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Guernica, mon amour

9 May 2009 in 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Art, Cold War, Film, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Pictures, Videos by Brett Holman | No comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Guernica

A couple of years ago I outed myself as something of a philistine by admitting that I didn’t ‘get’ Guernica, and thought that direct representations — photographs — of the ruined city were more powerful, more affecting than Picasso’s masterpiece. My incomprehension generated a fair degree of discussion, which was useful, but it was having to teach Guernica this week in tutorials which finally helped me make my peace with it. More specifically, learning something of Picasso’s process of design and composition, and the politics of his commission from the Republican government, led me to a better appreciation of its symbolism. Although it depicts — or rather is inspired by — the bombing of a city, it seems to be set inside as much as outside, somehow. The woman holding a lantern could be leaning out of a window, one who survived the destruction but suffers from what she has seen. Or she could be leaning in, perhaps symbolising the inaction of the international community after seeing what had happened to Guernica. Creative ambiguity, indeed.

But the other source the students looked at this week was the 1959 French-Japanese film Hiroshima mon amour. And while I’ve come to understand something of Guernica’s power, figurative and non-literal though it may be, I now have a problem with Hiroshima mon amour. In the most simplistic terms, it is a love story between a French woman and a Japanese man, who have a doomed affair in Hiroshima, ca. 1957. But the romance is not the point. Marguerite Duras, author of the screenplay, later wrote that:

Nothing is ‘given’ at Hiroshima. Every gesture, every word, takes on an aura of meaning that transcends its literal meaning. And this is one of the principal goals of the film: to have done with the description of horror by horror, for that has been done by the Japanese themselves, but make this horror rise again from its ashes by incorporating it in a love that will necessarily be special and ‘wonderful’, one that will be more credible than if it had occurred any where else in the world a place that death had not preserved.

But if she wanted ‘to have done with the description of horror by horror’, then why did she and director Alain Resnais include — at times harrowing — documentary footage of the ruined city and the victims of the atomic bomb? (Starting from 7.53, continued in the second clip.)
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Official historians behaving badly

29 April 2009 in 1910s, After 1950, Australia, Books, Film, Quotes by Brett Holman | 17 comments

A belated Anzac Day post.

Here’s C. E. W. Bean, the official historian of Australia’s involvement in the First World War, on why the infamous Suvla landings on 6 August 1915 didn’t cut the Gallipoli peninsula and open the road to Constantinople:

The reasons for the failure, which affected the fate of the Australian and New Zealand forces more profoundly than any other episode in the campaign, may be laid bare by future historians, probing unflinchingly for the causes. Many of the Anzac troops, on whom it left an enduring impression, attributed it partly to the senility of the leadership, partly to the inexperience of the troops, but largely to causes which lie deeper in the mentality of the British people. The same respect for the established order which caused Kitchener to entrust the enterprise to unsuitable commanders simply because they were senior, appeared to render each soldier inactive unless his officer directed, and each officer dumb unless his senior spoke. The men had doubtless the high qualities of their race, among them orderliness, decency, and modesty; they could follow a good leader anywhere as bravely as any troops in the Peninsula. But an enterprise such as that of Suvla demanded more than the ability to follow; it required that each man, or at least a high proportion of the force, should be able to lead; and the necessary quality of decision, which even a few years’ emancipation from the social restrictions of the Old World appeared to have bred in the emigrant, was — to colonial eyes — lacking in the Suvla troops. Moreover a large proportion of the new force had come straight from the highly organised life in or around overcrowded cities, and as a result they lacked the resourcefulness required for any activity in open country. They lacked also the hardness to set a high standard of achievement for themselves, while that demanded of them by the regimental and brigade staffs was — to put it mildly — inadequate for one of the decisive battles of the war. Further, though many reports had been heard concerning the excellent physique of the New Army, the standard in that respect was very uneven. There were in reality two well-defined types, the officers as a class being tall and well developed, but a majority of the men cramped in stature, presumably as the result of life in overcrowded industrial centres under conditions not yet operative to any marked extent in the great cities in Australia.

