Silent & Grainy
Apr. 25th, 2011 04:09 pmAn ANZAC Day gift:
Australia in France, Part One from the Australian War Memorial's collection.
One of the Australian War Memorial’s most important films – the most accurate filmed record of the Battle of Pozières in 1916.
I think the original link that took me here said it was the first Australian war documentary. The web site provides three extracts (about 10 minutes out of a total of 51 minutes). Interesting stuff, and worth taking the ten minutes to look at, especially the last one, but I'd recommend reading the curator's notes.
And a related article on the ASO site AWM Western Front about the significance of First World War films.
All of the men you see here are now dead. Some of them would have died within days of being photographed in the field. In a few cases, the camera shows us men so badly wounded that they are dying before our eyes. Australia has hundreds of memorials to the Anzacs, in parks and Avenues of Remembrance across the country, but these films are also a kind of memorial, and a brutally honest one. They show us glimpses of what the soldiers went through, before the battlefield clean-up and before the mythologising of "sacrifice" that inevitably followed.
and the background/problems involved in creating them, with an emphasis on Charles Bean, "the official war correspondent and later the official Australian historian of this war", and producer of the film above.
Bean was with the Australian forces when they landed at Gallipoli in 1915, and still on duty when they celebrated the signing of an Armistice on 9 November 1918. He was too shy and patrician to feel comfortable in their society, but he idolised the "true" Australian character he saw in them-–the unruly spirit of resilience, self-reliance and confidence that made them hard to discipline, but easy to inspire. He was sure there were no better soldiers than the Australians when properly led. Like many of his countrymen, he believed they were generally far superior to English conscripted units, because they had chosen to be there.
Australia in France, Part One from the Australian War Memorial's collection.
One of the Australian War Memorial’s most important films – the most accurate filmed record of the Battle of Pozières in 1916.
I think the original link that took me here said it was the first Australian war documentary. The web site provides three extracts (about 10 minutes out of a total of 51 minutes). Interesting stuff, and worth taking the ten minutes to look at, especially the last one, but I'd recommend reading the curator's notes.
And a related article on the ASO site AWM Western Front about the significance of First World War films.
All of the men you see here are now dead. Some of them would have died within days of being photographed in the field. In a few cases, the camera shows us men so badly wounded that they are dying before our eyes. Australia has hundreds of memorials to the Anzacs, in parks and Avenues of Remembrance across the country, but these films are also a kind of memorial, and a brutally honest one. They show us glimpses of what the soldiers went through, before the battlefield clean-up and before the mythologising of "sacrifice" that inevitably followed.
and the background/problems involved in creating them, with an emphasis on Charles Bean, "the official war correspondent and later the official Australian historian of this war", and producer of the film above.
Bean was with the Australian forces when they landed at Gallipoli in 1915, and still on duty when they celebrated the signing of an Armistice on 9 November 1918. He was too shy and patrician to feel comfortable in their society, but he idolised the "true" Australian character he saw in them-–the unruly spirit of resilience, self-reliance and confidence that made them hard to discipline, but easy to inspire. He was sure there were no better soldiers than the Australians when properly led. Like many of his countrymen, he believed they were generally far superior to English conscripted units, because they had chosen to be there.
