British Silent Cinema and the Great War

This book presents a unique insight into an extraordinary period of European history that had far-reaching significance for British cinema and for the way history itself is represented. The work collected in this volume draws from the best knowledge, enthusiasm and critical insight of leading scholars, archivists and historians specialising in British cinema. The editors are experts in the field of British silent cinema; in particular, its complex relationship to the Great War and its afterimage in popular culture. As the Great War continues to fade from living memory, it is a significant task to look back at how the cinema industry responded to that conflict as it unfolded, and how it shaped the war's memory through the 1910s and 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 :
MICHAEL HAMMOND is Senior Lecturer in Film History in the English Department at the University of Southampton, UK. He is the co-editor and contributor to Contemporary American Cinema with Professor Linda Ruth Williams, and is author of The Big Show: British Cinema Culture in the Great War 1914-1918. He is presently working on a British Academy funded project entitled The After-image of the Great War in Hollywood, 1919-1939. MICHAEL WILLIAMS is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Southampton, UK. His monograph Ivor Novello: Screen Idol, was published in 2003. He has also written on film stardom, British cinema, landscape, sexuality and film heritage, and is currently researching the relationship between classicism and silent stardom.