Nurses Attending the Wounded

1 Jan 1899
Silent
1m

Brits versus Boers... or are they?

In scene one, Brits and Boers battle, then in scene two nurses arrive to tend to the wounded and the dead, strewn across the frame. But what may seem like incredible battle scenes are too good to be true. The composition and arrangement of figures on the landscape could hardly be bettered: the film is part of the widespread practice of constructing Boer War scenes for public consumption. However, we need to be careful about labelling this as 'fake news'. We mustn't assume that audiences were completely gullible about the artifice.

Decades later, in 1936, producer RW Paul recalled having sent two cameras to South Africa, neither of which was able to capture actual battle footage. So to "meet the demand for something more exciting, representations of such scenes... and the work of nurses on the battlefield were enacted on neighbouring golf links, under the supervision of Sir Robert Ashe, an ex-officer of Rhodes's force". Crucially, he noted that they "were issued [to showmen by Paul's company] for what they were, though I cannot vouch for the descriptions applied to them by the showmen" who exhibited them to the public.

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From the collection

Robert Paul: Giant of Early Film

The most prolific filmmaker of the pioneer period of British film

The multi-talented Robert Paul (1869-1943) was the first British filmmaker to project film for a paying audience, in 1896. A contemporary of the Lumiere brothers, Paul had been producing film, in partnership with Birt Acres, for his own brand of Kinetoscope viewer since April 1895. Shortly after, he began producing for his Theatrograph and Animatographe machines, enjoying a long run at the Alhambra in Leicester Square. As an engineer, Paul made a number of significant innovations - such as an intermittent mechanism for efficiently projecting film. But he also made key innovations in film language, such as the first two-shot fiction film, Come Along Do! (1898). To cap it all, he was a shrewd businessman, with an instinctive grasp of audience tastes.