Celluloid War Memorials

The British Instructional Films Company and the Memory of the Great War

By: Mark Connelly

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eBook | 31 July 2019 | Edition Number 1

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The films made by the British Instructional Films (BIF) company in the decade following the end of the First World War helped to shape the way in which that war was remembered. This is both a work of cinema history and a study of the public's memory of WW1.

By the early twenties, the British film industry was struggling to cope with the power of Hollywood and government help was needed to guarantee its survival. The 1927 Cinematograph Films Act was intended to support the domestic film industry by requiring British cinemas to show a quota of domestically produced films each year. The Act was not the sole saviour of British cinema, but the government intervention did allow the domestic industry to exploit the talents of an emerging group of younger filmmakers including Michael Balcon, Walter Summers and Alfred Hitchcock, who directed the most influential of these BIF war constructions.

This book shows that the films are micro-histories revealing huge amounts about perceptions of the Great War, national and imperial identities, the role of cinema as a shaper of attitudes and identities, power relations between Britain and the USA and the nature of popular culture as an international contest in its own right.

Industry Reviews

BIF [British Instructional Films] and their WW1 [World War 1] films have received little attention by scholars, despite their box office success and critical acclaim at the time of their release... the role of the films as a 'surrogate language' for veterans is particularly interesting and productive, as is the argument that the films might be understood as 'celluloid war memorials'. The intention to concentrate on contexts of reception is particularly interesting in this regard and promises to offer a fresh insight into the productions.
Another major strength is the emphasis it places on the circulation of the films outside Britain itself, within the Empire and further afield. This really is original and has the potential to result in some ground-breaking work.'
Lawrence Napper, Film Studies Department, King's College London