History of Film Episode 033

War on Film, Film at War. 

Podcast Script written by Jacob Aschieris. 

    

    When last we left off, the great European bloodletting we call the first world war had begun. The French film industry, already teetering on its lofty heights, collapsed virtually over night. As soon as the brand new war machine was put into high gear, its titanic needs required essentially everything the citizens of the combatant nations could provide it, and then still more. All of the colonial wealth and industrial prosperity we looked at last episode were poured into a engine of destruction that burned through it like coal in a fire. Or perhaps we should say, celluloid in a fire. This is the thirty third episode of the history of film: War on film, film at war.  

    Some numbers here might be helpful, so lets go though a couple of them. I’m going to have to bounce around a bit between a few different armies because of the sources I have access to, but I think we will get the point. First, lets talk about the French army.throughout the entire war, 8.4 million frenchmen were mobilized to fight (Smith et al 96). That is almost half of the male population of France at the time, including old men and children. All of those men in uniform would normally have been working, producing food and material goods. Also, important for our purposes, some of them were making movies. Not any more. 

    As far as all production was concerned, these workers vanished. What laborers were left in the country were needed to keep the horrors of industrial warfare possible. The French alone government had a goal of producing 100,000 shells per day at the beginning of the war (61). I have no idea how many bullets, bandages, boots were trying to make, but I would guess the numbers that were needed to keep so many millions of men in the in the killing fields for four years must have been truly obscene.

    Here is where we have to jump around a bit, because in terms of food, my best source is for the German army, but I feel comfortable saying that it paints an accurate picture of the French army’s situation as well. This comes from Horger Herwig’s book The first World War:

…The [German] Army consumed copious amounts of food and fodder. A single corps of 35,000 soldiers monthly devoured 1 million lbs of meat, 660,000 loaves of bread, 189,000 lbs. of fat… and 73,000 lbs. of coffee; its horses needed 7 million lbs. of oats and more than 4 million lbs. of hay. The [18th] Army Corps, for example, estimated that it needed 1000 wagons extending for 9 miles to haul its monthly allotment of bread; its butchers slaughtered 1,320 cows, 1,100 hogs and 4,158 sheep every month. Taken as a whole, the German Army weekly demolished 60 million lbs. of bread, 131 million lbs. of potatoes and 17 million lbs of meat (280-281). (Emphasis added).

Now, again, that is the German army, but that isn't a bad stand in for France. In countries with such unprecedented labor shortages, and the need to so much war material, it was impossible for the French film industry to survive. The pressures on the entire population of the country were too intense. Film was just another casualty of the war. Richard Able, who is pretty undisputedly the greatest historian of early French cinema, said it this way:

All branches of the industry immediately closed down. The general mobilization emptied the studios of directors, actors, and technicians… The deserted spaces of the studios were requisitioned for military stores and horse barns, and Pathé’s film-stock factory at Vincennes was transformed into a war plant. The cinemas, along with all other shows, closed their doors in the national interest (Able, French Cinema, 9).

We will hear more from the eminent Dr. Able as this episode marches on. 

    At the beginning of the war, governments on both sides of the conflict adopted strategies which operated under the assumption that the war would be quick and thus relatively cheap (Fararr 40, 45). The German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm, even reportedly promised German soldiers that “You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees” (N.P.R.). The quote itself appears to e a bit dubious, but you get the idea. This concept, sometimes called the “short war illusion,” did not exactly pan out, as indeed some less optimistic experts suspected it would not (Strachan 134-35). Word for the wise, whenever anyone putting on a war promises it will be inexpensive and short — do not believe them. But I digress. 

    The attention of all of Europe was turned to the war. And where eyes are looking, so are cameras, those largest and widest eyes of all. So now we turn our attention there as well, at just what those cameras were recording. We look to a kind of motion picture that we haven't meaningfully discussed sine episode 9: The daddy of modern documentary, the Newsreel. 

