POWER OF THE FILM.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume VI, Issue 266, 26 October 1916, Page 2

POWER OF THE FILM.

THE SOMME PICTURES JAMES DOUGLAS’ IMPRESSIONS. REGENERATIVE .AND RF.SURRECTIVE TO SEE AR STRIPPED BARE."

Yesterday we published an article by Arthur Mason in which he gave his impressions of the Somme battle pictures. This morning a subscriber brought in the follownig article in which Mr. James Douglas gives his impressions and discusses the question whether they are too painful for public exhibition. These battle of the Somme pictures are already in

New Zealand. Scene: The vestibule-of the Scala Theatre. Time : Three o’clock. A jostling crowd of eager men and women. An attendant calling out in a loud voice: “All seats sold.” A long queue waiting patiently to book seats for another performance. This was my first impression of the rush to see “The Battle of the Somme.” As I stood watching the crowd corning and going a party of wounded soldiers arrived. One of them a handsome boy hobbled on his crutches up the stairs. He had lost a leg. He was going to see moving pictures of what he had seen somewhere in France.

1 There is no doubt that the Somme pictures have stirred London more passionately than anything has stir- ; red it since the war. Everybody is I discussing them. Everybody is debating the question whether they are too painful for public exhibition. , It is evident that they have brought the war closer to us than it has ever been brought by the written woid or by the photograph. The magic of the cinematograph has done what nothing else could do. It has in one stride outpaced the newspaper and the war correspondent. It does not describe: it reveals. It does'not reveal all, but what is does reveal is

< real reality. !’ Somebody in the War Office or at I G.FI.Q. has at last realised that the ■ war-film is the only substitute for •invasion. Somebody has grasped r the power of the moving picture to carry the war to British soik Somebody has had courage and imagination. Instead of displaying only pictures of preparations for the battle we are shown pictures of the battle itself. The preparations are there, but they are pushed close to the battle. We see the Manchesters on the eve of the battle standing in a circle round a chaplain in white surplice. We know that many of these immobile men in khaki fell next morning The visible silence in the picture hushes us with awe. It is one of those dramatic movements that seldom visit a theatre. We,are each conscious oi the wave of emotion that sweeps over the darkened house. It is made of pity and reverence and the sense of tears in mortal things. There is nothing common or mean in it. THE GRIM PRELUDE. We see a general sitting like a bronze man on a bronze charger addressing the Lancashire and Royal Fusiliers. There is no movement. There is no sound. A stern, cold sculpture. Then comes the grim prelude—shell-fire verifying the wrod-plctures of the correspondents. \Y r hat we have read we see. All but the noise. Fantastic smoke-shapes, strangely slow in the melting. Dark upheavals. And under them we know that German soldiers are hidden in the creases and wrinkles of the soil. We. see the monstrous how.tzer with its fifteen-inch mouth, its recoil, the shaking of its mountings, the tremor of the branches. It looks like a live thing. All the guns seem sentient things, notably: those that peer out of a guh-pit or roll back heavily on their caterpillar wheels.

We see helmeted soldiers fixing their bayonets and being passed round the corner of a trench like a football crowd going through a turnstile. We see a vast mine exploding. We see the earth ascending in a black globe like th& dome of St. Paul’s and then falling through the white smoke that persists long after the last fragment? has pierced it. We see the engineers hurrying to wire the crater. We see the. Worcesters fixing wirecutters to ther rifles. We see all the gears and gadgets of a complex warmachine. It is cold business, iron science, hard routine, grim system, stark order moving men like machines and machines like men. TENSE DRAMA.

The drama suddenly becomes tense We are hardly ready for the shock. YV’e see a row of soldiers standing with fixed bayonets in a trench waiting for the signal to scramble over the parapet. Suddenly an officer is seen on the parapet with a gallant gesture of leadership. He is not t.iere alone a second. The whole line lifts and goes over simultaneously. All but two. One on the right. One on the left. They slip back very quietly. They lie against the sloping face of the trench. They lie upright with their face to the clay—and the enemy. The man on the right does not move a limb. The man on the left moves his arms a little and then is at rest. This is lightning death wrought before our eyes, and wrought before we recognise it. Through our dazed grief we see the others running forward, one falling here, one falling there, until there is only one gallant figure visible, strolling dauntless into the storm.

Is it right to let us see brave men dying? Yes. Is it a sacrilege? No. Ii our spirit be purged of curiosity and purified with awe, the sight is hallowed. There is no sacrilege if we are fit for the seeing. And I think the seeing ennobled and exalted us. There was sobbing in the sacred’ darkness around us. There was a religious reverence in the silence closing over the sobs. There was humility in our tears. Soldiers and civilians came together in a

high mood of dumb compassion and mute pity. Death sanctifies. There is nothing vulgar in “eloquent, just, and mighty Death.” I say it is regenerative and resurrcctive for us to see war stripped bare. Heav,-n knows that v. e aped the supreme katharsis, the ultimate cleansing. YY'e grow indifferent too quickly. Use and wont atrophy our finer seif. It is well to see the curse that wjjr gods and war lords have laid upon our Europe. I would not spare my heart one pang. I would not spare your heart one pang. Our loved ones are not spared these horrors and worse, infinitely' worse. Why should we shrink from the dim shadow of their passion? Rather let us drink the cup to the dregs so that our will to make an end of it all for ever may be immutable and immitigable.

HEROES ALL. The bravery' of our boys is past cm imagining. “Every one of them,” said a wounded officer to me who fought on the First of July, “every one of them is a hero.” His eyes filled with tears as he spoke. I thought of his words as 1 saw our soldiers bringing in a dying comrade under shell-fire. He died half-an-hour after he passed on the back of a soldier. I shall not soon forget his gcod English face. Nor shall I soon forget the face of the dead German soldier who is lying there waiting to be buried b.v the British soldiers who are digging the graves on the battlefield. These are dreadful sights, but their dreadfulness is as whtrlesome as Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” It shakes the kaleidoscope of war into human reality. Now 1 know why soldiers are nobler than civilians in their tenderness and their chivalry and their charity. They have seen war, and they hate it a*s we can never hate it.

Therefore I say that these pictures are good for us. The dead on the battlefield, the' drivers of the gun teams steering the wheels clear of the corpses, the demented German prisoners, the kindly British soldiers showering cigarettes upon their cap fives, the mangled heap of anguish on the stretcher, the half-naked wounded men in the dressing-station —let our men and our women see.it all. and vow that earth shall be delivered from it all. Dead men, dead horses, and dead dog lying beside his dead master—these vilenesses are war. War is the enemy and Germany is its patentee, its idolater. it,s worshipper. It is our task to beat the German sword into a ploughshare so that the nations may learn war no more.