Celluloid War Memorials: The British Instructional Films Company and the Memory of the Great War by Mark Connelly (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Celluloid War Memorials: The British Instructional Films Company and the Memory of the Great War by Mark Connelly Martin Stollery Mark Connelly. Celluloid War Memorials: The British Instructional Films Company and the Memory of the Great War University of Exeter Press, 2016. Hbk, 339 pp, ISBN 9780859899987; pdf, 339 pages, ISBN 9780859890526; epub, 339 p, ISBN 9780859890823. Books about British Second World War cinema and British film representations of that war have for a long time been more prominent, and produced in larger numbers, than their equivalents relating to the First World War. No doubt this relates to the firmly established popular memory of the Second World War, and the cinema associated with it, as Britain's 'finest hour', compared to more negative ingrained assumptions about the 1914-18 war. The centenary of the First World War, however, has further encouraged emerging new scholarship on British production of cinema during the war and subsequent British film representations of it. Mark Connelly's Celluloid War Memorials: The British Instructional Films Company and the Memory of the Great War, which focuses in detail on a cycle of war reconstruction films produced by British Instructional Films (BIF) during the 1920s, therefore usefully expands upon the work recently published in this field by film historians such as Michael Hammond and Lawrence Napper. BIF became a key player within the British film industry of the 1920s as a result of the success of its cycle of war reconstruction films, endorsed and supported by various branches of the military, and promoted on this basis, as well as in terms of their meticulous research and authenticity. These films mixed archival footage with re-enactments of key moments in various campaigns, as well as maps and models providing strategic overviews. Connelly devotes a chapter to one or two of each of the films within this cycle: The Battle of Jutland (1921), Armageddon (1923), Zeebrugge (1924), Ypres (1925), Mons (1926), The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands (1927). A key part of his argument is that cultural historians of the decade after the First World War should refocus their attention away from a selective emphasis upon a relatively narrow range of canonical literary texts, such as Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That (1929), and from 'a false division between what might be labelled heralds of realistic horror and pedlars of romantic myths about war' (10). For Connelly, the BIF war reconstruction films, often released to coincide with Armistice Day or the anniversaries of the battles they represented, belong in the sizeable cultural space between these polarities. They performed an important memorial function, framing the war as meaningful, celebrating valour and endurance, while also embracing pacifism and being lauded by supportive critics for eschewing what they perceived as the facile, vainglorious heroics of American war films. Celluloid War Memorials is the first book solely devoted to BIF's war reconstruction film cycle. As such, and given Connelly's expertise as a military historian, the book analyses how specific films were positioned within the contests around the remembrance of key campaigns and battles that took place during the 1920s. For example, Connelly explores how Ypres' representation of the resilience and humour of ordinary soldiers differs from more negative assessments of these battles, epitomised in Siegfried Sassoon's now much quoted lines from 1920: 'I died in hell - (They called it Passchendaele)'. Rather than tracking sentiments within the literary elite, Connelly is more interested in how the BIF war reconstruction film cycle resonated with the many veterans and their families, serving as celluloid monuments to struggles and sacrifices of which they wished to be proud. The book's opening chapter sets out the usual caveats about too easily assuming that published sources, such as publicity material and newspaper reviews, reflect the feelings and views of broader audiences who left few written traces of their responses. Within these acknowledged limitations, Connelly surveys critical responses to the films from around the British empire, arguing with ample evidence that they typically buttressed a 'supra-identity' of imperial belonging—which contained 'room for moments of local pride' (142)—in Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, at least as far as memorialising the First World War...