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- Title
BATTLE OF THE SOMME: WHAT THE AUDIENCE SAW.
- Authors
FELDMAN, SETH
- Abstract
Battle of the Somme (Geoffrey Malins and John Benjamin--or "JB," as he is more commonly known--McDowell, 1916) was produced by a committee, shot by camera operators sent to the front to gather miscellaneous footage, and edited as straightforwardly as possible by an editor known to camera operators throughout the film world as "the butcher." Nevertheless, the enormous audiences for the film made Battle of the Somme the most widely watched non-fiction film made during the Great War. Shot in the opening days of the Somme, it was released while the four-and-a-half-month-long battle was still being fought. This made it, as David Williams claims, "the first media event in history." Other writers have cited it as the first documentary. Whether or not this is true, this article will argue that Battle of the Somme generated a genuine documentary audience. However, the article is not a study of spectatorship in a conventional way. That work has already been done. Rather, the purpose is to look at the way audiences literally saw the film, cues that are less than apparent today than they were in 1916.
- Subjects
UNITED Kingdom; DOCUMENTARY films; MOTION picture audiences; SOMME, 1st Battle of the, France, 1916; WORLD War I; WORLD War I films
- Publication
Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 2018, Vol 27, Issue 2, p1
- ISSN
0847-5911
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.3138/CJFS.27.2.2018-0015