Record of War: a provocative pairing of propaganda films

• Record of War screens at the Barbican on 19 July, marking 90 years since the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and 100 years since the founding of the Film Society.

The audience of the Film Society’s 98th programme, as it filed out of the New Gallery cinema into Regent Street, London, in the late afternoon murk of 5 December 1937, was, the director Thorold Dickinson later wrote, “shocked and shamed into uneasy silence”. They had seen something unique. A review in next day’s News Chronicle, headlined “Italy Accused By Own Film”, told how the organisers had taken Path of the Heroes, the spectacular official account of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, winner of the Fascist Party Cup at the 1936 Venice Film Festival, and dovetailed its reels with those of Abyssinia, a Russian film documenting the invasion from the other side.

The result was given the title ‘Record of War’. In its most effective segue, a reel from Path of the Heroes demonstrating the prowess of the Italian air force was followed by a reel from Abyssinia showing victims of the same air force’s gas attacks. “For once”, wrote Ralph Bond in the documentarist journal World Film News, the Film Society “can claim to have served a socially useful purpose”.

The Film Society had been founded in a more optimistic time, October 1925 – the month of the Locarno conference, when Britain and France allowed Germany to join the League of Nations, guarantor of world peace after the ‘war to end war’. One Sunday each month, autumn through spring, its membership of intellectuals, bohemians and society figures would gather in the West End to watch a programme of banned, experimental, uncommercial, usually European films. Its most significant undertaking had been the screening of Russian masterpieces that British officialdom had tried hard to suppress; it got away with screening them by appearing scrupulously non-political. The programme note for ‘Record of War’, true to form, confined itself to technical description. But its purpose was clear.

The conquest during 1935-36 of Abyssinia (as Ethiopia was then called), the last independent nation in Africa, had marked the collapse of the Locarno settlement and revealed the League of Nations’ impotence, or worse. The international situation had since deteriorated. Germany, which had left the League in 1933, was openly threatening her neighbours, and the rest of Europe was at odds. In late November 1937 the British cabinet minister Lord Halifax had unnerved France and her eastern allies, Poland and Czechoslovakia, by holding ‘unofficial’ talks with Hitler at Berchtesgaden. These and other diplomatic manoeuvres were not simply reported in the press and the still relatively new media of the newsreel and the radio; rather, the media constituted an instrument of diplomacy.

It was the golden age of what the critic and novelist Arthur Calder-Marshall called “false news”. In Czechoslovakia, part of the German-speaking minority was demanding autonomy as a prelude to incorporation into the Reich: a scuffle at an election hustings in October had been blown up by the Nazi propaganda machine into an example of the Prague government’s “brutal oppression”. Curiously, as the Spectator reported, there seemed to be evidence that transmission of the incident to Berlin “preceded the event” itself. Meanwhile, news from Russia of purges tested the credulity of British communists to its limit. “A classless Society exists, according to the official reports, everyone is ‘happy and joyous’ and singing anthems of praise to Stalin,” wrote the Trinidad-born Trotskyist C.L.R. James, then living in London, “yet everywhere the purge has to go on; more shootings and more imprisonments.”

British newsreels, shown in every cinema programme, did not so much falsify news as omit it. The Spanish Civil War had begun in the summer of 1936, when a group of generals mutinied against the elected leftist government: “In no film”, Calder-Marshall wrote of the newsreel coverage, “was any explanation given of how the war arose, who started it and what the Government is fighting for.” Though the Abyssinian war had been given comprehensive coverage, with camera teams embedded on both sides – British Paramount News sent three aeroplanes – the newsreel companies shied away from analysis. There were, none the less, stray references to the Italian bombing of Red Cross hospitals, and the use of gas. Over Spain the newsreels were more circumspect, and made with entertainment values in mind. “For most reels Spain is now in the oblivion class, with cameramen recalled,” World Film News reported in June 1937; but April’s bombing of Guernica by the German Condor Legion in support of the rightwing rebels “brought the Civil War back to the front page”. Even so, the perpetrators of what the commentary called “the most terrible air raid our modern history yet can boast” were not identified.

