World War I in Film

Abstract

World War I (1914–1918) was to motion pictures as the American Civil War (1861–1865) was to still photography. The Great War brought together many technological innovations foreshadowed in the American war. The moving picture was one such innovation. As Paul Virilio observed, in War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception (Virilio 1989, cited under Critical Overviews and Reference Works), the synchronized frame-by-frame advance of film through a projector imitated the advance of the cartridge belt through a machine gun. Framing a scene or editing during postproduction became an integral part of strategy and tactics: the projector became a weapon and the movie theater a battlefield. Governments realized quickly how valuable the cinema could be in explaining the meaning and experience of the war to both soldiers and civilians by encouraging enlistments, defining the nation’s goals, and vilifying the enemy. Filmmaking became part of war-making through documentary films, newsreels, and film narratives produced by governments or by private film companies. During and after the war, documentary and narrative (fictional) films served to reflect and shape the collective memory of the war through the range of the war-film genre—combat films, propaganda films, antiwar films, gender-focused home-front films, war-based musicals, war comedies, and films focusing on the life of the war veteran. How do we assess these films as historical “documents”? Some film scholars look at historical accuracy to assess verisimilitude. Others look at the war film primarily as a metaphor, as more representative of the zeitgeist of the period in which they are made than the war in fact. How do films influence national self-identity and individual, collective, and contested memory? For example: All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) reflects the antiwar spirit of the post-WWI era. Le Grande Illusion (1937) reveals the political climate of 1930s France. Sergeant York (1941) anticipates American participation in WWII. Oh! What a Lovely War (1969) says more about the anti-establishment movement of the Vietnam era than about the First World War. The Lighthorsemen (1987) is about defining Australian national identity. WWI films can also be assessed by viewing them in the context of two schools of historical interpretation: the orthodox view, reflected in Paul Fussell’s book The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), sees WWI as meaningless horror and stupidity; the revisionist view, as in Brian Bond’s lectures in The Unquiet Western Front (2002), challenges the Great War “myth” in an attempt to rescue the narrative from the mud and the muck.