The celluloid front line: Case studies in Western Front memorialisation from British, Canadian, and Australian national cinema 1999-2019

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with the national cinemas of Britain, Canada, and Australia’s continuing involvement in the process of Western Front memorialisation and what role remembrance plays in the shaping of the perceived contemporary national self. Through Pierre Nora’s concept of lieux de mémoire and other theorists’ work on cultural memory, such as Jan Assmann, Maurice Halbwachs, and, more recently, Jay Winter, it examines three case studies from each of these Commonwealth nations to reveal how they articulate aspects of their dominant narratives framing the memory of the Great War. These case studies, taken from the period of 1999 to 2019, are: The Trench (William Boyd, 1999), Passchendaele (Paul Gross, 2008), and Beneath Hill 60 (Jeremy Sims, 2010). By approaching these works through a comparative, ethnological style of analysis, each is shown to demonstrate an exploration of their unique dominant narrative traditions, as well as a sense of contemporaneity in the way they choose to represent these, with the British sense of disenchantment related to the Great War, of Canadian exceptionalism embodied in the soldiery, and Australia’s Anzac myth.

It begins by laying out the cultural and production context, studying first how these dominant narratives developed before delving into how the films themselves came to production. With this context in place, it undertakes a three part textual analysis, first looking at how the films reconstruct the Western Front on-screen, then comparing it to the contrasting landscapes of home, before finally examining how the climatic events that the films centre around – the first day of the Somme, Canadian victory at Passchendaele, and the detonation of the mines beneath the Messines Ridge – are rendered cinematically as events worth remembering for a contemporary national audience. Before concluding it surveys the reception of the case studies in their nations of origin to discover to what extent they were viewed as successful in bringing aspects of the cultural memory to life onscreen.

As this thesis will examine, cinematic representations of the Western Front hold a vital place in the continuing legacy of the Great War in Britain, Canada, and Australia through memorialising specific sites and poignant events for contemporary audiences. Although these films are objects of remembrance, gazing back on a war that took place almost a century previous, they reveal a great deal about the national perception of the experiences that occurred on the Western Front, as well as how this relates to the present national identity, as they narratively mould the cultural memory into a contemporarily pertinent form of commemoration.

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ORCID for Michael Williams: orcid.org/0000-0001-5386-5567

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