The dead

All images in this post are frame grabs from the DVD of The Battle of the Somme (1916)

Is it right to let us see men dying? Yes. Is it a sacrilege? No. If our spirit be purged of curiosity and purified with awe the sight is hallowed. There is no sacrilege if we are fit for the seeing … I say it is regenerative and resurrective for us to see war stripped bare. Heaven knows that we need the supreme katharsis, the ultimate cleansing. We grow indifferent too quickly … These are dreadful sights but their dreadfulness is as wholesome as Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’. It shakes the kaleidoscope of war into human reality … I say that these pictures are good for us.

Those words were written by James Douglas in The Star (25 September 1916, p. 2). He was reacting to a screening of the film The Battle of the Somme, a film whose impact upon audiences was unprecedented and – it could be argued – has never been repeated. Douglas, like many commentators, was trying to rationalise what he saw, to express the meaning and to find justification for a film whose stark images of the war that was still raging shocked audiences into a realisation of sacrifice and death. It was the images of death in the film that so disturbed many. If soldiers were not shown being killed (and some apparently were), then every face that stared at the camera was likewise facing death. The audience had been made witness to this, complicit in the soldiers’ fate.

While some called for the film not to be shown, for most it was justified, to the point of becoming almost a moral obligation. Through watching The Battle of the Somme, they gained a sense of the enormity of what troops in their name were undergoing, what the sacrifice (the optimum word) was that army and nation were making. Douglas’ evocation of religious feeling put the film in terms that many would understand. It is not a pure reaction to the film itself – that is not possible. Instead he saw the film through his own thoughts on the meaning of war. Any image, any film, is identified by us through expectations and understandings that are informed by time, place and culture. The Battle of the Somme in 1916 was a different film to The Battle of the Somme in 2008.

This we can now judge through the release of the film for the first time on DVD, produced by the Imperial War Museum, whose archive preserves the film. Alert to the complexities of authenticity, the IWM presents the film in a form that encourages us to question how we see what we see. Firstly, the film (for which no original negative survives) has undergone a digital restoration which has brought out details which were hitherto obscured. Even for those familiar with the film (and all of us must be familiar with it to some extent, given the widespread use of sequences from the film in television documentaries etc.), it is like seeing the film anew. But the major coup is the music. We are given two music tracks. One is a modern score by Laura Rossi, a symphonic work for full orchestra. The other is a recreation by Stephen Horne of a likely original score, taken from a contemporary cue sheet which suggested the sort of musical passages musicians might want to adopt in accompanying the film in 1916.

The latter will amaze many. Jaunty marches and popular airs accompany scenes of troops marching to the killing fields of the Somme, the scenes of battle and their aftermath. What were they thinking of in 1916? It is a complicated question to answer. Partly the musicians of the time were responding to what might have seemed just another war actuality film, which required patriotic accompaniment. But also the audience of the time saw heroism and uplift where we, after almost a century of awful contemplation of the futility of that war, bolstered by poems, novels and films, see something profoundly pitiable. It is with consciousness of such modern expectations, but equally with a sense of being true to the film’s original vision, that Rossi supplies a rich, subtle and binding score that connects 2008 to 1916. Which of these two very different scores will you prefer to listen to, and why? Or might your preferred option be to witness the film in silence?

The digital restoration, which allows us to see so much, is perhaps most striking when it comes to the famous ‘over the top’ sequence. This is the part of the film that will be most familiar. It is shown on television (at least in the UK) every time a shot is needed to evoke the First World War. Troops clamber over the top of a slope, then march slowly over barbed wire away from the camera, a couple of men falling down as they do so, shot dead.

Oh God, they’re dead!

a woman is reported to have exclaimed in a cinema showing the film, and it was this sequence that aroused the greatest comment at the time, the greatest need to explain the film’s significance. But they were not dead. As is now known, the sequence is a fake, set up in a trench mortar battery school some time afterwards, simply because the actual scenes taken of troops going over the top were deemed disappointing. At the time, no one knew of this subterfuge, and as far as reception is concerned, it did not matter. People believed they were witnessing death on screen; and producers and exhibitors felt this to be an acceptable thing to show. Which you may think is extraordinary.

