The Battle of the Somme

This record of the British army’s preparations for the Somme offensive and of the battle’s opening days was made as documentary and as propaganda at once. Two official cameramen shot it, Geoffrey Malins and John McDowell; the record here credits only Malins as director and McDowell does not appear at all. Its most disputed passage is the scene of men going over the top, which was staged: weighed down by their equipment, the cameramen could not capture the moment and restaged it instead. The footage of the dead and wounded, by contrast, is real and runs for more than ten minutes, which in 1916 meant an audience seeing the war at that distance for the first time. An estimated one million people paid to see it in London in the opening week alone. It has since been inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World register.