IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS | TOBY HAGGITH| Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2025 скачать в хорошем качестве

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUMS | TOBY HAGGITH| Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2025

The German Retreat and Battle of Arras records the British Army’s big 1917 Easter offensive on the Western Front during the First World War. The third in a trilogy of official feature-length films about the Army’s campaigns in France and Belgium – preceded by Battle of the Somme (1916) and Battle of the Ancre and Advance of the Tanks (1917) – Battle of Arras is the least known of the series, but beau- tiful and visually more varied, as demonstrated in this new digital restoration, the fruit of a collaboration between the Imperial War Museums (IWM) and the University of Udine. Battle of Arras was filmed by four newsreel cameramen, Geoffrey Malins, Harry Raymond, John McDowell, and Herbert Baldwin. The cameramen were given Army uniforms to wear, and were housed and fed by the Army and transported around the battle zones in an Army car. They were not free to film where they wished; they were usually “conducted” by Captain J. C. Faunthorpe, an officer from Military Intelligence and the Military Director of Kinematograph Operations, and they depended on the Army for access to the battlefields and information about what was happening and the subjects they could film. The film was sponsored by the War Office Cinematograph Committee, and produced by the Topical Film Company, an or- ganization made up of leading newsreel and factual filmmakers. There are no records about the production of the film, and other than the cameramen we do not know who made it; the only other named person is William F. Jury, the Booking Director. It is assumed that the editing and titling of the film was done in the same way as the previous big Battle films, the camera- men bringing back the exposed footage and their notes of what they shot to London, where the footage was edited by an unnamed commercial film producer, assisted by one or more of the cameramen, with Captain Faunthorpe writing all the titles and in overall charge. Once the footage was edited, a rough cut was screened to War Office officials and then sent to Army General Headquarters in France for more scrutiny and censorship. Any cuts identified by the Chief Censor were made back in London. At first Battle of Arras seems to follow the model of the Somme campaign films – it is around the same running time The intertitles relate that the raids brought “back prison- ers” and “valuable information”, while documents record that the South Africans and the Cameronians (Scottish Rifles) had many casualties. There are also fewer shots in the trenches. Instead there is a lot of movement by troops and even cavalry and horse- drawn cannons above ground, reflecting the successes of the British offensive at the start of the Battle of Arras.