What is going on with the British Pathe website? Having written one post on the early fiction films to be found there and another on the newsreels, I had to write a third pointing out that the free low resolution downloads were no longer available (but could be found on the ITN site), and that high resolution copies for which you had to pay were all that were available. But now the free download films – all 3,500 hours of them – are back on the British Pathe site. I think the only advice must be to download while you can.
Category Archives: Non-fiction
A Girl Cinematographer at the Balkan War
Jessica Borthwick, from The Bioscope
Having promised more on early war films, in recognition of Stephen Bottomore’s recent work, and the posts on British women filmmakers and the collection of women’s writings on cinema, Red Velvet Seat, I’m going to combine these interests by writing something on Jessica Borthwick, cinematographer of the Balkan War of 1913. Red Velvet Seat, in its otherwise excellent author biographies, says of Borthwick “no information found”. Well, I think we can do a little better than that.
Jessica Borthwick was twenty-two years old when she set out to film and photograph the second Balkan War (essentially the Bulgarians were fighting the Turks, Serbians and Greeks) in 1913. She filmed there for a year, not on behalf of any film company, but purely for her own interest, with the aim of exhibiting films and photographs on a lecture tour around Britain on her return.
Good connections enabled her to take this unusual step. She was the daughter of General George Colville Borthwick (1840-1896), who had been commander-in-chief of the army in Eastern Roumelia (part of Bulgaria after 1885). His brother was Sir Algernon Borthwick (1830-1908), 1st Baron Glenesk, a prominent figure in Victorian society as owner of The Morning Post, a position that by 1913 was occupied by his widow, Alice. The Hon. Miss Borthwick therefore found many doors open to her, particularly in Bulgaria, but that does not explain the remarkable determination and enterprise shown in an interview she gave for The Bioscope, published as ‘A Girl Cinematographer at the Balkan War,’ 7 May 1914. Here’s an extract:
… I took out with me to the Balkans one small plate camera and one cinematograph camera, which was made for me by Mr. Arthur Newman, who taught me in three days how to use it. This cinematograph camera of Mr. Newman’s lasted me the whole twelve months, in spite of the fact that it underwent terribly hard usage and received no repairs whatever except for my amateurish effort to mend it with bits of wire …
The difficulties of taking cinematograph pictures on the battlefield, especially when you are alone and unaided by any assistant, are, as you can imagine, tremendous. The use of a tripod is a particular embarrassment. Things happen so quickly in time of war that, unless one can be ready with one’s camera at a few seconds’ notice, the episode one wishes to record will probably be over. During the Servian [sic] war in Macedonia, my tripod was smashed by a shell, and although the camera was intact, the film which I was taking at the time got hopelessly jumbled up and had to be cut away from the mechanism with which it had become entwined.
Another great difficulty was the want of a dark room. One day, while taking films in the Rhodope Mountains, I came to a strange village of wooden huts inhabited by a nomadic race called Vlaques. Something went wrong with my camera, and I tried to make the people understand that I wanted some place which would serve as a dark room. It was impossible to get them to grasp what I meant, however, until eventually I found a man making rugs out of sheep’s wool. After much persuasion, I induced him to cover me up with his rugs, and in this unusual and very stuffy ‘dark room’ I managed to open my camera in safety. Having no film box with me at the moment, I wrapped the negative up in pieces of paper and stowed it away in my pocket, carrying it thus for fifteen days until I returned to Sofia. Occupied with other matters, I forgot the film and handed my coat to a servant who, being of an inquisitive nature, unwrapped the negative, and finding it uninteresting, put it back in the pocket without the paper, afterwards hanging up the coat to air in the sun. Subsequently I developed the film – and found it one of the best I had.
The want of a technical dictionary, combined with the natives’ ignorance of photography, brought about several rather amusing situations. On one occasion, in Adrianople, I lost a screw from my tripod. There were shops of most other kinds, but no ironmongers, and at last, in despair, I tried to explain to an officer what I wanted in dumb show, not knowing the word for ‘screw.’ Having followed my actions for some moments with apparent intelligence, he suddenly hailed a cab and bundled me hastily in. We drove right across the city, until eventually we entered some massive gates and drew up – inside the prison! However, I turned the misconception to advantage by securing some excellent snapshots and having some very interesting talks with the prisoners. One convict – a German of considerable education – invited me to go and see him hanged the next morning. I saw two executions in that prison.