    Back in episode 9, I said that Pathé created the newsreel proper, which is a little like saying Steve Jobs invented the iMac, or Thomas Edison invented the motion picture. Kind of true-ish a little, but its more complicated and corpritized than that. It would be more appropriate to say that the company called Pathé developed the newsreel as a commercial product at the close of the first decade of the 20th century.

    According to Raymond Fielding’s The American Newsreel: A complete History (alas, I don't think that a book on the history of the French newsreel exists), the newsreel was actually invented? Devolved? By an American based Pathé employee named Leon Franconi. Franconi was inspired by newspapers and magazines of the day, and by witnessing the inauguration of William Howard taft to the U.S. presidency. He advised his transatlantic executive that their company ought to make a news magazine of their own, but you know,  a movie one. Pathé appeared to like the idea, so in either 1909 or 1910, the the company released their first motion picture “news magazine” which they called “The Pathé Journal.” This first Pathé collection of the news on film was presented in a company owned Paris exhibition space, which was also called “The path Journal.” This theater would only show the the new “news magazine” films (Fielding 45). The newsreel proper, as it would be known until the end of the 1970’s, was born.

    This development is an extraordinary example of something we have talked about a few times on this podcast: the legitimization of film. This is a little bit of guess on my part, but I think it is pretty clear that the path people wanted these newsreels, at least at first, to stand apart from the low-brow entertainment that was their usual fare. The language used for the program and its dedicated exhibition space borrows from the most legitimate printed sources of education and learning. Academic “journals” are the top of the line source of new information for the highly educated to this day, and the Wall-street Journal is nothing to sneeze at. This new kind movie was for the enlightenment of the people, literally set apart from the rabble who liked make believe stories about train robbers and voyages to the moon. Now you could tell your mom you were going the the motion pictures, and she wouldn't be disappointed with you.

    The idea appears to have sold well. Goumont, always quick to copy the more powerful Pathé company, opened their own newsreel theater, the “Societe Eclair,” not long afterwords. Within a couple of years, newsreels, many of them Pathé, had made their way across the English Channel, forming British Pathé, and across the Atlantic to the United States (45). The news would be presented on a special reel before the main attraction people were really paying to see. Thus, the “Newsreel.” The name Pathé became especially associated with this form of motion picture, The spun off “British Pathé” kept making them for decades in the United Kingdom, many of which you can find still on their online archive. Newsreels would be inseparable from the movie going until the rise of television news in the 1950s, and hung on for a long while even after that in Europe. We can thank this humble form of documentary filmmaking for part of the early WWII movie boom in the united states, and for the beginning of Citizen Kane. Thanks, newsreels. But at this point in “the story of the screen itself,” newsreels were working a government job. The camera was going to war. 

    As soon as mobilization for the war began, the news boys and their tripods were on the ground to cover the whole glorious affair. Now I am going to do something I don't like doing on this show, which is to describe films I have never seen. I think that doing so generally makes for bad scholarship. But in this case I have to, because while British Pathé has made portions of their World War 1 news reels available and easy to see, I am having trouble finding their French equivalent. This may because they are simply not available, or because I don't have the language skills I need to navigate the francophone internet. So thats why I, personally, haven't seen these films, but here is a description from someone who has. This is a quote from Micheal Paris, writing about French film during the war for 1914-1918-Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War. Are you ready? Quote…  

We are looking down on a busy street scene… A large crowd has gathered and lines the pavements and blocks the entrance to the Aster Motor Works as an infantry regiment marches along the Rue de Paris towards the station. The crowd are smiling and waving and the soldiers have small tricolours fixed to their bayonets. The scene changes and the camera is now at street level as we watch the crowd milling around: men, women and children, laughing and enjoying the festive atmosphere of the occasion. A gendarme, wheeling his bicycle, tries to clear a path through the crowd. Some small boys, pushing and shoving each other  get in his way but he irritably pushes them out of the way as another regiment approaches. Colonial troops, this time, Muslims, probably from North Africa. They look straight ahead and purposefully stride on, eager to get to their destination. The scene changes to a railway station as we watch an infantry regiment board the train that will take them to the war zone. A young officer urges them on as they push their haversacks and rifles through the doors and climb aboard. The train begins to pull out of the station, the soldiers waving from the windows.

