War Memorial

2016
Country: United Kingdom,
Duration: 27 mins
|30 Seconds
B&W,
Sound: Stereo
Ratio: 16:9
Available Format/s: HD Video / / / HD Digital file / DCP
Original Format: Film transferred to video

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War Memorial is one part of an ongoing project based around 60 films which remain from World War Two of soldiers sending filmed messages home from the 14th Army in Burma and India. The Calling Blighty series was nearly four hundred 12 minute films that were made in 1944-5 of servicemen (and a very few women) in the Far East recording a message to be shown in local cinemas to wives and families back home. – a sort of one way Skype of their day. Produced by the Directorate of Army Welfare, these are remarkable and moving documents. Along with Marion Hewitt of the North West Film Archive, I have traced the relatives of the men and recreated the screenings an events at HOME Manchester and the Showroom Sheffield and the films were shown for the first time in 70 years to sellout audiences of 250 relatives – and two of the actual men still alive.Channel 4 broadcast an hour long documentary about the project, Messages Home, in June 2016, and we am now continuing the project tracing relatives of men in the Calling Blighty films. I have also edited a version of the films to be shown on Remembrance Day 2016 at the military cemetery in Rangoon, where some of the fallen soldiers who appeared in the films are memorialised.War Memorial is a different take on these strange and emotional films, where the messages themselves recede to the background and the directorial decisions of the largely unknown army filmmakers accumulate to show a different view to the reassuring and brave faces of the men. A focus on different parts of the image shows instead uncertainty and apprehension.

More works by Steve Hawley

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