Rare 16" Transcription Disc 'Peace on The Western Front' 1930 Anti War Movie

	£		47
	$		62

A Very rare 16" Transcription disc from the 1930 anti-war movie 'Peace on The Western Front'

There is lots of information on the film on the Imperial war Museum Website

Some information below

The disc is in goo playable condition with full gloss, some marks and scuffs but overall V+ to E- if you can grade such a thing in this manner

It will be shipped very carefully

What might seem an obvious and essential task of official record keeping today was an imaginative and radical innovation in 1919. Systematic film preservation had never been attempted, was very expensive, and was opposed by conservative minds in the British establishment.

This archive became key in the creation of Britain’s visual memory of the war, as society sought ways to memorialise, historicize and generally make sense of the recent conflict. Although initially unwilling to release footage for fictional films and comedies set during the war – that might trivialise the war and devalue the archive footage – the Imperial War Museum’s Trustees would assist the makers of ‘serious’ historical accounts of the war. One project which did receive their approval is the long-forgotten, Peace on the Western Front: a Story of the Battlefields (1930), which film curator Edward Foxen Cooper recommended, ‘There would be no objection for official war film to be included in this film, [as] the subject would be dealt with reverently and especially produced for Armistice week.’ (IWM LOC 451: Memo from E. Foxen Cooper, HM Stationary Officer, Cinematograph Section, War Office, to Secretary Imperial War Museum, 16 October 1930)

Peace on the Western Front was made by two veterans of the war, one British (Fred Swann) and the other German (Hans Nieter), and takes the form of a tour through the Belgian and French battlefields, twelve years after the war’s end. The tour is introduced and interspersed with dramatized sequences in which a veteran ‘Tommy’ (Moore Marriott) tells his young son Bobby (Eric Pavitt) of the real meaning of the war for those who fought and for the civilians who had to endure the fighting that ravaged their homeland. As is stated in the accompanying press brochure, the purpose of the film was to impress upon younger generations, for whom the Great War was ancient history, that war ‘is not a childish game, a glorious adventure’, but ‘a hideous ugly thing.’

Peace on the Western Front was not the first battlefield pilgrimage film, but it was the only British example to be pacifist and international in scope. Whereas films such as Memories of Albert and Beyond; Ypres - the Immortal (1920), and Eight Years After (1924) concentrated on memorialising the locations where British and Empire troops had fought and died, Peace on the Western Front also covered the epic campaign of Verdun and included footage of memorials and military cemeteries to French and German dead and reflected on the on-going trauma of the citizens of Belgium and France.

Released as a second feature at the end of 1930 (to coincide with Armistice Day), by mid-January 1931 it had secured close to 60 bookings and there was interest from all the major circuits. The film also gained a following among the growing peace movement and became an unofficial film for the League of Nations Union, with numerous screenings being arranged to coincide with meetings of local LNU branches and, specifically, to encourage people to sign the Disarmament Declaration of 1931. As a consequence, Peace on the Western Front remained in circulation for far longer than was usual for a second feature, still being shown in cinemas in October and November 1932.

Critics were full of praise for this ‘interesting’ and ‘intelligent’ ‘anti-war propaganda’ and were moved by the sincerity of the intentions of the film’s makers, even the nobility of the cause; The Bioscope called it ‘A deeply impressive film deserving world-wide exhibition.’ Commentators were also struck by a lack of sensationalism and restraint in the use of footage of the horrors of war. To some observers, Peace on the Western Front indicated a rise in the standard of films and programming and an example of how films containing ‘true to life material’ were so much better than the ‘colossal but preposterous spectacles’ so often screened (North Devon

 Journal).

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