"The cameras caught all the work or at least a good deal of the work of murder and destruction that followed the retreat... You see one prosperous little town turned into a bloody shambles. You see fifteen ... hostages ... lying dead on the ground, they having been shot because they were unable to furnish the ransom demanded...".
This gruesome description sounds like a film about the Balkan war. And that is indeed what it is, not from the current war, but from the bloody conflict which was convulsing the Balkans exactly eighty years ago.
The Balkan War (1912-13) began with the states of the region - Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia - combining to force the Turks out of the Balkans. But, much as today, Balkan alliances are fragile and temporary, and the victorious allies quarrelled amongst themselves, Bulgaria losing the resulting war with Greece and Serbia.
The two wars were major media events and attracted literally hundreds of journalists (including F.T. Marinetti, the futurist poet, and Leon Trotsky, then working for a Kiev newspaper). At least twenty film cameramen were also there at one time or another, from many countries including France, Greece, Russia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Great Britain, Australia, Germany and Denmark. This was not by any means the first filmed war (that was back in 1897), but it was the first in which the new newsreel companies were fully operational, and it was for these companies that most of the cameramen were working.
Gaumont, Pathé, Eclair, Jury's, Drankov, Cines, Kinemacolor and Topical, all made a major effort to record the war on film, and many of their films were exhibited; most merely showing troop movements and the background to the war, but some including scenes taken on the actual battleground, with guns firing and men dying. Many accounts of the filming survive in the trade press, and others are recorded in books written by war correspondents in the years following the wars.
Films of the Balkan wars survive in the following archives:
Jugoslavia: the Jugoslovenska Kinoteka preserves several thousand metres.
Greece: there are films at Tainiothiki tis Ellados and in other collections.
UK: three fragments are in the National Film Archive; Jury's film made by Sir Bryan Leighton is in the Imperial War Museum; a Gaumont film is in the Reuters (formerly Visnews) collection.
Belgium: one Eclair film has been preserved by the Cinematheque Royale.
Netherlands: the Nederlands Filmmuseum has one Pathé Journal (Courant), partly about the 1st Balkan war.
It is also believed that the Bulgarska Nacionalna Filmoteka preserves at least one film, and other East European archives probably have others.
Today the Balkan wars have been almost forgotten, confused in the perceptions of many people with the Great War (1914-18) which followed closely. I suspect that the same may have happened with surviving films of the Balkan wars, with some of these quite possibly having been catalogued mistakenly under Balkan actions in the First World War (though of course I cannot know this for sure).
With the Balkans now once again plunged into war, it may be an appropriate moment to search for these films, recording as they do an earlier period of bloodshed in this unhappy region.
My research on the Balkan wars has been greatly inspired and enormously assisted by the doyen of researchers in this field: Dejan Kosanivic of Belgrade. An article based on my researches into this subject appears in the May 1993 issue of 'Sight and Sound' magazine, and a more complete version will appear in a book I am working on concerned with the relationship between warfare, early cinema and the filming of the first wars.
The filming of the Balkan wars, early as it was, may be regarded as something of a culmination of early filmed warfare. Among the wars and conflicts which were filmed and/or 'faked' in the period 1896 to 1914 were: Indian frontier 1896-7, Graeco-Turkish War 1897, Spanish-Cuban-American 1898, Philippine 1899-1900, Sudan 1898, Boer 1899-1902, Boxer 1900, Russo-Japanese 1904-05, Morocco 1907- , Chinese Revolution 1911, Balkans 1912-13, Mexican 1910-14. Films of such wars were some of the most popular and widely distributed motion pictures in the early period. Many have survived, but, as with films of the Balkans, many surely remain to be discovered.
Stephen Bottomore, 27 Roderick Road, London NW3 2NN, U.K. Tel/fax: +44 71 485 6438.
Une fois cette première guerre finie, la fragile alliance des vainqueurs se transforma en une deuxième guerre à l'issue de laquelle la Bulgarie fut vaincue à son tour par la Grèce et la Serbie, ses anciennes alliées.
Ces deux guerres furent des événements médiatiques majeurs et attirèrent des centaines de journalistes (y compris le poète futuriste F.T.Marinette et le reporter d'un journal de Kiev, Léon Trotski).
De nombreux pays dépéchèrent plus d'une vingtaine de chefs opérateurs sur place. Il ne s'agissait pas de la première guerre filmée mais c'était la première fois que les nouvelles compagnies de films d'actualité étaient prêtes.
Gaumont, Pathé, Eclair, Jury's, Cines, Kinemacolor et Topical s'efforcèrent d'enregistrer la guerre sur de la pellicule. De nombreux films furent montrés. Des films sur les guerres dans les Balkans subsistent dans les cinémathèques à Belgrade, Athènes, Londres, Bruxelles et Amsterdam. D'autres pourraient être retrouvés à Sofia et dans d'autres cinémathèques.
L'étude de Stephen Bottomore, inspiré et assisté par Dejan Kosanivic, de Belgrade, paraîtra sous forme d'article dans "Sight and Sound Magazine" en mai 1993 et sous forme de livre utérieurement.