In short these newsreels were, you know, exactly what you would expect them to be: good patriotic shlock on the eve of a bloodbath of heretofore incomprehensible proportions. I say that of course, with 2024 hindsight.

    So the war had begun. Records here aren't always consistent, but it seems like these are the general facts: French cinema production had of course, screeched to a halt. Most? Many? Cinema houses closed. Certainly they had ceased being the stately pleasure domes they had been in 1913 — no more “fun” pictures were being shone. The ones that remained open, showed newsreels. Those newsreels were being shown to audiences who were, naturally, desperate for news about the war. So the war is what they got. 

    For the first few months of the conflict, cameramen were allowed remarkable access to the war. They setup their tripods and recorded some of the most important events of 20th century European history. Michel Paris writes that “Initially, cameramen were able to move about freely, their footage showed the arrival of the British Expeditionary Force, the retreat of the Belgian Army, the floods of refugees fleeing from the battle zone, and the dramatic retreat to the Marne.” But alas, all to soon the realities of war caught up with the top brass of the French army. It was decided that the newsreels which attempted to capture “the truth” about the war, much like Christmas truces, were not to be tolerated and were bad for moral. Censorship was enacted that placed government strictures on what could and could not be tolerated on public movie screens (Paris). 

    Now, if you were a particular French movie mogul, this censorship policy was really bad news. Newsreels were the only thing being shown in French theaters, and now they were being hamstrung by the very army they were profiting from recording. So the Pathé company had an idea: The movies would enlist in the army themselves. Convincing the army that carefully produced and edited motion pictures could, and would, boost the public moral, the army consented to give the movies an official position in the war: the Service Photographique et Cinématographique des armées (Paris). While always forced to record with discretion, this compromise gave movie distributors access to approved material that they could used to feed public demand for news about the war. This unit, alongside an additional, official army newsreels, ushered film into the realm of state sponsored propaganda in a new way. In my eyes, it is this use of the humble newsreel that prefigures what propaganda film will become over the coming decades. It sets the stage, John the Baptist like, for the Americas use of film in the second world war, and the entire history of motion pictures made in the-soon-to-be-born Soviet Union. Much, indeed, can grow out of economic expedience. 

    So the movies went to war. But the people left at home didn't. Imagine, if you will, that your government is sending people off to a war that they know will be big — I mean, they are sending half the men in France — but they promise will be short, and all the things that add a bit of pleasure to everyday life have got to shut down for a while. Most people, I think, even now, would be willing to tighten their belts and do without, knowing that their sacrifice of simple pleasures was helping their sons and brothers on the battlefield, and hopefully help “win the war.” But then it wasn't short. It didn't end. No plays. No concerts. Maybe a few censored few letters from the front. The only motion pictures anyone back home could watch shifted from some of the brutal realities of war to the official government line, which is never satisfying. The good people of France were becoming restless. Theater owners were becoming poor. The months stretched on. Then, after almost a year, there was a ripple. Something was changing. Philippe Soupault, the Frecnh poet who would later become a founder of the surrealist movement, wrote this of the spring of 1915. 

We walked the cold and deserted streets seeking an accidental, a sudden, meeting

with life. To distract ourselves we found it necessary to yoke the imagination to

sensational dreams. For a time we found distraction in lurid periodicals—those papers which are more highly-colored than picture postcards. We scoured the world for them, and by means of them we participated in marvelous and bloody dramas which illuminated for an instant various parts of the earth.