During the cholera rage in Adrianople, everything connected with that terrible disease was painted black. The carts in which the dead bodies were carried away were black, for example, as were the coffins in which cholera victims were buried. While the scourge was at its height, I went down into the gipsy quarter to take a film. The people in this part of the city had never seen a camera before, and when they saw me pointing my black box at various objects they thought I was operating some wonderful new instrument for combating the disease which was destroying them. Quickly surrounding me, they came and knelt upon the ground, kissing my feet and clothing, and begging with dreadful pathos that I should cure them. It was a task as sad as it was difficult to explain that their hopes were mistaken, and that I was impotent to help them …
What are my present and future plans? Well, in a few days time I hope to start a month’s engagement at the Polytechnic to lecture twice daily on the war … With regard to the future, I shall leave England in June next for the Arctic regions, where I want to start a colony for the cure of consumption and other diseases. This is the dream of my life. The great open spaces of the North are God’s sanatorium, and I believe that, when once their possibilities are known, their value will be recognised. I have been in the Arctic regions before. Yes, I shall take two or three cameras with me, induding Mr. Newman’s wonderful new hand cinematograph camera. When shall I return? That I cannot say. Perhaps at the end of a year – perhaps never.
Her lecture ambitions appear to have been thwarted. A court case followed in which she accused her projectionist of incompetence and having ruined her lecture engagements. Nor did she return to the Arctic. The First World War intervened, and she is next heard of as an ambulance worker on the Western Front, where she was wounded by shell and decorated by the Belgians.
Then what happened to her? She appears not to have married, but to have been a society figure, mentioned from time to time as having attended august gatherings of London society, into the 1940s. In 1946 she is recorded as having given a talk to the Sailors’ and Airmen’s Families Association, on the problems of life. She may be the same Jessica Borthwick who is occasionally referred to as a sculptress. We have no record of her death. Her films, alas, are not known to survive. Because they were never commercially released, there does not even seem to be a review of them, or any stills. Nor does it seem that her photographs exist. Perhaps this post will have brought together sufficient information for someone else to go in pursuit of her and discover more. It would be a worthwhile investigation.
By the way, the interview with her from The Bioscope is reproduced in full in Red Velvet Seat, while a lengthy abstract is given in Kevin Brownlow’s The War The West and the Wilderness.
Searching for Albert Kahn
Albert Kahn, from http://www.ejumpcut.org © Albert Kahn Museum – Département of Hauts-de-Seine
A lot of people are coming to this blog in search of information on Albert Kahn, following the BBC4 series The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn. The Kahn collection is best known for its still photographs, which largely lie outside the concerns of The Bioscope, but he did employ motion picture cameramen too (as well as acquiring film from other collections), so here’s a short account of his Archives de la Planète, and some pointers on where to find out more.
Albert Kahn was a millionaire Parisian banker and philanthropist who decided to use his fortune to document the world in photographs. Between 1908 and 1931 he sent out still photographers and motion picture cameramen to create a photographic record of the globe. The project was supervised by geographer Jean Brunhes, who employed around eleven cameramen who visited forty-eight countries and brought back 72,000 Autochrome colour plates, 4,000 steroscopic views, and 600,000 feet of film. They also acquired film from commercial companies, including newsreels and scientific films. Kahn called the project the Archives de la Planète. Kahn lost his money in the Depression, bringing an end to the project, but the collection survived. It has remained remarkably little known, particularly the film component, but a steady trickle of academic interest in recent years has now been followed by the success of the BBC4 series, which has rightly startled people with the beauty of the images and the sheer extent of what they recorded.
Most of the film collection is in the form of unedited rushes of actuality subjects: everything from film taken in Mongolia in 1912-13, to the signing of the Briand-Kellogg Pact in 1928, A.J. Balfour visiting Zionist colonies in Palestine in 1925, fisheries in Newfoundland in 1922, and dancers in Cambodia in 1921. Kahn’s cameramen included Stephane Passet, Lucien Le Saint, Léon Busy, Frédéric Gadmer, Camille Sauvageot and Roger Dumas.
There is an informative and thoughtful article by Teresa Castro, ‘Les Archives de la Planète: A cinematographic atlas’, which is a good place to start, and has some beautiful Autochrome illustrations.
