This entry is a subentry of War and the Military in Film.
Visual depiction of the military has been a preoccupation of filmmakers since the first actualitiés, or nonfiction films, were shown by Louis Lumière in Paris, in 1895. Within a year, newsworthy footage was being shown by enterprising camera operators in makeshift theaters all over the world. Thomas Alva Edison pioneered another type of newsfilm, the prize fight, as early as 1894. By the outbreak of the Spanish‐American War in April 1898, viewing “actualities”—lasting perhaps a minute or two—was already part of American leisure activity.
These early newsfilms are all documentaries, as are, in one sense, all newsreels. Every selection of subject, every change in camera angle, every decision in editing footage for a final product involves point of view. That hard‐to‐define word documentary, described by the English filmmaker John Grierson as “the creative treatment of actuality,” also involves point of view. In short, there is much more to the concept of documentary than simple documented fact, as compared to, say, the official likeness recorded in a passport photograph.
Early depictions of news events made extensive use of recreations, often amateurish, though this seems not to have provoked much comment. No camera was present at the sinking of the USS Maine when it was blown up in Havana Harbor, 15 February 1898; the best that Edison's operators could do was to film the half‐submerged wreck and the funeral procession for the sailors who had died in the explosion. Such dull footage was replaced with more newsworthy reenactments. Two cameramen proudly recalled faking the naval Battle of Santiago, using cardboard cutouts of U.S. and Spanish warships, pulled by threads across a container filled with water. The proclaimed “authentic” battle footage was enhanced by off‐camera cigar smoke. The tension between the viewer's desire to “see” the face of battle and the camera's inability to do so was clear from the beginning, a tension that still exists.
The Boer War (1899–1902) was filmed by pioneering cameramen. W. L. Dickson could not shoot the Boer positions with an early telephoto lens in December 1899 because of poor weather conditions. To remedy the situation, fully equipped armies of mock British and Boer soldiers “fought” each other in the hills around Orange, New Jersey, site of the Edison motion picture company. It is but a short step from newsreel reenactments to soldiers fighting in some Hollywood costume drama.
The first American newsreel premiered on 8 August 1911—an American version of a French newsreel, Pathé's Weekly. An enthusiastic review in a trade magazine claimed that the best footage showed German soldiers on review at Potsdam near Berlin. The anonymous reviewer felt this footage allowed the viewer to see the perfection of German arms and discipline in a way possible in no other medium. Also praised in this first American newsreel was footage of an American naval vessel, the battleship North Dakota, undergoing repairs at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. From the start, in other words, the depiction of military might and military hardware informed the commercial newsreel in America.
Pathé, a French company that distributed in the United States, was the first of what became five American newsreel companies active until the rise of television in the mid‐1950s. Hollywood's Universal Pictures newsreels did not cease operations until 1967. The newsreel was a series of short stories, lasting eight to ten minutes in total, driven by entertainment values and always meant to hold a paying audience that had come to a movie theater to see a feature‐length fictional film. Military pageantry proved a favorite subject. The newsreel rarely contributed to serious debate over military policy, and almost never turned such to subjects as women in the military, or the relationship of the military to the society from which it found its basis for support.
For North Americans, the story of the Mexican guerrilla leader Francisco (“Pancho”) Villa, his raid on Columbus, New Mexico, and the resulting Punitive Expedition of 1916—part of the U.S. military involvement in the Mexican Revolution—were of intense filmic interest, an interest fueled by a unique contractual relationship between Villa and the U.S.‐based Mutual Film Corporation. In an agreement signed on 3 January 1914, Villa promised to fight, whenever possible, only during daylight hours. In one important battle for the city of Ojinaga, Villa actually delayed his attack until Mutual could bring its cameras into position.
Little of Mutual's footage has survived. What has—uninteresting visually—can be seen at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. But extraordinary still photographs of Villa can be found in two articles by Aurelio de los Reyes, printed in the 1986 and 1987 Library of Congress Performing Arts Annual. The Mutual contract with Villa reminds us that docudrama the combination of documentaries and feature films, is not a concept of entirely recent vintage, and that something more than newsworthiness has shaped the visual record of newsfilm.