What seldom gets shown on television is the shot that immediately follows the ‘over the top’ sequence in the film. This shows genuine footage of troops going over the top. But we see them only in the far distance. The cameramen (there were just two, J.B. McDowell and Geoffrey Malins, who shot both ‘over the top’ sequences) were greatly restricted in what they could shoot. Their hand-cranked cameras had single 50mm lenses with poor depth of field, they had no telephoto lenses, the orthochromatic film stock was slow, making filming action in the distance or in poor light difficult. But there was also military control and official censorship, each preventing them from filming anything other than officially-sanctioned images. And there was the danger. The most obvious indication of the ‘fake’ nature of the first sequence is that the cameraman would have been in absolute peril of his life had it been genuine. But for the above shot, Malins is a long way off, and far in the distance we can just pick out tiny figures on the horizon – British troops, coming over the top and marching into no-man’s land. Looking closer into the middle ground, the digital restoration now reveals to us a sight not previously detected in the film: a number of troops proceeding leftwards, one or two of whom fall down. Oh God, they’re dead.

Do we want to look that closely? Can they really seem dead when viewed at such a distance? Is the death we seek not in the falling bodies, or even in the corpses seen later in the film, but rather in the eyes of the still living, whose fate awaits them, and who are all dead now of course. That was a line the film historian Denis Gifford would sometimes come out with when we were in the basement theatre at the British Film Institute, watching some collection of British silent shorts. The figures would parade to and fro, some of whom he knew, having interviewed them in the 1960s, but then that sad moment of realisation:

They’re all dead now, of course.

This is a poignancy that seems particularly linked to the non-fiction film. Dramatic films, of whatever age, are attempting to entertain. Either they do or they don’t. But the film of actuality trades on the depiction of life, and then the distance created by time. This was recognised even in 1916. Sir Henry Newbolt wrote a poem inspired by the experience of watching the film, entitled ‘The War Films’, but made memorable by its opening line:

O living pictures of the dead,
O songs without a sound,
O fellowship whose phantom tread
Hallows a phantom ground —
How in a gleam have these revealed
The faith we had not found.

The Battle of the Somme captures the point of loss, the ghosts on the screen, the living pictures of the dead. Of course it is a deeply partial record. It shows no real fighting beyond shellfire, no serious injuries, no pain, little hatred (look for the shove that one British soldier gives to a captured German who stumbles pass him). And of course it shows only the Allied point of view (the Germans would respond with their own film, Bei unseren Helden an der Somme, in 1917). But we recognise it for what it is able to show, not for what it leaves out. It is a profoundly memorably expression of the hopes and fears of its age.

The Battle of the Somme was filmed by Malins and McDowell, two experienced newsreel cameramen, who knew well how to capture plain packages of actuality. McDowell was the senior of the two, who ran his own film company (British & Colonial). Malins had been filming on the war front for longer, and is the better known, not least for his somewhat vainglorious memoir, How I Filmed the War (available from The Internet Archive). Malins co-edited the film with Charles Urban, to whom credit should be given for seeing that the footage Malins and McDowell has shot would work best at feature length, rather than as a series of ten-minute shorts which had been the practice up til then. His vision gave the film the presence it needed to capture the audience that it found. The producer was William Jury, and the film was made for the British Topical Committee for War Films, a trade body working under War Office sanction, which would be replaced by the War Office Cinematograph Committee once the film started to enjoy huge success. It has been estimated that it was seen by 20,000,000 people in the UK in six weeks – almost half the population.

