‘How Shall We Look Again’? Revisiting the Archive in British Silent Film and the Great War

Abstract

As the First World War now passes from living memory, the film records that survive are increasingly significant in shaping our understanding of the conflict. Feature films produced in the aftermath indicate how the conflict entered the collective memory and was explored and exploited by cinéastes, writers and performers. When we look again at films such as Blighty (1927), The Guns of Loos and Dawn (1928), we need to remind ourselves that these films were produced almost a decade after the end of the conflict and are part of the process of remembering. Wilfred Wilson Gibson’s poem ‘Lament’, published in a 1926 anthology, expressed this moment of troubled reflection of present upon past beautifully:

We who are left, how shall we look again

Happily on the sun or feel the rain

Without remembering how they who went

Ungrudgingly and spent

Their lives for us loved, too, the sun and rain?¹

Most films of the early and mid-1920s were made with the benefit of hindsight and at a respectful distance. But by the late 1920s, respect and mourning were giving way to critique and questioning, indicated, for example, by the publication of poems by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That.