World War I represents a turning point for nonfiction film's treatment of the military, a turning point more obvious perhaps for what British filmmakers were able to achieve than for their American competitors, who until 6 April 1917 were recording a war that seemed little more than a curiosity to most U.S. audiences. Most of the footage shot between 1914 and 1918 has long since disappeared. But much of it—the “outtakes”—was never seen by audiences of the day, and has only recently come to light. Those who unthinkingly assume that NBC's Project XX or CBS's The Twentieth Century—both pioneering television documentary series from the 1950s that are still being rerun—have included the relevant surviving footage of battle will be amazed by the existence of some 440 titles in Anouk van der Jagt and Mette Peters, World War One on Television: An Index of Non‐Fiction Programmes (1993).
One of the more dramatic rediscoveries of recent years is a forty‐minute film shot by German cameraman Oskar Messter of wartime production at a steel mill at Poldihütte (then part of Austro‐Hungary) in 1916. The numerous women workers are shown manufacturing shell casings, step by step. No surviving records indicate what contemporary audiences thought of this film, or how many saw it, but its visual brilliance makes it one of the Netherlands Film Museum's outstanding pieces of wartime nonfiction footage. The skillful editing suggests that it was meant as a documentary; it survives to tell us about the role of women in wartime production, as well as to indicate state‐of‐the‐art steel manufacturing in a time of full‐scale war.
The most important documentary to come out of World War I was Britain's The Battle of the Somme (1916). We know that the overwhelming majority of the British populace saw this film in the late summer and fall of 1916, and that is seemed genuinely to convey what it was like to fight in a battle that resulted in 100,000 British casualties on the first day. The unanimity of surviving contemporary opinion makes it clear that this was film propaganda that worked. The seventy‐three‐minute film, available on video from London's Imperial War Museum, has little impact on today's viewer, more eager to recognize the few “over‐the‐top” attack scenes, which were faked, than to accept the film's historical significance: the first feature‐length documentary successfully to justify the meaning of total war to a home front audience.
The impact of this film was not lost on the enemy. Germany responded with a rejoinder, With Our Heroes at the Somme (1917), restricted in scope and unsuccessful with German viewers. Nevertheless, its title demonstrates why Adolf Hitler and Gen. Erich Ludendorff believed that in World War I the British were the master propagandists.
American nonfiction filmmaking in 1917–18 represents a lesser level of achievement. The Battle of the Somme was shown widely in the United States. The Wilson administration's Creel Committee released a seventy‐minute documentary newsfilm, Pershing's Crusaders, in 1918, but the uninteresting footage failed to arouse enthusiasm. U.S. Army Signal Corps camera operators spent much of their time pleading with old‐fashioned field officers who saw no value in film. As a result, American newsreels carried war stories based on the footage of European news cameramen, with little to show save colorful entries into towns freed from German occupation. French civilians looked appropriately joyous for the camera. The exploits of the black 369th Regiment (“Harlem Hellfighters”) are shown (including a sound track with the 369th's jazz band) in William Miles's documentary, Men of Bronze (1977), now available on video. The best guide to American footage, curiously enough, is Roger Smither's 1994 catalogue of the film holdings of the Imperial War Museum, which includes a brief summary of every single film item relating to World War I.
Nobody has a problem locating footage for World War II. Indeed, we first recall that war from film images; few could claim never to have seen so much as a single World War II documentary. American newsreels got their battle footage through a pool system. U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps photographers shot footage at the front; after careful censorship, it was then shared with all five newsreel companies. This does not mean that every story has a dreary visual sameness, but it helps explain why there are no multiple shots of bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example. It is also true that the overall visual record of American battle footage is not particularly impressive, particularly when compared to the Nazi Wochenschau, or newsreel, now available on home video from Chicago's International Historic Films (IHF). Wartime saw no change in the entertainment‐driven requirements of the American commercial newsreel. Bathing beauties appeared on screen more often than that symbol of women in the workplace, Rosie the Riveter.