The DVD comes with the alternative music scores, commentaries, interviews with archivists and musicians, and five ‘missing’ scenes and fragments. We do not know what the original The Battle of the Somme was like exactly; the version that survives was re-edited, and the footage used in multiple other films, during and after the war. Rather than insert these extra scenes where it is not quite certain they should go, the IWM has chosen to present these (without music) separately. There is a booklet as well, with information on the film’s production, reception, restoration and particularly its music. A website, www.iwm.org.uk/somme-film, will provide viewing notes, additional information, suggestions for further reading and teaching resources. It is a magnificent achievement, one whose influence on research, teaching and the appreciation of First World War history is likely to be considerable. The only possible disappointment is the menu, which simply divides the film into its five parts, where a more detailed use of chapters could have helpfully guided researchers to particular points of action, regiments, location etc.

More will follow. The booklet notes the publication next year of Alastair H. Fraser, Andrew Robertshaw, and Steve Roberts’ Ghosts on the Somme, a book which analyses the film in great detail, overturning some of the traditional understanding of who filmed what, which regiments are shown, and which locations are featured, while confirming that the vast majority of the film is genuine actuality. There is still more to be discovered about The Battle of the Somme. It is a film we will have to return to, again and again.

The DVD is available from the Imperial War Museum Shop (Region 0, PAL, duration 74 mins with 58 mins extras).

A CD of Laura Rossi’s score is available from Virtuosa Records.

On the weekend of 15/16 November 2008 there will be two screenings of the film at the IWM in London, the ‘original’ score on Saturday, the Rossi score (not played live) on the Sunday. Both screenings are free, and start at 14.00.

The Battle of the Somme has been recognised by UNESCO by being accepted for inscription on its Memory of the World register.

If there are angels

The Gold Rush

Too many things happening and too little time is leaving the Bioscope a little neglected of late, for which apologies. The colour series will return, and some more substantial posts, once I’ve got some other things out of the way. But in the meanwhile, let us have a cultural interlude. It has been too long since we had a poem for your delectation, so here is a particular favourite: Polish poet and Nobel Prize winner Wisława Szymborska’s 1993 poem, ‘Slapstick’:

If there are angels,
I doubt they read
our novels
concerning thwarted hopes.

I’m afraid, alas,
they never touch the poems
that bear our grudges against the world.

The rantings and railings
of our plays
must drive them, I suspect,
to distraction.

Off-duty, between angelic -
i.e. inhuman – occupations,
they watch instead
our slapstick
from the age of silent film.

To our dirge wailers,
garment renders,
and teeth gnashers,
they prefer, I suppose,
that poor devil
who grabs the drowning man by his toupee
or, starving, devours his own shoelaces
with gusto.

From the waist up, starch and aspirations;
below, a startled mouse
runs down his trousers.
I’m sure
that’s what they call real entertainment.

A crazy chase in circles
ends up pursuing the pursuer.
The light at the end of the tunnel
turns out to be a tiger’s eye.
A hundred disasters
mean a hundred cosmic somersaults
turned over a hundred abysses.

If there are angels,
they must, I hope,
find this convincing,
this merriment dangling from terror,
not even crying Save me Save me
since all of this takes place in silence.

I can even imagine
that they clap their wings
and tears run from their eyes
from laughter, if nothing else.

From The End and the Beginning (1993), trans. Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh

As the shoelace-devouring Chaplin put it (at least I think it was him), ‘life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot’. It all depends where you are standing, and who is observing.

God kicks our backsides

It’s been a while since we had any poetry on The Bioscope. While browsing through the fine Old Poetry site, I came across by A.S.J. Tessimond (1902-1962), a British Imagist poet whose name, I’m ashamed to say, I’d not come across before now. This poem of his, entitled ‘Chaplin’, dates from 1934. It rather appeals to me:

The sun, a heavy spider, spins in the thirsty sky.
The wind hides under cactus leaves, in doorway corners. Only the wry

Small shadow accompanies Hamlet-Petrouchka’s march – the slight
Wry sniggering shadow in front of the morning, turning at noon, behind towards night.

