The Hero of the Dardanelles beach landing

First Gallipoli movie busts myth

Friday, June 19, 2015

Academic uses blockbuster’s centennial re-release to correct historical inaccuracy

The academic who recovered and reconstructed Australia’s first Gallipoli movie is using its centennial re-release to correct a recurring historical inaccuracy.

The Hero of the Dardanelles is the first surviving feature depicting Australian troops of the Great War and includes the first re-enactment of the landings on the Turkish peninsula. Staged at Tamarama Bay in Sydney, the re-enactment shows hundreds of soldiers from the Australian Imperial Force’s training camp in Liverpool storming the beach and scrambling up the cliffs.

“But many film and television producers use the footage as actual footage from the frontline,” says Dr Daniel Reynaud, an associate professor of history at Avondale College of Higher Education and author of Celluloid Anzacs: The Great War Through Australian Cinema. “The reason we view the footage as real is because it looks old and has survived as borrowed footage in a documentary that claimed to have no fake footage in it.”

The National Film and Sound Archive had preserved only the first 12 minutes of The Hero of the Dardanelles. So, Reynaud found its screenplay in the Australian Archives then used the footage the documentary borrowed, footage from other films that borrowed and stills published by the Sunday Telegraph to reconstruct the movie. “We’ve lost 40 of the original 60 minutes, but at least we know how the story ends.”

A critical and box office success, The Hero of the Dardanelles became one of Australia’s biggest blockbusters. Opening at the Majestic Theatre in Melbourne on July 17, 1915, the movie “ran for months when cinemas changed films every week,” says Reynaud. It is one of only two movies from Australia’s most prolific silent film director, Alfred Rolfe, to survive. “Rolfe wasn’t showy, and he didn’t generate publicity about himself,” says Reynaud, “so it’s easy to forget him, but he made some of our most important films.”

The Hero of the Dardanelles is important because it gave Australians the first moving image representation of Anzac, says Reynaud. “Images are more memorable and striking than words, so the movie helped shape our understanding of the early Anzac legend.” Hero idealises the Anzac as a well-to-do city boy with the makings of a good officer, but this copying of British stereotypes would cede in other films to the rise of the urban and bush Australian mythologies.

Reynaud gives historical and socio-political context to Hero and other films in a monograph called The Hero of the Dardanelles and other World War One Silent Dramas, which the National Film and Sound Archive released to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings. Reynaud notes in the monograph how the enthusiastic tone of the early films turns gradually to weariness. He points to the complete reversal of attitude that saw the 1928 film, The Exploits of the Emden, marketed as “anti-war.”

The Hero of the Dardanelles is now publicly available for the first time after its release on DVD by the National Film and Sound Archive in April.

Brenton Stacey
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Brenton Stacey

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Brenton is Avondale University’s Public Relations and Philanthropy Officer. He brings to the role experience as a communicator in publishing, media relations, public relations, radio and television, mostly within the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the South Pacific and its entities.

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