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Brilliant book shows how film changed how we saw war

Reviewed by: Allen Mills

Posted: 07/26/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Media, Memory and the First World War

By David Williams

McGill-Queen's University Press, 321 pages, $50

This is a brilliant book that deserves a large readership because it considers deep matters in an impressively intelligent way.

Its author teaches English at the University of Manitoba. It is an academic book, and thus perhaps not for lounging with on the dock this summer. But struggle with it in some other place and it will give up rich rewards.

Historians should read it, as so should students of literature and so should those who work with media of any kind. There is a final constituency that it should appeal to and this is a post-modern humanist one that is concerned about the fate of human identity and flourishing in a time of warp-speed technological change.

Williams' book, then, covers many subjects and themes. There are stunning essays on Homeric literature and the end of oral tradition and on Virgil and the Aeneid and the role of heroism in the cause of empire.

But the main theme of the work is the shift in sensibility that the coming of film and the cinema made on literature and popular culture at the time of the First World War. Williams is not an uncritical devotee of Marshall McLuhan but he shares his basic insight that different media change our understanding of what we believe is "objective" and they alter the way we relate to each other and our world.

Here Williams' main concern is to see how recollection and memory about the horrors of the battlefields of France and Belgium were altered by the onset of film.

By 1914 cinemas were springing up all over Europe and North America. Films were made about the war often for propaganda purposes and sometimes not. Inevitably the public back home came to see the war up close. Making sense of it was altered when mediated no longer by books and newspapers.

Film by its very nature is all about movement. It shows apparently actual action and it comes to involve the viewer in ways that print cannot. When sound was later added to silent films the environment was even more realistic and total.

Film is participatory and upsets the established sense of time by inducing the audience to believe that it is presently there within the action. There now comes to be a sort of eternal, involving "present" time rather than neat distinctions of past, present and future which, says Williams, is the pattern of a literate, print culture. Time itself gets shaken up.

Williams traces this new film-type language in the writing of the English war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and the German novelist Erich Maria Remarque.

He carries it forward looking at Timothy Findley's use of the photograph in his 1977 novel The Wars, and so on.

Finally, Williams offers intriguing analysis of the newer presentation of history in TV documentaries like For King and Country about Canada's soldiers in the First World War and the role of museums as institutions of "memory" about such things.

What strikes him is that modern media of television and the Internet emphasize even more a popular participation in the constructing of memory leading to the further undermining of traditional hierarchies which have monopolized such things.

What is also under assault is a traditional humanist, print-based idea of reflection, analysis and objectivity. We are returning to an oral culture, says Williams, and moving away from the privileged domain of the intellectual culture of the professional print-based historian and politician.

This is a stunning work of imagination at so many levels. There are, inevitably, some massive leaps of logic in his claims but altogether the reader is challenged immensely by its speculative links and suggestions.

Buy it for the intelligent print devotee in your circle of friends, even if they are a diminishing breed.

Allen Mills teaches political studies at the University of Winnipeg

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 26, 2009 B7

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