The worsening climate barely impinged on the Hollywood features that followed the newsreels in British picture palaces, but it affected what was shown in art cinemas. Earlier in the autumn Elsie Cohen, manager of the Academy cinema in Oxford Street, had shown Joris Ivens’s pro-government The Spanish Earth (1937), but had been forced by the censor to cut footage of German aircraft; by her own account she “left just enough for it to be seen if you were quick”, tipped off the critics, and caused a sensation. Over the weekend of ‘Record of War’, it was playing at the Berkeley cinema, in Mayfair, on a bill with a German film – a rarity in London by this point – Monica and Martin (1937). Meanwhile, the Academy was showing Augusto Genina’s Venice prizewinner Lo Squadrone Bianco (1936), an Italian adventure story set in its Libyan colony, not unlike the British imperial epics of the era. The Film Society’s decision to show Path of the Heroes thus provided the opportunity to observe what Ruth Ben-Ghiat, in her book Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema (2015), has called the “loose relationship between feature and documentary filmmaking on imperial and military themes”.

‘Record of War’ was largely the doing of two of the Film Society’s leading lights, Thorold Dickinson – who had recently made his directorial debut with The High Command (1937), partly shot in British West Africa – and Ivor Montagu, an upper-class communist who divided his time between political activism and employment in the film industry. There is no sign that the audience knew what they were in for. The previous Film Society programme gave no inkling. The December London Film Guide, a BFI publication, mentioned the two films but not the dovetailing. In a sense the experiment was an extension of the aesthetic principle that had captivated Dickinson, Montagu and other cineastes of their generation – montage, as learned from the Russians, in this instance applied to the reel, usually an invisible unit of film, rather than the shot. It was not simply a case of one film’s truth contradicting another’s lies: the rhetoric of both films was made visible by the juxtaposition. ‘Record of War’ promoted critical engagement at a time when seeing was often equated with believing.

The Abyssinian emperor Haile Selassie had gone into exile in England after the Italian victory. His supporters, led by Sylvia Pankhurst, editor of the campaigning newspaper New Times and Ethiopia News, planned to show the two films two weeks later at the Regal cinema, one of the largest in London, in the emperor’s presence. Two days after the Film Society screening, however, LUCE, the Italian state film arm, complained about the “unauthorised interpolation” through their lawyer, Filippo del Giudice, future producer of films by Dickinson, Lean and Reed. Path of the Heroes was suppressed by its own sponsors, and ‘Record of War’ was not repeated in the 1930s. Montagu’s distribution company Progressive Film Institute meanwhile released an English-language version of Abyssinia titled The Birth of an Empire; Pankhurst showed it in Manchester, though she criticised what she saw as its negative portrayal of Abyssinia before the invasion.

It is unclear whether C.L.R. James and his pan-Africanist confederates in the International African Service Bureau saw ‘Record of War’. The invasion of Abyssinia was a turning-point for James; as well as revealing the League of Nations to be “a cloak for the machinations of Imperialism”, as he wrote in 1935, it pushed him “beyond European Marxism toward a deeper understanding of the traditions of the black resistance”. The IASB was in contact with Pankhurst’s organisation, and James was an admirer of the Russian films in which the Film Society specialised.

A month after staging ‘Record of War’, in January 1938, Dickinson and Montagu went to Spain to make fund-raising propaganda films for the government side. On his return Dickinson made a revealingly self-conscious comment on the newsreel and documentary filmmakers who “are incidentally storing up a film record of the history of the rebellion and of foreign intervention, which is a real contribution to the study of history”. Three decades later he was in a position to realise this ambition.

In 1969, having become Britain’s first film professor, at the Slade School of Fine Art, Dickinson reconstructed ‘Record of War’ in support of a lecture series by A.J.P. Taylor at University College London. Taylor, a former member of the Film Society, had written of how the newsreels of those years had “presented current events in the same intense, dramatic way” as features, so that “life was itself turned into a spectacle”. The repeat screening was prompted in part by the work of Dickinson’s student Lisa Pontecorvo, who had written her thesis on “the compilation of factual and actuality film in the recording of modern history”, and who was the driving force behind the Slade’s promotion of the use of film by historians. Later she wrote of how newsreels encapsulated “the unwritten values of the times”. What had been propaganda now became a form of evidence, as Dickinson had foreseen. To the reconstruction she added a clip of Haile Selassie being booed by Fascist journalists.

In The Origins of the Second World War (1961), Taylor had written about the Abyssinian war as an essentially European affair, and the lecture series which the 1969 reconstruction of ‘Record of War’ accompanied was titled “Britain’s Involvement in Europe in the 20th Century”. Its reconstruction will open up new perspectives, on the past and on the present.