Looking at Villiers steadily, he said at last: “You are an Englishman and I can trust you. You Turks will take the initiative, for the Greeks can now only be on the defensive.” Not surprisingly, Enver Bey was staggered by his request. Villiers asked the governor for confidential information: “I want to know when and where the next fight will take place. Villiers yearned to obtain something much more visceral, and he got what he required in typically resourceful fashion, passing through the Turkish lines to secure a private interview with the Ottoman governor, Enver Bay, who granted him a safe passage to the Greek capital, Athens, which was much closer to the fighting. ”Not content with this,” writes Stephen Bottomore, the great authority on the first war films, ![]() “There was no blare of bugals,” the journalist complained on his return, “or roll of drums no display of flags or of martial music of any sort… All had changed in this modern warfare it seemed to me a very cold-blooded, uninspiring way of fighting, and I was mightily depressed for many weeks.” According to his own accounts, he was able to get some real long-distance shots of the fighting, but the results were deeply disappointing, not least because real war bore little resemblance to the romantic visions of conflict held by the audiences of the earliest newsreels. If that’s so, the notion wasn’t too obvious to anyone else in 1897 when Villiers arrived at his base at Volos, in Thessaly, trailing his cinematograph and a bicycle, he discovered he was the only cameraman covering the war. Bottom: a photograph of the real but distant action as captured by an enterprising photographer. Top: an artist’s impression of the charge of the 21st Lancers at the height of the battle. The Battle of Omdurman, fought between British and Sudanese forces in September 1898, was one of the first to show the disappointing gap between image and reality. He was a prolific, if limited, war artist as well, so the idea of taking one of the new ciné cameras to war probably came naturally to him. What we can say is that the British veteran was an experienced reporter who had covered nearly a dozen conflicts during his two decades as a correspondent, and certainly was in Greece for at least a part of the 30-day conflict. How well he rose to the occasion is hard to say, because the war is an obscure one, and though Villiers-a notoriously self-aggrandising poseur-wrote about his experiences in sometimes hard-to-believe detail, none of the footage he claimed to have shot survives. The few historians to take an interest in the prehistory of war photography seem agreed that the earliest footage secured in a war zone dates to the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, and was shot by a veteran British war correspondent by the name of Frederic Villiers. Pretty much the earliest “war” footage ever shot, in fact, was created in circumstances that broadly mirror those prevailing in Mexico. Indeed, the early history of newsreel cinema is replete with examples of cameramen responding in precisely the same way to the same set of challenges. Nor were they the first to conclude that it was easier and safer to fake their footage-and that fraud in any case produced far more saleable results. ![]() What I did not explain, for lack of space, was that the Mutual Film teams embedded with Villa were not the first cinematographers to tussle with the problems of capturing live action with bulky cameras in dangerous situations. I tried to show in last week’s essay how newsreel cameramen took on the challenge of filming the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20-a challenge they met, at one point, by signing the celebrated rebel leader Pancho Villa to an exclusive contract. That is because almost all of it was either staged or faked, setting a template that was followed for years afterwards with varying degrees of success. What we can say, fairly definitely, is that most of this pioneer footage tells us little about war as it was actually waged back then, and quite a lot about the enduring ingenuity of filmmakers. Who first thought of building a pyramid, or of using gunpowder as a weapon? Who invented the wheel? Who, for that matter, came up with the idea of taking a movie camera into battle and turning a profit from the horrible realities of war? History offers no firm guidance on the first three questions, and is not entirely certain even on the fourth, although the earliest war films cannot have been shot much earlier than 1900. Frederic Villiers, an experienced war artist and pioneer cinematographer, was the first man to attempt to film in battle-with deeply disappointing results.
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