The plumed cavalcade has passed to tomorrow, is lost again;
But the wisecrack-mask, the quick-flick-fanfare of the cane remain.

Diminuendo of footsteps even is done:
Only remain, Don Quixote, hat, cane, smile and sun.

Goliaths fall to our sling, but craftier fates than these
Lie ambushed – malice of open manholes, strings in the dark and falling trees.

God kicks our backsides, scatters peel on the smoothest stair;
And towering centaurs steal the tulip lips, the aureoled hair,

While we, craned from the gallery, throw our cardboard flowers
And our feet jerk to tunes not played for ours.

Not just Chaplin as beleaguered everyman, but Chaplin as Don Quixote, the person we all might actually be but would never want to be. Now that I like (though it’s a conceit that has occured to others). There are more of Tessimond’s poems on The Filter^ blog.

Alas, poor Bunny

A few years ago, I was sent a catalogue by the photographic agency, Corbis. Among its many images denoting emotions, there was one of a portly, middle-aged man with bright beaming face, categorised under something like ’surprise’ or ‘happiness’. The person had no further identification. The photograph was of John Bunny, once arguably the most popular and recognised person worldwide, now reduced to complete anonymity.

I can’t find the photograph now on the Corbis web site (which does have one picture of Bunny identified as him). So maybe someone discovered the injustice. I hope so. For John Bunny really was the most popular of silent stars in his day, and the way in which his popularity has so dramatically faded ought to be a lesson to anyone whose head gets turned by the notion of celebrity.

John Bunny (1863?-1915) was the son of a British naval officer who settled in New York, where his son ran away from home to join a minstrel show and then became a stage actor and director. In 1910 he turned to the movies, joining the Vitagraph Company, and almost instantly became a star. He portrayed a rotund, merry, earthy figure, whose genial manner and aptitude for comic characterisation, sometimes touched with pathos, endeared him to millions. He appeared in over 200 shorts between 1910-1914, with such titles as Bunny Buys a Harem, And His Wife Came Back and Bunny’s Honeymoon. He was often teamed with the comically angular Flora Finch. He made some films in Britain in 1913, including Pickwick Papers (he was a natural Mr Pickwick), scenes from which were filmed just around the corner from where I am typing this now. His death in 1915 made headlines around the world.

Why mention Bunny now? Simply because of yesterday’s post with the Vachel Lindsay poems, for there is one last poem by Lindsay on the film stars of the early cinema period which I haven’t given you as yet. It’s the second part of a two-part sequence, the first of which commememorates the actor Edwin Booth, renowned for his performance as Hamlet. For the second part, Lindsay laments the death of John Bunny as if he were Yorick, Hamlet’s fool:

John Bunny, Motion Picture Comedian

In which he is remembered in similitude, by reference to Yorick, the king’s jester, who died when Hamlet and Ophelia were children

Yorick is dead. Boy Hamlet walks forlorn
Beneath the battlements of Elsinore.
Where are those oddities and capers now
That used to “set the table on a roar”?

And do his bauble-bells beyond the clouds
Ring out, and shake with mirth the planets bright?
No doubt he brings the blessed dead good cheer,
But silence broods on Elsinore tonight.

That little elf, Ophelia, eight years old,
Upon her battered doll’s staunch bosom weeps.
(“O best of men, that wove glad fairy-tales.”)
With tear-burned face, at last the darling sleeps.

Hamlet himself could not give cheer or help,
Though firm and brave, with his boy-face controlled.
For every game they started out to play
Yorick invented, in the days of old.

The times are out of joint! O cursed spite!
The noble jester Yorick comes no more.
And Hamlet hides his tears in boyish pride
By some lone turret-stair of Elsinore.