There is no Les Archives de la Planète or Albert Kahn website with a collection of the images on show (update: the BBC has now created www.albertkahn.co.uk). The Hauts-de-Seine.net site has some pages on the Musée Albert Kahn giving basic information and access details, in French. [Another update: the link is now www.albert-kahn.fr]
The Museum is located in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, and is renowned for its beautiful gardens. There is a plain official web page describing these, but you are better off reading the evocative New York Times article, ‘Philosophy in Bloom’, by Jacqueline McGrath, which describes a visit to the gardens (which are apparently not to easy to find).
Autochrome of French troops during First World War, from http://www.worldwaronecolorphotos.com
If you are entranced by Autochromes, there are several good sites to visit. This year (2007) sees the centenary of the Autochrome, recognised by www.autochrome.com [link now dead]. The highly recommended Luminous Lint photography site has an explanation of the ingenious Autochrome photographic process, involving the use of dyed potato starch grains acting as colour filters, which helped give them their particular ‘impressionist’ effect.
The site World War I Color Photos has some astonishing images from a conflict we generally only imagine in monochrome. Australian and French First World War Autochromes are reproduced on the Captured in Colour site (which also displays the Paget plate colour system). And there are more First World War Autochromes on the Heritage of the Great War site (though do note this site mixes these up with other coloured images, including artifically-coloured postcards).
The Library of Congress has a page on the restoration of Autochromes. There is an exhibition of the expressive Autochrome work of Gabriel Veyre at www.gabrielveyre-collection.org (Veyre did not work for Kahn but was previously a film cameraman with the Lumière brothers, inventors of the Autochrome). George Eastman House has an online exhibit of eighty Autochromes from the Charles Zoller collection, reproduced in high resolution. The Galerie-Photo site has an exhibition of Autochromes (originally stereoscopic i.e. 3D), with some interesting technical observations.
American academic Paula Amad has written “Cinema’s ‘sanctuary’: From pre-documentary to documentary film in Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète (1908-1931)” for the journal Film History, the best single source for information on Kahn’s project, and is writing a book on the collection.
The site www.autochrome.org [link now dead] doesn’t have that much information, but it does tell you in detail how to make your own Autochromes the original way (it’s not easy). If you don’t want to try the original potato starch method, why not use Photoshop? PhotoshopSupport.com will show you how.
Pioneering scientific filmmaker Dr Jean Comandon was one of those who worked for Kahn, late on in the project, as the Institut Pasteur explains (in French).
Definitely the book on Autochromes to buy is John Wood’s The Art of the Autochrome. There will be no more beautiful title on your bookshelves.
Lastly, look out for the National Media Museum’s forthcoming exhibition The Dawn of Colour: Celebrating the Centenary of the Autochrome, which opens on May 25th.
Update (April 2008): The BBC has now produced an Albert Kahn website, www.albertkahn.co.uk, which has information on Kahn, the autochromes and the Albert Kahn museum, as well as promoting the new BBC book The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn: Colour Photographs from a Lost Age. No plans have been announced for a DVD release of the BBC series, presumably owing to licensing issues. However, the Kahn museum section of the new BBC site refers to some DVDs, without going into further details. It has been rumoured that the museum was planning to produce some DVDs of its own, showcasing its Autochrome colour photographs (and its films?). This may be a reference to these, which do not seem to have been published as yet.
Another update (March 2009): There are faint rumours of a possible DVD release, in some form. However, the original The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn series is now available on DVD from the BBC, but only from its educational service, BBC Active, where it is priced at an eye-watering £1,125 for 9x50mins DVDs – the intended market is institutions only. This existence (and price) of this would suggest that any subsequent commercial release to the public will be highlights in some form.
And another update (September 2009): There is now a proper website for the Musée Albert Kahn, at www.albert-kahn.fr. It’s all in French, but includes several examples of the autochromes, photographs of the museum and gardens, a biography of Kahn, and news of exhibitions etc.
Final (?) update (September 2009)
Good news – the BBC has brought out the series on DVD. The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn is a 3-disc set (PAL, region 2), divided into nine parts, running 462mins. It’s released by 2 entertain, which is part-owned by BBC Worldwide.
British Pathe at ITN
Alas, having posted items on the British Pathe newsreel site telling people about the free downloads (with lots of silent material, including some fiction films), the service has changed. The agreement the company had with the Lottery Fund was that it would make its collection freely available online for three years, and then might charge. Well, it’s been a bit more than three years, and the charging has been brought in. It is no longer possible to download low resolution copies for free. Instead you are offered high resolution (512Kb/per sec) copies which can be downloaded for £25 (plus VAT). You can still search the database and view the preview stills for free, but the free downloads have gone.
