Cine Filming of Anzacs at Gallipoli

Cine Filming of Anzacs at Gallipoli

The First World War was the first widely photographed war, but the Gallipoli landing was virtually un-photographed.

 How is it then that most Australians have seen footage of the landing?

 It’s shown on television every Anzac Day, and in countless documentaries. Longboats pull into the shores at Gaba Tepe in full sunlight; troops rush ashore past debris and dead mates; a Turkish machine gunner on the hill fires down at the ant-like Anzacs scrambling up the ridges.

The footage is fake, of course, or more accurately, re-creation.

 Two re-creations were staged by Sydney film companies within weeks of the news of the landings. The theatrical firm JC Williamson’s filmed over 1,000 men storming ashore at Obelisk Bay in Sydney Harbour, with assistance from the military authorities, to make Within Our Gates, or Deeds that Won Gallipoli (1915), directed by English actor and playwright Frank Harvey. This was a melodrama about a German spy blackmailing a German-Australian clerk in the War Office in Melbourne. Repenting of his treachery, the clerk enlists and dies at Gallipoli. The film opened in Melbourne on 19 July 1915 and ran for a long season, to enthusiastic crowds. The film is lost, save for about six seconds of landing footage preserved in a later compilation (the AH Noad Film, held by the Australian War Memorial).

In fierce competition, Australasian Films had already restaged their own Gallipoli landings at Tamarama beach, just south of Bondi, again with official support. Many of the soldiers in that film were in training at Liverpool, west of Sydney. They would soon be sent to the Western Front in France. This film, The Hero of the Dardanelles (1915), directed by Alfred Rolfe, opened on 17 July 1915, pipping its rival by two days. It too was very popular.

The fact that two films were made, and shown simultaneously in theatres, shows just how strong was the perceived public demand for images of Gallipoli. Without television, Australians relied on newsreels for moving images of recent events, but there was no newsreel footage available. That meant it had to be invented, or re-created. These two features films used what information was available – which was very little – about what the area looked like, and imagined the rest, with the aid of advice from military officers who were themselves relying largely on their training and imaginations.

The initial sources were also limited. The English war correspondent Ellis Ashmead–Bartlett, whose report was the first published in Australia, did not witness the landing, except from the deck of a ship. He did not go ashore until 9.30 pm on the 25th, about 17 hours after the first Anzac troops. CEW (Charles) Bean, the sole Australian war correspondent, was ashore by 10 am on the 25th, almost 12 hours ahead of Ashmead-Bartlett, but his report of the landing was delayed by red tape. Bean was not yet recognized by the British General Headquarters as an official correspondent. His report was not allowed through until five days after Ashmead-Bartlett’s had been published in Australia

Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett deserves to be better known in Australia than he is. His report of the landing was an exaggeration, but it had a major impact on the formation of the Gallipoli mythology. Even less well known is that Ashmead-Bartlett supplied the only known real footage of the allied soldiers on Gallipoli, and that he had a major part in ending the campaign. He declared it a failure before the British generals were prepared to do so, in a secret letter intended for the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith (of which more later).

Ashmead-Bartlett’s cine camera was supplied by Sir Alfred Butt, a London impresario, during the correspondent’s unscheduled return to the UK in early June 1915. His notes and possessions were lost in the sinking of HMS Majestic, off Gallipoli, on 27 May, so he returned to London to re-equip. He came back to Gallipoli with about 10,000 feet of film, a heavy, boxy cine camera (thought now to have been an Aero-scope) and very little idea how to use it. Nevertheless, he shot footage of the Anzacs at Anzac Cove and the British at Suvla Bay and Cape Helles, as well as troops embarking at the nearby island of Imbros. Charles Bean records in his diary that he took Ashmead-Bartlett to Quinn’s Post at Gallipoli on 22 July, to shoot cine pictures. Ernest Brooks, the Admiralty’s official photographer, helped Ashmead-Bartlett to use the camera. In September, Brooks took over most of the filming and he is believed to have shot the most dramatic sequence in the film – a line of soldiers firing vigorously from within a trench. The resulting footage was cut together and first shown in London on 17 January 1916, under the title With the Dardanelles Expedition. Charles Bean later secured a copy for the soon-to-be established Australian War Memorial in 1919. Bean wrote a set of titles for the footage, some of which were wrong and have confused historians ever since.

An extract from  article by Paul Byrnes, Curator of the  AUSTRALIAN HERITAGE MUSEUM  On Line