WAR BY CINEMA.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume VI, Issue 265, 25 October 1916, Page 2

WAR BY CINEMA.

BATTLE OF THE SOMME

REALISTIC riCTL’RES

(By Arthur Mason). London, Sept. 7

This is the latest and greatest thing in the art of the cinema It is cinema photography- by official order, and the film cf battle by official permission. The pictures are now in a thousand cinema theatres of England. They have been m London for a fortnight, at many theatres, and millions of people have seen them. The cinema theatre, which has never lacked attractiveness, has never known such an attraction as tliis that has sent streams of people to struggle at its) doors for the seats within, or to ; stand in long queues in the streets) outside them, for sight of it. Per-j haps these ‘'Battle of the Somme ; nicturcs are already in Sydney. In . inv case they will soon be there. Ini svdney. as everywhere else they ts-ill ’ crowd the cinema theatres with peo-! pie come to see something of the re-; ality of var in so far as a photo-) granitic film may reveal it. and in 1 Svdney. as every where else, they; vill niak- a cDen impression upon! ,*1 ri(Jyo’Jp‘ j To the a-'atement of almost ■ everybody who read it. Dean Hen-j von. of Durham, has addressed to. o IP ‘-f-inifs” a Etter of protest

against the exhihit ; on of these films of war. which—though he does not appear to have seen them—he. seems 'o regard as a revolting display of realism. It is a curious attitude of mind. Apparently it hopes to dismiss the unpleasant facts of war by nresuming their non-existence. At least it thinks that to keep them discreetly out of sight is to upon the public mind a beneficent illusion. But, though there are undoubtedly many people of the cloistered sort still left to us, the vast najority of us prefer to disagree • .vitn Dr. Heoson. Many bereaved,

at all events— and they snould know -have already disclaimed his assumption that those especially who .ave suffered loss by war should be spared painful sight of the detail of war. All the objectors to Dr. Hendon’s theory agree, on the contrary, -.hat it is 'a good thing for this people— unimaginative almost entirely without grasp of the ravage and ruin of otner countries, and with little understanding of what actually it is their own soldiers are doing and suffering in France—that they should be stirred into recognition of war as serious and the facts of war as painful.

M.y own quarrel with the “Battle of the Somme” pictures is not that they reveal war as it is, but that they do not sufficiently reveal it. With no particular taste for horrors I find the film reticent to the point of evasion when it eom.es really to the great issue of fighting and kiling. The reason for that, no doubt, is'that even cinema photography has its limitation's, and that only faint suggestions of the reality are, after all, available to it. Thus, it will be seen that many of the pictures concern themselves with scenes in the

great offensive that are no more in-: cidental to the actual business of. killing and being killed. Their! power upon one is rather that of! suggestion. The great guns of the; bombardment belch their smoke at; a hundred points of the battle-line,. trenches are shattered, mines ex-i plode, gigantic craters yawn upon the once solid earth ; but most of > these effects, as seen by the specta-; tor, are after-effects .and were only j as such by the photographer himself. They are impressive enough, ; but their impresfeivenc-ss is a matter largely of the imagination. A few only of the pictures are of the sort which a too delicate reluctance to face the facts will regard as needlessly unpleasant. One of them shows a charge from a trench. The officer signals—the men leap the parapet. One man falls instantly ; another falls in his first stride —and . the picture vanishes. Again, there ! is a succession of views of dressing stations, where slightly wounded men art- in the hands of the surgeons, while processions of stretcher bearers go past, and men dazed from shell-shock—German ijien and prisoners—shuffle rather pitifully across the screen. Lastly, there are one or two pictures of German dead. They lie starkly enough upon the field of battle, and they are buried in a inaitcr-of-fact way by British soldiers, who, perhaps, appear somewhat callous in eyes that have expected to see the last rites surrounded by solemnity and ceremonial. Othewise these pictures are mostly of scenes before the actual stroke t,i the offensive, and here I find tnein not only at their best, but at their most suggestive and their most saddening, lor these scenes are full or the fine Hair of before-the-batt!e. Hundreds of young men go by, marching to the trenches. They go biavely, eagerly, gaily, they smile and cheer, they wave hats in the air, they are brimful of life and laugnttr. And you know as you watch them that 'many of them will never come that way again, that in an hour 01 two the gleam will be gone from those laughing eyes, and the light upon the clean-featured faces be darkened, and all the ardour and

promise of that leaping, springing

lite be stilled. That, tor me, was the outstanding pathos of these pictures", and not the spectacle ot guns, and broken trenches, and obliterated villages, or even the wounded and the dead. But there 1.-, undoubtedly in those, and especially for ail who have never seen ana cannot see the reality, an impressive suggestion of the havoc of war. And as it is the desire, no less than the duty, of those who have no active share in it to seek to know something of the significance of this terror that has so shadowed the wcrld and our life within it, I do not wonder that the “Battle of the Somme” pictures have proved to be so great an attraction for so many millions of people.