But do not despair! Because the British Pathe films are also available from ITN Source, ITN currently having the rights to manage British Pathe footage sales. And there, if you go to the Advanced Search option, and select British Pathe from the Collection drop-down menu, you get access to the entire library with free video streams (but not downloads). How long this situation will continue, I’ve no idea, but for now it’s all there to view from ITN – but not to keep.
Modern Gladiators
I am poorer but richer. I have forked out for Antonia Lant’s Red Velvet Seat: Women’s Writing on the First Fifty Years of Cinema, as already promoted here. It is full of riches. The notes alone are a map to a marvellous world, with a host of tempting pathways down which to travel.
There’s so much that one could say about the texts in the volume, but the first thing to catch my eye was two pieces written by women who saw the film of the World Heavywieght Championship bout at Carson City, Nevada, between James Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons, on 17 March 1897. One is a short, anonymous piece, ‘The Matinee Girl’, from the New York Dramatic Mirror, 12 June 1897; the other is a longer piece by Alice Rix, ‘Alice Rix at the Veriscope’, from the San Francisco Examiner, 18 July 1897, which is about women spectators of the film.
The film was made by the Veriscope Company, which employed three cameras in parallel, housed in a wooden cabin, so that when the film ran out of one the next door camera started (as the picture above shows). The result was a seemingly continuous, single-position record, which ran for well over an hour (there were fourteen rounds). The film was 63mm wide, giving a ‘widescreen’ effect which was shaped to the size of the ring:
The film was widely shown and enthusiastically watched by audiences worldwide most of whom had never seen a boxing match (boxing was illegal in every American state except Nevada). There was clearly a number of women who went to see the film. And another of them wrote about the experience. Lady Colin Campbell, who wrote a column in The World, on 20 October 1897 wrote about seeing the film at the Aquarium in London (using the pen name Véra Tsaritsyn), under the title ‘Modern Gladiators’:
In spite of all that the humanitarians may say or the Peace Society may preach, the love of fighting will endure to the end of time … it is with satisfaction that I note the number of people who are crowding into the theatre of the Aquarium to see the cinematograph version of the great fight between Corbett and Fitzsimmons, which took place last March in Carson City, Nevada.
It certainly was an admirable idea to have got up this historic encounter for the sake of the pictures to be obtained of it. It is given to comparatively few to see a real prize-fight; but these pictures put the P.R. ‘on tap,’ as it were, for everybody. It is the real thing: the movements of the men, the surging of the crowd, the attentive ministrations of the backers and seconds, are all faithfull represented; only it is so bowdlerised by the absence of colour and noise that the most super-sensitive person, male or female, can witness every details of the fight without a qualm. Evidently the fair sex appreciate such an opportunity, for there are plenty of those tilted ‘coster-girl’ hats adorned with ostrich feathers that would delight the heart of a ‘donah,’ which are fashion’s decree for the moment, to be seen in the theatre … The five-shilling ‘pit’ (which are the lowest-priced seats for this peep-show) is soon filled up; the half-guinea stalls are not long behindhand; and the only part of the auditorium which remains partially empty is the back row of the stalls, which, for some mysterious reason, is thought to offer such exceptional advantages that the seats are priced at a guinea. The seats being exactly the same as the half-guinea abominations in clinging red velvet, and the point of view being precisely similar to that of the front row of the pit (which is only divided off by a rope), we ponder over the gullible snobbishness of the world, while a well-meaning but maddening lady bangs out ‘The Washington Post’ out of an unwilling and suffering piano in the corner. We have nearly arrived at the point of adding our shrieks of exasperation to those of the tortured instrument when the show begins and the ‘Washington Post’ is mercifully silenced.
We are first gratified with a little slice of statistics; the two miles of films on six reels, containing one hundred and sixty-five thousand pictures; the prize of 7000l. which went to the victor; the names of the referee, the timekeeper, and various other details, to which the audience listens with ill-concealed patience … [T]he first picture is thrown upon the sheet, and, having wobbled about a little to find the centre of the canvas, settles down into an admirably distinct view of the platform, with the two champions wrapped in long ulsters, each surrounded by his backers …
Here she goes on to describe the fight in great detail, commenting on the odd effect of the silence, complaining about clinching, and describing the dramatic end where the defeated Corbett in a rage tried to attack Fitzsimmons, causing mayhem in the ring.