Then one day we saw hanging on the walls great posters as long as serpents. At every street-corner a man, his face covered with a red handkerchief, leveled a revolver at the peaceful passersby. We imagined that we heard galloping hoofs, the roar of motors, explosions, and cries of death. We rushed into the cinemas, and realized immediately that everything had changed. On the screen appeared the smile of Pearl White—that almost ferocious smile which announced the revolution, the beginning of a new world (Able, French Cinema, 10).

The movies had come back to France. Projector lamps were burning across Europe, hailing the birth of a new empire. As the German army pressed the French on their western front, the cinemas of Paris were ablaze with a silver light emanating from the California sun. American movies invaded Europe, and found it defenseless.

    Thank you for listening to this episode of the history of film. I don't know if we will ever specifically cover British film during ww1 — my hope to mostly cover ww1 film in France and then touch on it when when British, Swedish, and German film movements of the 1920s, but It was interesting to read around it when preparing for this episode. But just for todays bonus fact, the British also used their newsreels for propaganda. They brought out the big guns though. They imported you guessed it, D.W. Griffith — what?— , to record the war and combine it with Hollywood studio footage to make The Hearts of the World.  I think I might own that movie on laserdisc. Of the experience Griffith said “Viewed as drama, the war is in some ways disappointing, everything is hidden away in ditches. As you look over No Man’s Land… There is literally nothing that meets the eye but an aching desolation of nothingness. It is too colossal to be dramatic!” When the truth lacks drama — which ww1 did not, but I digress — a little studio magic will never cease to make it more palatable. Maybe we will talk about that in greater detail as time goes by.

    My principal sources for this episode were Richard Ables Magnificent French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929, Raymond Fielding’s The American Newsreel: A Complete History, and Micheal Paris’s article “Film/Cinema (France)” for 1914-1918 online. I found some of these books thanks to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast, which covered the first war… woe… quite a while go now. 

    In the past I have resisted posting my scripts for The History of Film” for a few a few reasons. First, I write these scripts for me to read aloud, not for other people to read as texts. I will often used punctuation and grammar loosely, change sentences as I am recording to make them easier to say, and cut out redundancies while editing. All this is fine if the script is private, it becomes a problem when it is ostensibly a transcript of a podcast. I also have a really hard time with spelling, which again, isn't a big deal if I am saying the script, and nobody else is reading it. But now Apple podcasts transcribes every show weather I want it or not, so I figure I ought to the release the script warts and all so anyone who wants to can access my sources. To that end I am working on a new version of the website. I hope to have that up and running as soon as possible. 

    If you would like to email me, you can do so at historyoffilmpodcast@gmail.com. Im working on setting up more social media stuff, which you can find at the bottom of the podcast description. That included the discord server that I made but haven't used too much because I am as frightened by discord as Martin Scorsese is of e-mail. I am trying to change my ways though.

 

Thats all for now. Thank you for listening, and join me next time for another exciting episode of the history of film. 

 

Works cited 

 

• Abel, Richard. French cinema: The First Wave, 1915-1929. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.

• Able, Richard. “French Silent Cinema.” The Oxford History of World Cinema: The Definitive History of Cinema World Wide, Edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Oxford UP, 1996, pp. 112-22.

• Farrar jr, L. L. “The Short-War Illusion The Syndrome of German Strategy, August—December, 1914,” Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, Freiburg, Vol 0 iss. 2, Jan 1972, pp. 39-52.

• Fielding, Raymond. The American Newsreel: A Complete History, 1911-1967. 2nd ed. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co, 2006.

• N. P. R. Staff, “WWI: The Battle That Split Europe, And Families.” NPR, April 30, 2011, sec. Author Interviews. https://www.npr.org/2011/04/30/135803783/wwi-the-battle-that-split-europe-and-families.

• Paris, Michael. “Film/Cinema (France).” 1914-1918-Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War, October 8, 2014. https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/filmcinema-france/#easy-footnote-1-1088886.

• Strachan, Hew. “Chapter 10: Economic Mobilization: Money, Munitions and Machines.” The Oxford Illistrated History of the First World War, New Edition edited by Hew Strachan. Oxford UP 2014.