Hmm, so it’s the fault of the British soldier for being ‘cramped in nature’ and lacking in ‘resourcefulness’ and ‘hardness’, unlike the strapping young colonials, of course. At least Bean allows himself an out, in the form of ‘future historians’. One of these historians, Robin Prior, argues that — contrary to received wisdom — the primary aim at Suvla was actually just to set up a supply base for the northern Allied forces, which it did successfully. Any advances across the peninsula were secondary to this, and in any case were never likely to amount to much given the geography, the forces available and the operational plan. Which last, as it happens, was partly authored by Captain Cecil Aspinall, who later wrote (as Aspinall-Oglander) the British official history of the Gallipoli campaign, where he was quite happy to blame the commander on the ground, the elderly but inexperienced Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stopford, for the ‘failure’ of his plan.

Something for me to bear in mind when I talk to my students in a few weeks about the (brilliant but misleading) 1981 film Gallipoli. Especially the scene where the radio operator at the Nek, where waves of Australian soldiers have been uselessly slaughtered in assaults against Turkish trenches in support of the landings, reports that the British at Suvla have met no resistance but, instead of advancing inland, are ’sitting on the beach drinking cups of tea’. Peter Weir probably can’t be blamed for portraying the British military, officers and other ranks both, as incompetent when even the official historians are happy to do the same.

See C. E. W. Bean, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, volume 2: The Story of ANZAC from 4 May, 1915, to the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula, 11th edition (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1941), 715-6; Robin Prior, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009), 207-9.

Total war and total peace

21 April 2009 in 1900s, 1930s, After 1950, Civil defence, Cold War, Film, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Space, Words by Brett Holman | 18 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

A random thought while sitting in a lecture today: if there is (or can be) such a thing as total war, does that imply that total peace is a meaningful concept?

Firstly, what is total war? One definition, drawn from the ubiquitous set of conference proceedings edited by Stig Förster et al (and more directly, from today’s lecture notes), goes something like this. Total war consists of:

  1. total aims: e.g. the destruction of an enemy nation
  2. total methods: e.g. bombing cities
  3. total mobilisation: e.g. conscription for both the armed forces and for labour
  4. total control: e.g. censorship, dictatorship

More briefly, total war is the subordination of every other consideration (law, custom, morality, etc) to the prosecution of war. Total war is an ideal form of warfare, something which can be approached more or less closely, but which can never actually be fully attained. Well, hopefully not, because that would be bad.

So what would total peace look like? I don’t think it can simply be the absence of total war; that’s just peace generically. Total peace must be total in some sense.
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Claude Grahame-White

5 April 2009 in 1910s, Biographies, Film, Phantom airships and other panics by Brett Holman | 5 comments

I’ve added another biography to the sidebar, that of devil-may-care flying fool Claude Grahame-White. He is probably most remembered today for his daring night flight in 1910 while attempting to win the Daily Mail London to Manchester prize. (His film career seems to have attracted somewhat less attention.) But for me Grahame-White’s main significance is as an airpower propagandist and as one of the originators, along with his co-author Harry Harper, of the knock-out blow theory.1

Note the snub to British aeronautics: he was a member of the Aero Club of America in 1937, but not the Royal Aero Club!

  1. And for his involvement with the phantom airship scares: it has been suggested that he was responsible for the Sheerness incident, and he also searched for a phantom airship over London on the night of 5 September 1914.

The death ray men

27 March 2009 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Books, Film, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 12 comments

A few articles have been appearing in the British press over the last few days about Harry Grindell Matthews, who (among many other things) claimed in 1924 to have invented a death ray. There’s no actual news attached to these stories, as far as I can tell, other than the fact that a new biography of the man has just come out (Jonathan Foster, The Death Ray: The Secret Life of Harry Grindell Matthews). In them, and presumably in the book, Grindell Matthews is portrayed as an unrecognised scientific genius who will now hopefully get his due. While he’s certainly a fascinating figure, and one who pops up in my thesis, I think he was another of those inventors who was as much showman as scientist, someone who claimed to have invented many amazing things but which somehow rarely seem to have resulted in a finished product.

