Introduction: Cinema During the Great War

The First World War was arguably the most important and tragic event of the twentieth century. As Andrew Kelly has written in the introduction to his book on cinema and the war:

No war was as violent, pointless and as miserable as the First World War. With eight-and-a-half million dead, and twenty million injured, it was a disaster unparalleled in human history. There was nothing great about the Great War except the scale of despair and destruction.¹

A vast amount has been written about this war. I was recently in Toronto University library, one of the world's major research libraries, whose books on the World War fill some thirty bays of shelving: equivalent to a couple of hundred linear metres of books – just on this one war. So much has been published on the theme that one might be forgiven for thinking that little more of originality could be written about it, and yet new and fresh interpretations of all aspects of the war continue to appear on the shelves, on diverse areas of military, diplomatic and social history. One might mention, just considering English-language books, the general histories by Strachan, Stone and Ferguson; military histories such as the book by Alexander Watson; diplomatic histories like the influential volume by Hamilton and Herwig; and social histories such as Chickering's on urban life in Germany during the war and Richard Holmes' study of the British regular soldier.² There have also been recent important works of bibliography on the War, and books covering such subjects as media representation and propaganda, as well as countless journal articles.

In this issue of Film History we add to the Great War literature, looking at the film industry strictly during the period 1914–1918. This circumscription by date means that there is nothing here on later cinematic reflections of the War (The Big Parade, All Quiet on the Western Front, etc) – after all, a large literature already surrounds such cinematic reimaginings, Kelly's aforementioned book being a leading example. Of course, a good deal has also been written about film within the 1914–18 period itself, but much remains to be done, as this issue demonstrates. For one thing, many of the articles here are about the situation in non English-speaking countries, whereas most of the existing writings in English (certainly in this journal) have dealt with British or American aspects of the War.

This issue opens with Richard Abel's examination of a spate of "feature" documentaries about the World War that were shown in the United States as the conflict was taking place. His principal sources are newspaper ads for the films, and from these it seems that many of them took a partisan line, with a striking number having a pro-German tone. Cooper Graham and Ron van Dopperen investigate the film career of Edwin F. Weigle, war cameraman for the Chicago Tribune, who filmed aspects of the defeat of Belgium in 1914, and also in Germany in 1915. Laurent Véray has studied film and the First World War for many years, and has published much on this theme, mainly in French: his paper in this issue summarises several aspects of his earlier work about official production by France during the war. Sabine Lenk's article, based on documents in the Düsseldorf municipal archives, examines film censorship in that German city during the conflict.

Then follow two papers on the situation in the Netherlands, which remained neutral in the War. Karel Dibbetts and Wouter Groot look at the exhibition of The Battle of the Somme (1916), as well as war documentaries from France and Germany. Judith Thissen and André van der Velden describe a boom in picture palaces during the war years and the long-term impact of this on the Dutch film exhibition business. Isak Thorsen tells of another case of a wartime film boom in a neutral country, Denmark, where the Nordisk company embarked on an ambitious expansion policy from 1914 to 1917. Finally, Priska Morrissey's article discusses the positive impact of the war on the status of...