Bunny died of liver failure on 26 April 1915. Today, only a handful of his films survive: A Cure for Pokeritis, Bunny at the Derby, The Pickwick Papers, Bunny all at Sea, Her Crowning Glory, The Wooing of Winifred, and a few more. In truth, his real comic appeal died with him, and it is worth seeing Bunny at Sea for its scenes taken on board a ship where real life passengers laugh delightedly at Bunny’s antics, giving us some indications of the roots of his popular appeal.

Vachel Lindsay wrote evocatively of the first Bunny picture that he saw:

It is a story of high life below stairs. The hero is the butler at a governor’s reception. John Bunny’s work as this man is a delightful piece of acting. The servants are growing tipsier downstairs, but the more afraid of the chief functionary every time he appears, frozen into sobriety by his glance. At the last moment this god of the basement catches them at their worst and gives them a condescending but forgiving smile. The lid comes off completely. He himself has been imbibing. His surviving dignity in waiting on the governor’s guests is worthy of Goldsmith and Sheridan. The film should be reissued in time as a Bunny memoiral.

Whichever title it might be, it’s a lost film now…

Poems by Vachel Lindsay

It’s been a while since we had poetry on The Bioscope. So, to make up, here are three poems by Vachel Lindsay (1879-1931), who if not quite the poet laureate of the silent cinema was undoubtedly the poet at the time most drawn to the medium. For film historians, he may be best known as the author of The Art of the Motion Picture, a somewhat high-flown early stab at film theory, published in 1915 and still in print.

But Lindsay is best known for his poetry, with its jazz-inflected rhythms and contemporary themes. He wrote three poems on actresses who appeared in Biograph films before the First World War: Blanche Sweet, Mae Marsh and Mary Pickford. “I am the one poet”, he wrote, “who wrote them songs when they were Biograph heroines, before their names were put on the screen, or the name of their director”. That’s probably not strictly true, since he had to know their names to be able to put them in the titles of the poems, but nevertheless the poems are at one with his treatment of the moving picture as an art form.

Anyway, here they are: one interesting, one quite good, and one a little nauseating.

Blanche Sweet: Moving-Picture Actress
(After seeing the reel called “Oil and Water”)

Beauty has a throne-room
In our humorous town,
Spoiling its hob-goblins,
Laughing shadows down.
Rank musicians torture
Ragtime ballads vile,
But we walk serenely
Down the odorous aisle.
We forgive the squalor
And the boom and squeal
For the Great Queen flashes
From the moving reel.

Just a prim blonde stranger
In her early day,
Hiding brilliant weapons,
Too averse to play,
Then she burst upon us
Dancing through the night.
Oh, her maiden radiance,
Veils and roses white.
With new powers, yet cautious,
Not too smart or skilled,
That first flash of dancing
Wrought the thing she willed:-
Mobs of us made noble
By her strong desire,
By her white, uplifting,
Royal romance-fire.

Though the tin piano
Snarls its tango rude,
Though the chairs are shaky
And the dramas crude,
Solemn are her motions,
Stately are her wiles,
Filling oafs with wisdom,
Saving souls with smiles;
‘Mid the restless actors
She is rich and slow.
She will stand like marble,
She will pause and glow,
Though the film is twitching,
Keep a peaceful reign,
Ruler of her passion,
Ruler of our pain!

Mae Marsh, Motion Picture Actress

I

The arts are old, old as the stones
From which man carved the sphinx austere.
Deep are the days the old arts bring:
Ten thousand years of yesteryear.

II

She is madonna in an art
As wild and young as her sweet eyes:
A frail dew flower from this hot lamp
That is today’s divine surprise.

Despite raw lights and gloating mobs
She is not seared: a picture still:
Rare silk the fine director’s hand
May weave for magic if he will.

When ancient films have crumbled like
Papyrus rolls of Egypt’s day,
Let the dust speak: “Her pride was high,
All but the artist hid away:

“Kin to the myriad artist clan
Since time began, whose work is dear.”
The deep new ages come with her,
Tomorrow’s years of yesteryear.