The death ray itself is a good example of this. It was claimed to be an electromagnetic weapon which could kill over long ranges, or explode gunpowder, or stop an internal combustion engine. The last ability was key to the possible use of the death ray as an anti-aircraft weapon, and this is what most press attention at the time focused on. There was a press campaign waged on Grindell Matthews’ behalf which clamoured for the government to acquire this weapon for Britain. Officials from the Air Ministry were given a demonstration, but were unimpressed. The government was not entirely uninterested, and even offered him a thousand pounds for a successful test under their own conditions. But Grindell Matthews lost patience and hopped over to Paris to hawk the death ray there. He came back to Britain, made a film with Pathé called The Death Ray, and eventually gave up and went to America.

This sounds a lot like charlatanism. Grindell Matthews claimed much for his invention, but was reluctant to submit it to reasonable scrutiny, even when offered when more than fair compensation for his time. On the other hand, the Wright brothers, for example, had been just as suspicious when trying to sell their flyers to the world’s militaries, and ended up not making a whole lot of money from their inspiration and perspiration. So such behaviour wasn’t unprecedented. On the other other hand, the reason why the Wrights didn’t profit fully from their invention of flight was that other people duplicated it, refined it, improved it and marketed it. If Grindell Matthews was just a bad businessman, then why didn’t a practical death ray ever appear from somebody else’s lab?

It certainly wasn’t because nobody else was trying. Here’s a (partial) list of others who claimed to have invented a death ray before 1939:
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We’ll meet again

29 January 2009 in After 1950, Cold War, Film, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Videos by Brett Holman | 8 comments

I watched Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb the other night for the umpteenth time, and I found myself wondering what the ending means. Vera Lynn singing her Second World War hit ‘We’ll meet again’ over a montage of hydrogen bomb explosions (see above). I think the key has to be that — at least according to popular mythology — ‘We’ll meet again’ was a favourite song for loved ones separated by war. Here are some thoughts I came up with (or across):

  • Contrast between WWII and WWIII. No one will be meeting again after this one is over.
  • Contrast between the Good War and the Cold War. Back then we fought to save the world from the Nazis, this time we’ll be using Nazis to destroy it.
  • Yeah baby! The film has sexual metaphors and allusions all the way through it; the ending then depicts the orgasmic final embrace of the USA and USSR (i.e. what happens when couples ‘meet again’).

It’s probably none of those, of course. Any ideas?

Gort of the interplanetary police force

1 January 2009 in 1920s, After 1950, Books, Cold War, Collective security, Film, International air force, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Space, Videos by Brett Holman | 6 comments

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

I recently rewatched one of my favourite science fiction films, The Day the Earth Stood Still — the 1951 original, of course, not the currently-screening remake (which I have yet to see, but tend to doubt that it will improve over the original in any area other than special effects). I can’t remember when I last saw it, but it must have been before I started the PhD because otherwise the climactic scene would have leapt out out me and smacked me in the face, as it did the other day … (Warning: spoilers ahead.)

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Holiday reading

19 December 2008 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Blogging, Film by Brett Holman | 4 comments

The 19th Military History Carnival has been posted at Military History and Warfare. For my pick from this edition I can’t go past the first entry, on the interwar RAF at Thoughts on Military History. It’s part of the first chapter of his thesis, and it’s a very good overview of the financial and operational problems faced by the RAF. I particularly like Ross’s point that the perception that the RAF was all about strategic bombing was never wholly true — it always devoted brainpower and scarce resources to problems such as army co-operation. And the perception has distorted the historiography since then. If I had to quibble, then it would be with this part:

The RAF also had to deal with the gradually changing geo-strategic situation in Europe. For example, in the mid-twenties, in a period of deteriorating relation with France, the RAF had to deal with the potential threat of what has been described as the French air menace. This, coupled with the emergence of the threat of Germany in the 1930’s led to the materialisation of a distinct home fighter force based around the concept of strategic air defence. This force starting out in 1923 as the Home Defence Air Force with a projected strength of 52 squadrons would eventually emerge as RAF Fighter Command.

