Celluloid War Memorials

Book excerpt: Creating Celluloid War Memorials for the British Empire looks at the British Instructional Film company and its production of war re-enactments and documentaries during the mid to late 1920s. It is both a work of cinema history and a study of the public’s memory of World War I. As Mark Connelly shows, these films, made in the decade following the end of the war, helped to shape the way in which that war was remembered, and may be understood as microhistories that reveal vital information about perceptions of the Great War, national and imperial identities, the role of cinema as a shaper of attitudes and identities, power relations between Britain and the United States, and the nature of popular culture. --