First shown at the prestigious Rialto in New York City in October 1916, Donald C. Thompson's seven reel feature film War As It Really Is was a self-made project. Produced and marketed by the Donald C. Thompson Company, in collaboration with Leslie's Weekly, the film showed some of the most gruesome sights of the Great War.
Intertitle from Thompson's film War As It Really Is (1916)
"In the Jaws of Death"
"Much detail is clearly screened in the corpses and skeletons piled about deserted fortifications", commented a review by Motion Picture News. Starting with some remarkable aerial views of the Entente fleet at Thessaloniki, Thompson's film covered the western front from the French side. Press reports indicated he was at the Somme battlefield on July 2, 1916, when he was severely wounded by by a piece of shell. A print of the movie has survived in the U.S. Signal Corps collection of the National Archives in Washington, DC. To give an idea of the frontline footage we have uploaded scenes on YouTube from reel 7 following the intertitle "In the Jaws of Death", showing a French infantry attack on the German lines under heavy artillery fire. The film clip has been edited with a contemporary score by composer Gustav Holst from his musical suite The Planets/Mars.
In 2021, Thompson's World War I film War As It Really Is was colorized and enhanced by artificial intelligence. Also, a modern musical score was added to this new film version. The results are simply astonishing.
American cinematographer Merl laVoy featured before in this weblog. Last year we published on our discovery of footage from his first film, Heroic France(1917). Apart from this World War I film, a series of still photographs taken by LaVoy for this same assignment has also been retrieved.
Merl laVoy (left) with French soldier near Verdun, 1916. Colorized picture, copied from Picture-Play Magazine, September 1917
Author Cooper C. Graham located these pictures online. Most of the photographs have a copyright reference to LaVoy and bear a close match to the film scenes shot by LaVoy for his movie Heroic France. The LaVoy pictures from this period are also interesting because these were shot on a camera with an unusual frame size. In inches, it comes out to 7 inches by 11 inches, a ratio of almost two to one, which means that the pictures look elongated horizontally or vertically.
Here are LaVoy's World War I pictures from France with the original captions, as written on the backside of the prints.
Telephone station at big guns, in communication with observers. "Heroic France"/ The Allies in Action
First line trench. No reference to LaVoy, but similar to film scene from Heroic France
Returning empty 75 mm shells for reloading. Copyright Merl laVoy
Cemetary at the front. Note (c) LaVoy
Firing at enemy airplane. Note (c) LaVoy
Photograph of General Marie Émile Fayolle by LaVoy. The general was the commander of the Sixth Army at the Somme while LaVoy was shooting film in France
Ever since films were first made war scenes have been staged before the movie camera. The expert in this field is no doubt film historian Stephen Bottomore. In his doctoral thesis Filming, faking and propaganda: The origins of the war film, 1897-1902, Bottomore presented the first detailed treatment of war and early cinema, describing the representation of conflicts in film from the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 through the Spanish-American War, Boer War, and others up to about 1902.
Bottomore clearly demonstrated that in attempting to cover these events, early filmmakers faced a difficult task, for warfare at the end of the 19th century was changing, relying more on defence and concealment and less on highly visible offensives; there was also increasing regulation and censorship of reporting. With the new tactics making battle less visible, and with increasing official controls, how could wars be represented on film? Surprisingly, in just half a decade, filmmakers found ways to cope, by developing new 'genres' of films such as acted fakes, and new exhibition strategies, and in these ways managed to present wars to the public of the time fairly effectively.
German Infantry Charge
As we found during our research on the American cinematographers of the First World War, the situation in 1914-1918 had not changed much. As an example, here is a video showing how Albert K. Dawson staged a German infantry attack on the Western Front in February 1915:
Trench warfare in World War I didn't make for very exciting action scenes. With their bulky cameras and heavy tripods, and with no zoom lenses available to get closer to the actual scene, camera operators frequently decided to stage events. The classic scene from The Battle of the Somme (1916) - showing British soldiers going over the top - was filmed at a trench mortar school well behind the firing lines. By comparing film scenes with still photographs and press reports, we discovered American cinematographers sometimes used the same techniques.
On the other hand, the reasons for staging war scenes were complex. Since cinematographers such as Durborough and Dawson had great difficulty in getting to the front and then getting their actual combat footage past the censors, does this partially excuse their behaviour? As Signal Corps cameraman Joe Hubbel said: "Our idea was to make up propaganda films to show what we were doing. On one occasion they had hospital trains near us that could run up to the front and bring back the wounded. We took a company of men, bandaged them up and laid them in the sun on stretchers and loaded the train. I was brought up on charges that I was faking it. Well, that wasn't a good word. I was representing an occasion that you wouldn't take the chance with a lot of wounded men. And it looked the same."
This raises the question and it is a significant one: when is a re-enactment justified? The question is especially important when the documentary filmmaker is making a work that is designed to persuade the viewer to fight and die for a cause.
The website Smithsonian.com has more on the early history of faking war films.
From November 1916 the German government took control of all film activities, culminating in the incorporation of the Universum Film AG (UFA) as authorized by General Ludendorff. As descibed in our latest book, the German military leaders from the start of the war were reluctant to allow cinematographers to go to the front. But now finally film was recognized as an important medium for publicity. As a result eight so-called Film Truppen were established. These film squads consisted of official military cameramen who were attached to various German army groups.
German cinema team. Western front, June 1917. Colorized picture from the collection of the Imperial War Museum.
Hans Barkhausen in his book on German film propaganda during World War I and II calculated that these military cameramen in 1917-1918 produced over 10.000 photographs. The list of motion pictures that they made also is impressive. Most of these pictures have been lost, but the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) still have about 1.000 photographs made in the last two years of the Great War by these military cameramen. Never properly researched before a selection of these pictures was recently copied and turned over to the Imperial War Museum in London, as part of an exchange program.
Flying Circus
The German military film squads were organized along the lines of the Imperial airforce. Like the "Red Baron" von Richthoven's flying circus, these cameramen moved around from one front sector to another. Take for instance Film Squad No. 1 which started covering the war on the Mediterranean shore, found itself on the western front in March 1917, went to Romania five months later and from the beginning of 1918 filmed in Tiflis, the new capital of Georgia that had been set up by the Germans as a separate state after Russia had withdrawn from the war at the Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
As the war expanded and Germany conquered large chunks of territory on the eastern front the German film squads went to the Caucasus mountains, the interior of Turkey, the Black Sea coast and even as far as the deserts of Palestine to film the German side of the war. A regular film squad was commanded by a lieutenant and consisted of two still photographers, a cinematographer and an assistant film camera operator.
Also, here is a video showing these photographers at work recording military history with their camera. Contemporary German music has been added to the clip.
