The Battle of the Somme (1916): An Industrial Process Film that ‘Wounds the Heart’

Hammond, Michael

doi:10.1057/9780230321663_2

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Jackson's film remains a commemorative project in which the use of color and digital editing have been noted as both effective and problematic. The use of colorization in They Shall Not Grow Old and the digital editing of analogue filmstock, intricately links private and public forms of viewing "evincing nostalgia for direct, unmediated access […] the exemplary privatized and particularized experience" (Rosen 2001, 175), which, like the mediation of private grief through public mourning noted by Michael Hammond (2011) in his study of The Battle of the Somme (1916), interlaces emotion with the ideological configurations of narrative form and its representational techniques in the social space of cinema exhibition.…”

Section: Liz Watkinsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Politics of Nostalgia: Colorization, Spectatorship and the Archive

Watkins

2021

Comp. Cine.

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Colorization describes the digitization and retrospective addition of color to photographic and film materials (celluloid nitrate, glass negatives) initially made and circulated in a black-and-white format. Revisiting the controversial 1980s colorization of 24 classic Hollywood studio titles, which incited debate over questions of copyright, authorship and artistic expression, this essay examines the use of colorization to interpret museum collections for new audiences. The aesthetics of colorization have been criticized for prioritizing image content over the history of film technologies, practices and exhibition. An examination of They Shall Not Grow Old (Jackson, 2018) finds a use of digital editing and coloring techniques in the colorization of First World War film footage held in the Imperial War Museum archives that is familiar to the director’s fiction films. Jackson’s film is a commemorative project, yet the “holistic unity” of authorial technique operates across fragments of archive film and photographs to imbricate of fiction and nonfiction, signaling vital questions around the ethics and ideologies of “natural color”, historiography, and the authenticity of materials and spectator experience.

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Section: Liz Watkinsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Politics of Nostalgia: Colorization, Spectatorship and the Archive

Watkins

2021

Comp. Cine.

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A multidisciplinary scientific investigation of the 1916 Hawthorn Mine Crater, Beaumont Hamel, Somme, Northern France

Wisniewski,

Doyle,

Hunter

et al. 2023

Journal of Conflict Archaeology

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‘A war film with a difference’: Adrian Brunel'sBlightyand Negotiation within the British Studio System of the Late Silent Period

Botting¹

2015

Journal of British Cinema and Television

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The creation and viewing of war films was one of the elements in the process by which Britain attempted to come to terms with the horrors of the First World War. During the interwar period, war films took two main forms: those which reconstructed famous battles and melodramas set against a wartime backdrop. However, the film Blighty, directed by Adrian Brunel in 1927, took a slightly different approach, focusing not on military action but on those who stayed behind on the Home Front. As a director during the silent period, Brunel trod a stony path, operating largely on the fringes of the industry and never really getting a firm foothold in the developing studio structure. He remains well regarded for his independent productions yet also directed five features for Gainsborough at the end of the silent period. Of these film, his first, Blighty, is perhaps his most successful production within the studio system in terms of managing a compromise between his desire to maintain control while also fulfilling the studio's aims and requirement for box office success. Brunel's aversion to the war film as a genre meant that from the start of the project, he was engaged in a process of negotiation with the studio in order to preserve as far as possible what he regarded as a certain creative and moral imperative.

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The Battle of the Somme (1916): An Industrial Process Film that ‘Wounds the Heart’

Cited by 3 publications

References 2 publications

The Politics of Nostalgia: Colorization, Spectatorship and the Archive

The Politics of Nostalgia: Colorization, Spectatorship and the Archive

A multidisciplinary scientific investigation of the 1916 Hawthorn Mine Crater, Beaumont Hamel, Somme, Northern France

‘A war film with a difference’: Adrian Brunel'sBlightyand Negotiation within the British Studio System of the Late Silent Period

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