*The Battle of the Somme* film premieres

On 21 August 1916 the documentary The Battle of the Somme opened simultaneously in 34 cinemas in London, and soon afterwards across the country. It showed the preparations for the offensive on the Somme and its first days, while the battle was still going on. For the first time so large an audience could see war at close quarters: trenches, artillery bombardment, the attack, the wounded and the dead. Within six weeks the film had been seen in Britain, by estimates, by some 20 million people. It is regarded as one of the most successful propaganda films in the history of cinema.

It was shot by two official cameramen attached to the army, Geoffrey Malins and John McDowell, between 26 June and the first days of July 1916. Malins filmed on the northern sector of the front, with the 29th Division at Beaumont-Hamel. It was he who, on the morning of 1 July, filmed the explosion of the great mine under the redoubt on Hawthorn Ridge, ten minutes before the attack. The shot of a column of earth rising over the German trenches became one of the most famous images of the whole war. McDowell worked further south, with the 7th Division at Mametz. The material was edited into a film of five reels, running about 77 minutes, with intertitles explaining the successive scenes.

The first screening, for invited guests, took place on 10 August at the Scala Theatre in London. A letter was read out from the new Secretary of State for War, David Lloyd George, urging that the film should reach everyone. The authorities hoped it would show the public the army’s effort and strengthen support for the war. It did, although audiences reacted in different ways. Many looked on the screen for relatives and friends who had gone into the attack on 1 July. The scenes showing the dead caused shock. The Dean of Durham, Hensley Henson, protested against an entertainment that “wounds the heart and violates the very sanctity of bereavement”, and one London cinema refused to show the film, saying that cinemas were there to entertain, not to show “the horrors of war”. Many commentators, however, felt that people at home ought to see what the soldiers were going through.

Although the film was taken to be a faithful record of the battle, some scenes were staged. The famous shot of soldiers going over the top, a few of whom fall, was filmed on a training ground behind the lines, not under fire. Most of the material, however, is genuine, including the scenes with the wounded and prisoners. The cameramen could not film the real attack at close range. The picture that audiences took for the truth about 1 July was thus both dramatised and softened: it said nothing of the scale of the losses on the first day, when the British army lost more than 57,000 men.

The film’s success convinced the authorities of the value of cinema as a propaganda tool. In early September King George V watched it at a private screening at Windsor, and further films from the front followed in later years. Today a copy is held by the Imperial War Museum, and in 2005 UNESCO inscribed the film on its Memory of the World register.