"He Sees Now What He Looked Like": Soldier Spectators, Topical Films, and the Problem of Onscreen Representation during World War I

ABSTRACT:Utilizing a variety of historical sources, including new evidence pertaining to the faking of scenes in The Battle of the Somme (1916), this essay examines how British soldiers of World War I responded to topical films purporting to document the realities of the war and their lives as soldiers. As this essay documents, such soldiers, primed by their firsthand experience of the conflict, became a demographic of wartime filmgoers positioned to interrogate, negotiate, and ultimately deconstruct the artifice of cinematic imagery that had been primarily constructed for a comparatively naïve civilian audience.