The two miles of pictures have taken an hour and a half to pass before our eyes; but though we leave the theatre with aching heads, we regret that so little that we determine to return as soon as we can, to witness again this combat of modern gladiators.
And though here at the Bioscope we’re wary of pointing people to stuff published illegally on YouTube, you can see edited highlights of the bout from a 16mm print probably dating from the 1960s. The intertitles are an obvious modern addition, as is the use of slow motion where they repeat the shot of the knockout blow, where the original film has been damaged. About a third of the film survives today – disappointingly, the scenes showing the uproar at the end of the fight are missing.
British Pathe – part two
Some while ago I posted an item on the British Pathe website, concentrating on the silent fiction films that unexpectedly can be found there. Now here comes the follow-up post, on the newsreels and other non-fiction films to be found there.
In 2002 British Pathe, owners of the Pathé newsreel library, put up the whole of its collection, thanks to a grant from the New Opportunities Fund‘s NOF-Digitise programme. It was a controversial decision, because a commercial company was being given public money to do what some felt the company might have done for itself, but others welcomed a new kind of public-private initiative. The result for the public was 3,500 hours of newsreel footage from 1896 to 1970, available for free as low resolution downloads. Later 12,000,000 still images were added, key frames generated as part of the digitisation process. It was, and remains, one of the most remarkable resources on the net, and a major source for those interested in silent film.
Charles Pathé established the Société Pathé Frères, for the manufacture of phonographs and cinematographs, in 1896. A British agency was formed in 1902, and its first newsreel (which was the first in Britain), Pathé’s Animated Gazette, was launched in June 1910. This soon became Pathé Gazette, a name it retained until 1946, when it was renamed Pathé News, which continued until 1970. These newsreels were issued twice a week, every week, in British cinemas, and were a standard feature of the cinema programme in silent and sound eras.
Pathé also issued other films. It created the cinemagazine Pathé Pictorial in 1918, which ran until 1969. Eve’s Film Review, a cinemagazine for women, was established in 1921 and ran to 1933, while Pathétone Weekly ran 1930-1941. There were other film series and one-off documentaries.
All of this and more is on the site. Pathé were distributors of others’ films, some of which turn up unexpectedly on the site. For example, there are some of the delightful Secrets of Nature natural history films made by Percy Smith in the 1920s. There are also actuality films from before 1910 which Pathé seems to have picked up along the way, though not all of them are Pathé productions by any means – for example, assorted films from the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902.
For the silent period, researchers should note that the collection is not complete. For the First World War and before (what British Pathe calls Old Negatives) the surviving archive is patchy, and the cataloguing records less certain with dates. For the 1920s, the record is substantially complete – indeed, there is unissued and unused material as well as the standard newsreels. These of course show events great and small throughout the decade, with an emphasis on sport, celebrity, spectacle and human interest. Look out in particular for the women’s magazine Eve’s Film Review, a delightful series with an emphasis on “fashion, fun and fancy”. For silent film fans, there are newsreels of Chaplin, Valentino, Pickford, Fairbanks etc. There are all sorts of surprise film history discoveries to be made, such as a Pathé Pictorial on feature film production in Japan in the 1920s.
You can find the British Pathe collection (the company doesn’t use the accent on the e) at other places online. British Pathe is now managed by ITN Source, one of the world’s major footage libraries, and all of its films can be downloaded from that site in the same manner. You can also find many of them on the British Universities Newsreel Database, which is a database of all British newsreels and has substantial information about each of the Pathé newsreels, the people who worked for them, and histories of newsreels and cinemagazines in Britain in the silent and sound eras.
There are also versions of the Pathe delivery for schools – Beyond Pathe, Teaching & Learning with the British Pathe Archive, and Shapes of Time.
It’s a hugely important resource, and it’s all still free, though it’s now beyond the date British Pathe agreed with the New Opportunities Fund to keep the collection freely available to all. Long may it continue to be so.