There’s nothing actually incorrect here, but from my own parochial perspective I’d want to stress that while it is true that HDAF did eventually lead to Fighter Command, in theory it was supposed to be composed of 2 bomber squadrons for every fighter squadron. It was to be a striking force, not primarily an air defence force: it would defend Britain by bombing the enemy. Of course, in practice it had more fighter squadrons than bombers, because they were cheaper to build, and once the supposed French threat disappeared there was no urgency to complete the whole HDAF programme until Hitler came along. But as I say, nothing in what Ross wrote actually contradicts any of that, it’s just me being nit-picky :)

Bonus! Because I forgot to nominate anything for the Carnival this time around, here’s one I would have nominated from The Bioscope. It’s about the 1916 film The Battle of the Somme, which was recently issued on DVD by the Imperial War Museum. A hugely important film and a very illuminating post.

Howard Hawks at Melbourne Cinémathèque

2 December 2008 in 1930s, Australia, Contemporary, Ephemera, Film, Pictures by Brett Holman | 3 comments

The Dawn Patrol

This post will only be of interest to Melbourne readers. Melbourne Cinémathèque is holding a season of 1930s Howard Hawks films this month, including three of his aviation classics: Only Angels Have Wings, Ceiling Zero (both on Wednesday, 3 December) and The Dawn Patrol (Wednesday, 17 December). They’re showing at ACMI. I don’t think I’ve seen any of them so I’ll probably be there! Thanks to Cathy for the tip.

Image source: Wikipedia.

Screening the knock-out blow

26 August 2008 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Film by Brett Holman | 5 comments

Last year I gave a lecture where I said that Things to Come, the 1936 Alexander Korda production of H. G. Wells’ novel The Shape of Things to Come, was not a very popular film, that not many people would have seen it. I had to retract that, but I then said that

I stand by my other point, however, which was that Things to Come is actually very singular, at least in British feature films: there are very few depictions of a city being turned to rubble by air attack

Now I have to retract that too, as since then I’ve compiled an — admittedly short — list of interwar British films which do depict cities being destroyed by bombing, or at least coming under the threat of air attack.

Some of these I did know about, such as The Airship Destroyer (1909). It’s now available on YouTube, under an alternate title, Battle in the Clouds. In it, an airship bombs a city, which is last seen in flames. I’m not sure if either of the sequels, The Aerial Anarchists and Pirates of 1920 (both 1911) had anything comparable.

There’s a long gap after that. The Flight Commander (1927) climaxes with Sir Alan Cobham bombing a Chinese village, which was filmed at the RAF Pageant, but that’s more air control than strategic bombing. In High Treason (1928), written by Noel Pemberton Billing, an aerial war is threatened, but averted. There were a few American films set during the First World War which showed Zeppelin raids on London, including The Sky Hawk (1929) and Hell’s Angels (1930), but they’re, well, American.1

Things to Come (1936) was actually, I think, the first proper (i.e. scary) depiction in a British film of the effects of a truly devastating air raid. But there were others over the next few years. A pair of short instructional films, The Gap (1937) and The Warning (1939), have long piqued my interest, but unfortunately I didn’t get to see them while in London. The Gap was a recruiting film for the Territorial Army, which manned Britain’s anti-aircraft guns. London is hit by a surprise air raid, and because there are not enough AA gunners it is devastated. The Warning was aimed at drawing in volunteers for air raid precautions, and portrays the terrible aftermath of an air attack on Nottingham. Air defences swing into action, but do little to prevent the carnage.
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  1. I think one or the other of these was the source of a similar scene in a British film from the 1930s or 1940s, or perhaps it was from the Korda documentary Conquest of the Air (1936, but not released until 1938). I can’t for the life of me remember what film I saw it in, but the scene was too short and too lavish to have been made specially.

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