Wartime documentary was official; such films must be considered as propaganda, their avowed purpose. Most were made for the government by Hollywood directors, men who had made their reputations in fictional feature production. Best known was Frank Capra, who produced for the military seven feature‐length documentaries explaining the reasons why the United States was at war. The Why We Fight series originally included an eighth film, War Comes to America, Part II, which survives only as a shooting script. The Capra films (available on home video) seem strident to today's viewers, who perhaps have not thought about what they replaced—plodding, well‐meaning lecturers assigned to give recruits fifteen orientation lectures, including all the facts and figures.
Capra's film unit also produced a pioneering documentary, The Negro Soldier (1944), describing overstated prospects for black advancement. Nevertheless, the film by its very existence and its high production values served as a threat to official segregation policy. Its radical premise could not be disguised; career advancement would mark the end of a rigidly segregated military.
The Hollywood director William Wyler directed Memphis Belle (1944), the finest documentary about the experience of flying on a bombing raid produced by any combatant nation. John Huston made San Pietro (1945), a low‐key explanation about how the taking of one small Italian village from its German occupiers explains the grinding attrition of the Italian Campaign, and, by indirection, the meaning of the war to the G.I.s. Some modern viewers miss the skillful reenactments in the film, which is effective precisely because of important scenes shot just before or after the battle. Huston dealt with the problem of battle fatigue in Let There Be Light (1946), filmed at a hospital on Long Island. The film was denied public clearance for twenty years because Huston did not get written releases from the soldiers undergoing psychiatric treatment; for years he falsely insisted that the Pentagon had censored his film because it was antiwar.
The most significant nonfiction footage to come out of World War II is a collective enterprise, reminding us how much the horrors of war and views of the enemy are defined through visual media in the twentieth century. In the spring of 1945, the collective footage of skeletal figures, piles of dead bodies stacked like so much cordwood, of a bulldozer pushing countless naked bodies into a mass grave, and of such well as Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton walking through liberated death camps while inmates were still present, provided documentation for German crimes against humanity presented at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial, 1945–46. This visual record made clear in the war's aftermath that Nazi Germany had been an enemy worth fighting. Although the word Holocaust was not used in 1945, we must count the Holocaust footage shot by American, Russian, and British cameramen as one of the most important military uses of the medium of film.
The Korean War was covered by newsreel cameramen; television news based its limited coverage on newsfilm shot by newsreel cameramen. It might be helpful to point out that similar footage was seen in theaters and on television, remembering that a freeze by the Federal Communications Commission restricted the total number of television stations in the United States to just 108 until mid‐April 1952. Korea was an unpopular war. Millions saw Gen. Douglas MacArthur's triumphal motorcade pass through downtown San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City after his dismissal by President Harry S. Truman in April 1951; few found much interest in a war that soon settled into stalemate. The historian Bruce Cumings's 1990 WGBH television series has an appropriate title for Korea: The Forgotten War.
For Vietnam, the distinction between television news and documentary begins to erode. Americans learned of France's war in Indochina from the newsreel; the war which came to occupy American attention was covered by three national networks: NBC, CBS, and ABC, the last too weak to attract many viewers, which is worth remembering when one evaluates the impact of the conservative commentator Howard K. Smith, or such unusual ABC Vietnam television correspondents as the photographer David Douglas Duncan.
The Vietnam War resulted in many documentaries protesting the conflict, most of which failed to find much of an audience. Peter Davis, in The Selling of the Pentagon (CBS, 1971), indicted the military‐industrial complex. His feature‐length Technicolor Hearts and Minds (1974) received an Academy Award for Best Documentary. The film explains American militarism as a direct result of societal enthusiasm for Friday night high school football, and uses an editing trick to jump‐cut from Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who declares that the Oriental places little value on human life, to a Vietnamese woman weeping over the death of her child. Zina Voynow, the film's editor, told me in 1978 that she felt her work on this film to be the most important thing she had done in her life.