To Mary Pickford: Moving-Picture Actress
(On hearing she was leaving the moving-pictures for the stage)

Mary Pickford, doll divine,
Year by year, and every day
At the moving-picture play,
You have been my valentine.

Once a free-limbed page in hose,
Baby-Rosalind in flower,
Cloakless, shrinking, in that hour
How our reverent passion rose,
How our fine desire you won.
Kitchen-wench another day,
Shapeless, wooden every way.
Next, a fairy from the sun.

Once you walked a grown-up strand
Fish-wife siren, full of lure,
Snaring with devices sure
Lads who murdered on the sand.
But on most days just a child
Dimpled as no grown-folk are,
Cold of kiss as some north star,
Violet from the valleys wild.
Snared as innocence must be,
Fleeing, prisoned, chained, half-dead -
At the end of tortures dread
Roaring Cowboys set you free.

Fly, O song, to her to-day,
Like a cowboy cross the land.
Snatch her from Belasco’s hand
And that prison called Broadway.

All the village swains await
One dear lily-girl demure,
Saucy, dancing, cold and pure,
Elf who must return in state.

To Mary Pickford and Blanche Sweet were first published in The Congo and Other Poems (1914). Mae Marsh was first published in The Chinese Nightingale and Other Poems (1917). The film Oil and Water was made in 1913. David Belasco was the theatre impresario who discovered Gladys Smith and gave her the stage name Mary Pickford.

O living pictures of the dead

Having posted that item on Geoffrey Malins’ book How I Filmed the War on his experiences of filming The Battle of the Somme, I thought it would be good to share with you this poem by that sturdy defender of Empire, Sir Henry Newbolt, which is his response to seeing the film. The title of the poem is The War Films, and it was written in 1917. Not everyone who saw the actuality films from the Western Front may have reacted it quite so religiose fashion, but it does indicate how profoundly moved many were by the sight, how the films triggered a profound sense of the great sacrifice being made by the troops. And it does have two particularly haunting opening lines:

O living pictures of the dead,
O songs without a sound,
O fellowship whose phantom tread
Hallows a phantom ground —
How in a gleam have these revealed
The faith we had not found.

We have sought God in a cloudy Heaven,
We have passed by God on earth:
His seven sins and his sorrows seven,
His wayworn mood and mirth,
Like a ragged cloak have hid from us
The secret of his birth.

Brother of men, when now I see
The lads go forth in line,
Thou knowest my heart is hungry in me
As for thy bread and wine;
Thou knowest my heart is bowed in me
To take their death for mine.

More poems may follow in future posts, but meanwhile I strongly recommend Philip French and Ken Wlaschin’s Faber Book of Movie Verse (1993), which has many poems about silent cinema stars and cinema-going, both contemporary and written in retrospect.

Reel Baseball

www.kino.com

Coming soon from Kino Video is a real labour of love – Reel Baseball, a compilation of baseball films from the silent era. The 2-DVD set (Region 1) features mostly fiction films of baseball from 1896 to 1926. The set includes two features: The Busher (1919), featuring Charles Ray, Colleen Moore, and John Gilbert; and Headin’ Home (1920), starring baseball’s greatest, Babe Ruth. The eleven shorts include Casey at the Bat or The Fate of a “Rotten” Umpire (1899), How the Office Boy Saw the Ball Game (1906), John Bunny in Hearts and Diamonds (1914), a Felix the Cat cartoon, Felix Saves the Day (1922), and a 1922 Phonofilm sound short of the evergreen poem Casey at the Bat, recited by DeWolf Hopper. The DVD is released on 3 April, and promises to be a real gem (but what a shame all they had room for on the actuality side of things was a single minute-long Kinograms newsreel of Babe Ruth).

Doris and Enoch

File under strange but true. The new Region 1 DVD of the Doris Day movie Move Over Darling (1963) includes among its extras D.W. Griffith’s Enoch Arden, Part II (1911), because both films were inspired by the same Tennyson poem, about someone who comes back from the dead.