How We Advertised America
George Creel, from How We Advertised America
The Prelinger Archive continues to publish public domain texts on the Internet Archive, on all kinds of subjects. Among the latest batch is George Creel’s How We Advertised America, published in 1920. George Creel was a journalist and campaigner on social issues who was put in charge of the Committee on Public Information in 1917. The CPI was America’s official propaganda outfit during the First World War, tasked with ‘selling the war’ to Americans. As such it was responsible for American official films such as Pershing’s Crusaders, America’s Answer, Under Four Flags, and the newsreel Official War Review. The Creel Committee, as the CPI was also known, recognised the importance of film as a medium to persuade the public, but it was mistrustful of the film industry, and the film industry was reluctant to be exhibiting propaganda. It had huge troubles getting its films onto American screens. Nevertheless, it produced a stream of footage from its team of Signal Corps cameramen which was issued in the form of persuasive documentaries and the regular newsreel.
After the war, Creel published the controversial How We Advertised America, which called for the use of the methods in commercial advertising to be used for official promotion of America. It’s an important source for understanding the context in which propaganda films were produced during the First World War, the first time the medium had been used extensively by national governments as a tool of mass persuasion. The book is available as a free download in PDF (65MB), DjVu (21MB), b/w PDF (20MB) and TXT (906KB) formats. See also Kevin Brownlow’s book The War The West and the Wilderness for a good acount of the work of Creel and the CPI.
The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn
Autochrome of a fringe-maker in Galway, Ireland during May 1913 © Musée Albert Kahn
The BBC4 Edwardians season has just shown part one of a nine-part series on the remarkable Albert Kahn collection of early colour photographs and actuality films, taken from Kahn’s Archives de la Planete. Kahn was a millionaire Parisian banker who decided to create a visual record of the world in the early twentieth century using the new Autochrome photograph process invited by the Lumière brothers (also inventors of the Cinématographe, of course). He sent photographers to over 50 countries. They took more than 72,000 colour pictures and around 100 hours of (monochrome) film footage, recording sights and scenes across the world in an unprecedented documentary exercise.
The first four parts are being shown under the slightly misleading title of The Edwardians in Colour. The remaining five parts will feature in a future set of programmes on the 1920s.
Update: For background information on Albert Kahn, and links to various sources, see the Seaching for Albert Kahn post on this blog.
U.S. Government Enters Film Industry
The U.S. Government began its entrance into the motion picture industry as early (if not earlier) as 1908. Early on, Government agencies such as the Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Army Signal Corps, the Bureau of Reclamation and others began their foray into this arena. In the beginning, Government offices relied on outside commercial studios for their productions, but early on they realized in order to control costs, maintain creative control and eventually set up their own distribution systems, it was in their best interests to set up their own production units.
The Department of Agriculture began producing films officially as a motion picture unit late in 1913. They had even purchased processing equipment and cameras and had the first Government motion picture lab initially hidden away in an 8 x 12 room as it had yet to be funded. In 1917 the U.S. Signal Corps began training soldiers in cinematography at Columbia University in New York. The U.S. Reclamation Service (Department of the Interior) began filming in 1908-09 using the medium to document their efforts in irrigation in the Midwest. The list goes on and on: the Bureau of War Risk Insurance , the National Forest Service, Bureau of Mines, etc. all utilized this medium in an effort to educate and inform the masses. It is a long neglected segment of film history which is well worth a new look.
O living pictures of the dead
Having posted that item on Geoffrey Malins’ book How I Filmed the War on his experiences of filming The Battle of the Somme, I thought it would be good to share with you this poem by that sturdy defender of Empire, Sir Henry Newbolt, which is his response to seeing the film. The title of the poem is The War Films, and it was written in 1917. Not everyone who saw the actuality films from the Western Front may have reacted it quite so religiose fashion, but it does indicate how profoundly moved many were by the sight, how the films triggered a profound sense of the great sacrifice being made by the troops. And it does have two particularly haunting opening lines:
O living pictures of the dead,
O songs without a sound,
O fellowship whose phantom tread
Hallows a phantom ground —
How in a gleam have these revealed
The faith we had not found.We have sought God in a cloudy Heaven,
We have passed by God on earth:
His seven sins and his sorrows seven,
His wayworn mood and mirth,
Like a ragged cloak have hid from us
The secret of his birth.Brother of men, when now I see
The lads go forth in line,
Thou knowest my heart is hungry in me
As for thy bread and wine;
Thou knowest my heart is bowed in me
To take their death for mine.
More poems may follow in future posts, but meanwhile I strongly recommend Philip French and Ken Wlaschin’s Faber Book of Movie Verse (1993), which has many poems about silent cinema stars and cinema-going, both contemporary and written in retrospect.
The Bioscope 