British Silent Cinema and the Great War

This innovative book presents for the first time detailed histories of the impact of the Great War on British cinema in the silent period, from actual war footage to fiction filmmaking. In doing so it explores how cinema helped to shape the public memory of the war during the 1920s.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Goodbye to All That or Business As Usual? History and Memory of the Great War in British Cinema; M.Hammond & M.Williams PART I: THE WAR The Battle of the Somme (1916) as Industrial Process Film; M.Hammond British and Colonial: What the Company Did in the Great War; G.Turvey 'Improper Practices' in Great War British Cinemas; P.Moody 'Shells, Shots and Shrapnel': Picture-goer Goes to War; J.Bryan PART II: AFTERMATH: MEMORY AND MEMORIAL 'A Victory and a Defeat as Glorious as a Victory': The Battles of the Coronel and Falkland Islands (Walter Summers, 1927); A.Sargeant Remembering the Great War in 1920s British Cinema; C.Gledhill Remembrance, Re-membering, and Recollection: Walter Summers and the British War Film of the 1920s; L.Napper 'Fire, Blood and Steel': Memory and Spectacle in The Guns of Loos (Sinclair Hill, 1928); M.Williams PART III: NOTES FROM THE ARCHIVE Hello to All This: Music, Memory and Re-visiting the Great War; N.Brand The Dead, Battlefield Burials and the Unveiling of War Memorials in Films of the Great War Era; T.Haggith Anticipating the Blitz Spirit in First World War Propaganda Film: Evidence in the Imperial War Museum Archive; R.Smither 'How Shall We Look Again'?: Revisiting the Archive in British Silent Film and the Great War; B.Dixon & L.Porter Bibliography Index

About the Author :
NEIL BRAND Silent film accompanist JANE BRYAN Teacher of silent cinema history, University of East Anglia, UK BRYONY DIXON Curator at the BFI National Archive and co-director of the annual British Silent Film Festival CHRISTINE GLEDHILL Visiting Professor of Cinema Studies at the University of Sunderland, UK TOBY HAGGITH Senior Curator in the Department of Research at the Imperial War Museum, UK PAUL MOODY Ph.D. Student at The London School of Economics, teacher of Film and Television History for the Open University and Video and Audio trainer for Brunel University's Journalism Department, UK LAWRENCE NAPPER Lecturer in Film Studies at King's College, London, UK LARAINE PORTER Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at De Montfort University, UK AMY SARGEANT Reader in Film at the University of Warwick, UK ROGER SMITHER Keeper of the Film and Video Archive at the Imperial War Museum 1990-2010 GERRY TURVEY Former lecturer in Film Studies and currently a trustee of the Phoenix Cinema, North London, UK