Quite different, in what now seems old‐fashioned black and white, is Eugene Jones's The Face of War (1967), now available on video. The film suggests what it was like to be part of a Marine combat unit in 1966. Jones spent three months in the field with the company; his film does a remarkable job of capturing the aural presence of radio in the life of an American soldier in Vietnam. Emile de Antonio's In the Year of the Pig (1969) incorporated archival footage from camera operators from the former East Germany, Hanoi, and the National Liberation Front office in Prague, in a hammer‐and‐tongs assault on American conduct of the war.
The most important piece of newsfilm to come out of the Vietnam War was certainly the NBC color newsfilm of South Vietnamese Colonel Loan executing a Viet Cong sympathizer, 2 February 1968, on the streets of downtown Saigon, at the start of the Tet Offensive, the turning point of the war. A three‐man camera team from NBC and ABC filmed the event; Associated Press photographerEddie Adams took a Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of what seemed to be the instant of death. The visual microcosm of disaster suggested that America supported a government that killed innocent victims with no concern for guilt or innocence.
The Communists' Tet Offensive took the war into the cities of South Vietnam. Peter Braestrup, in Big Story (1977), the most comprehensive study of any foreign event ever covered by the American media, indicts both television correspondents and newspaper reporters for missing the meaning of Tet (Braestrup was Washington Post bureau chief in Saigon in 1968). The Persian Gulf War, not Vietnam, was America's first “living‐room war.” As a general rule, television supported the war up to the fall of 1967; elite opinion in Washington—exemplified by the counsel the so‐called Wise Men gave Lyndon B. Johnson in late March 1968—turned against the war before the majority of Americans did so. Antiwar television and newspaper stories did not make American battlefield victory impossible.
The latest development in television newsfilm occurred in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Thanks to satellite cable television, CNN's Peter Arnett was able to broadcast directly from Baghdad, and Saddam Hussein used television to speak directly to President George Bush and the American people. Endless media prognostications about the upcoming allied Coalition assault on Kuwait City from the sea helped mislead Hussein and his advisers as to where the attack would actually come, contributing importantly to his overwhelming defeat.
The Gulf War to date has produced no memorable documentaries. Vast amounts of television programming about that war, recorded from all over the world, can be viewed at archives at the University of Leeds in England. Yesterday's newsfilm is tomorrow's archival footage for the day‐after‐tomorrow's documentaries. A final word of caution may be in order: the recent enthusiasm for faked grainy newsfilm in Hollywood feature films should remind us that never has the distinction between documentary and fictional film been less clear.
[See also Film, War and the Military in: Feature Films; Illustration, War and the Military in; News Media, War, and the Military; Photography, War and the Military In; Propaganda and Public Relations, Government.]
Bibliography
- Editors of Look, Movie Lot to Beachhead: The Motion Picture Goes to War and Prepares for the Future, 1945.
- Raymond Fielding, The American Newsreel, 1911–1967, 1972.
- Erwin Leiser, Nazi Cinema, 1974.
- Peter Braestrup, Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington,
2 vols., 1977. - Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, eds., From Hanoi to Hollywood: The Vietnam War in American Film, 1990.
- David Culbert, editor‐in‐chief, Film and Propaganda in America: A Documentary History,
5 vols., 1990–93. - Philip M. Taylor, War and the Media: Propaganda and Persuasion in the Gulf War, 1992.
- Daan Hertogs and Nico De Klerk, Nonfiction from the Teens: The 1994 Amsterdam Workshop, 1994.
- Paolo Cherchi Usai, Burning Passions: An Introduction to the Study of Silent Cinema, 1994.
- Roger Smither, ed., Imperial War Museum Film Catalogue I: The First World War Archive, 1994.
- John Whiteclay Chambers II and David Culbert, eds., World War II, Film, and History, 1996
