abounded. Cinema was just one of the many ways in which the war was imagined across the entire 1920s. The only silence came every year at eleven o’clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and that silence was a massive annual reminder of the war’s looming presence in everyone’s life.

Unsubtle emphasis on a particular type of literature creates the impression of a false division between what might be labelled heralds of realistic horror and pedlars of romantic myths about war. Against this, the war films of the twenties can be seen as part of a balancing act for they often buttressed traditional images of war whilst never denying its human cost. The fact that these films appear to have been accepted as realistic and authentic by their audiences reveals a far less clear-cut division between types of commentator and audience reaction. The producers of war films, and those who commented on the product, often stated that in the depiction of the true horrors of war there was a moral which all could grasp: no more war. However, war films can be said to be duplicitous insofar as part of their box office appeal was illustrating moments of great excitement and drama, but then providing a very thin veneer of pacifist sentiment to escape censure as glorifiers of war. The sheer fact that the film companies supported this delicate balancing act shows the sensitivity over presenting graphic images of war. But, this was no confidence trick played on an unsuspecting public. As this study will argue, BIF Company, like other commercial companies, made products to appeal to a mass audience in order to make money. Although BIF Company appears to have been more ideologically driven than many other commercial concerns, being genuinely committed to a patriotic cause, it still had to make profits. As such at least part of its thinking was the hard-headed one of what would appeal. Therefore, it can be argued that by making commercially successful war films which denied that the war was a wasteful folly, something can be deduced about attitudes towards the war. Public acceptance of these films probably involved a degree of mental gymnastics similar to the sales approach, insofar as the audiences bought into the thrills, glory, pride, sorrow and pacifist morals in the comforting belief that the result of such horror was an enduring lesson for mankind. It reveals an acceptance that there was not a watertight division between ‘truthful-realism’ emphasizing horror and futility and ‘romantic-escapists’ stressing traditional images of war and soldiering. Those who privilege the type of literature emerging in the late 1920s often ignore the rest of the cultural landscape in which film sits with such importance; and with it they ignore the existence of a different, although sometimes only subtly so, discourse about the war. Horror and large-scale death could be portrayed and yet not axiomatically mean waste and disenchantment.

A further issue is the supposed chasm dividing civilian and combatant, opening during the war and which was unbridgeable by its end. It can be crudely reductionist, with all soldiers perceived as frontline combatants engaged in continual desperate struggles, and civilians as uncomprehending, indifferent, self-centred fools. An alternative, but equally damning, judgement is to portray civilians as wilfully refusing to face up to the truth through their willing acceptance of a propaganda palliative which exempted them from critical reflection. Such judgements strip people of agency, independent thought and insight. Civilians knew more about the realities of frontline war than has sometimes been understood, from, among other sources, the letters of friends and loved ones serving in the forces. As Jessica Meyer and Michael Roper have shown, letters from service personnel are full of variables.18 Content and style were constructed not only to ensure passage past the military censor, but also for the particular recipient in mind. Meyer concludes that the vast majority of men conceived of themselves as warriors playing a vital role defending their homes and family, which was the underlying zeitgeist of most letters.19 Existing in a zone of competing, but overlapping, interpretations, civilian attitudes and insights should be assigned with equal care. A more subtle line might be to see the acceptance of the ‘official’ information stream as a comforter which made sense of appalling personal trauma and loss. Far from seeing the war and its immediate aftermath as a space in which one register and diction was exposed, found wanting and redundant because of the supremacy of the combatant soldier as the defining war experience, perhaps a better explanation lies in examining in very close detail the precise time and space in which any given set of words or images was deemed applicable or appropriate. If former combatants insisted on the sole right to interpret the war, then ex-servicemen’s fears that they would soon be forgotten by wider society would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Determining who had the right to speak and in what language did not mean the unconditional supremacy of one form of communication or diction over another or even that all ex-servicemen wanted it that way. In fact, it can be argued, especially once the war was over, that the high diction, the big words, are exactly what the now former soldiers expected civilians to use about them and their experiences. If the ‘Big Words’, as Robert Graves famously called them, inscribed on war memorials and repeated on Armistice Day each year, were utterly rejected by ex-servicemen, then it becomes almost impossible to understand their presence in huge numbers at the Cenotaph, the way they interacted in the British Legion and regimental associations, their participation in mass pilgrimages to memorials and the former battlefields. This is not to say that they were there solely because of a total investment in these concepts or that they never found things to dispute in them, but it does reveal the fluidity and complexity of the remembrance and the way in which the war was interpreted.

The privileging of a certain kind of literary output over other cultural expressions, particularly film, originates in part from the self-declared superiority of author-veterans. Gilbert Frankau in his novel, Peter Jackson: Cigar Merchant. A Romance of Married Life (1920) announced:

The ‘Somme Offensive’ in 1916 is ancient history now: a thing of Staff-maps and war-diaries, of barren paper and profitless arguments, flat as the faked film of it