British Universities Film & Video Council

moving image and sound, knowledge and access

Restoring ‘The Battle of the Somme’

Filmed warfare was a new phenomenon at the time of the First World War and it was months before the British authorities allowed cameramen up to the front line. David Walsh of the Imperial War Museum discusses the restoration of The Battle of the Somme (1916), one of the first such films and long-held to be a classic of its kind.

About the author: David Walsh is Head of Preservation at the Imperial War Museums.

The Battle of the Somme, assembled from footage taken by two cameramen, J B McDowell and Geoffrey Malins, at the time of the opening of The Somme offensive on 1 July 1916, was one of the first official films to be released to the public. This groundbreaking production, a full-length documentary showing activities in forward areas during the build-up and first days of the battle, was immensely successful with a public who had never seen anything of its kind before. Here were actual scenes of the now familiar business of war: the supplies and ammunitions, the troops marching, the big guns, the wounded and the dead. There were even shots, after a carefully orchestrated build-up, of troops going over the top – although this is the one instance where a brief faked sequence is used, as the genuine shots of the first advance are distant and pictorially unimpressive.

When the Imperial War Museum took over the responsibility for the original negative of the film in 1920, it was already in a shabby state – it is one of the laws of film archiving that the more popular and important the film, the worse the condition of the surviving material. The negative was scratched and patched, with a number of inferior quality duplicate sections where the original had been damaged  – or perhaps even cut out for other uses. Thanks to the initiative of the head of the Museum’s film collection, Edward Foxen Cooper, master copies of this and many other important films were made on more stable cellulose acetate stock in the early 1930s and it is largely thanks to this pioneering effort that the film survives complete, even though the original negative has long since decomposed.

Somme_before-web

The 2nd Battalion, Royal Warwickshires marching to the Front: a scene from reel 2, as captured in a frame blow-up from the film in the early 1990s. (image: IWM)

somme_after-web

The same scene in a frame-grab from the new version, following restoration work at Dragon Digital Intermediate in 2006. (image: IWM)

 

« previous     1 2    next »