TAKING WAR FILMS.

Taihape Daily Times, Volume 8, Issue 39, 16 February 1916, Page 7

TAKING WAR FILMS.

. —-^ —_ WONDERFUL WORK OF FRENCH OPERATORS. GREAT BATTLE IN ALSACE. When the French Government decided to have official films taken of the fighting at the front, all the moving picture experts in the country were mobilised into a corpc!. They were uniformed and equippel, and put under officers of the General Staff. Then they were distributed with their cameras along the entire French front and told to go to work. And what they got surpassed anything ever taken before in the history of the cinema..-For not a single foot of film but is the real thing. Many of the pictures have been made under fire —four soldier-operators have been seriously wounded so far in the taking of them, and dozens of cameras rendered hors de combat.

A French aeroplane took up an cp•erator to make moving pictures of -.he German trendies. Directly the pilot and the movie operator were in the air, a German Taube rose to get therm Instantly a French piano went up after j the German. Then followed a battle j in the air between the Taube and the second French air-craft —and the j photographer had the nchve to keep j close enough to get the whole fight. The machine-guns of both planes may be seen letting go; there is the desperate expression on the face of the German airman and his look of terror as he is wounded and his machine begins to flutter. Then he drops to the ground in erratic circles and lands inside the French lines, here they make him prisoner on the spot. It is amazing—no picture like it could be staged. GREAT SEPTEMBER BATTLE. Then there is the great battle picture, the awful fight in the Champagne district, and Joffre's mighty bombardment. He selected a front of fifteen miles and behind each one of the 3,000 guns he assembled there were stacked 2,000 high explosive shells, with the German trenches only 200 yards away The Germans knew something was coming off, and they were prepared for it as well as they could be, but they never fully realised what was up until Joffre gave his signal to go—on September 25. Such pictures were never taken before, and will 1 never be taken again. For everything conspired to make the thing a success —the conditions were just right and even the chalky soil made the figures of the struggling men show up with wonderful distinctness. Another reel actually shows 21,000 German prisoners passing in front of the camera. You see them herded behind barbed wire before being sent to Africa; it's laughable to see the French guards cutting the suspenders of the prisoners with scissors, so that they have to hold up their trousers with their hands—this keeps them from running away. PICTURES FROM THE CLOUDS. There is the arrival of three waggons with an army kite 1 carrying a camera—the men dart from their waggons and put It together, it rises over the German trenches, they firing at it meanwhile; the officer in chargepresses the button, and makes the pic- ! ture, and then takes the plate holder from the kite, plunges into a dark room waggon, and emerges soon after with a finished enlargement which is in the hands of the general staff within an hour.

Then there is tiro scene-painters' corps.' The French have mobilised these craftsmen, too, to paint fake concealments for their works. In this instance the photographer took w-hat is considered a great joko on the Germans. There was a fine read lined with poplars, which made a short cut for troops, but it was right in the line of fire. So the theatre men painted a duplicate of the road and the trees, and mounted it on the far side, along the road towards the Germans. Then the troops marched by with water carts every 100 yards to keep down the dust, while to the dsrriaas it was an

empty road —a painted one, and that they never knew. HARTSMANNSWEILER KOPF. One camera caugln a man just as he fell wounded.- His comrades npply the first aid bandage; arrived and drosses the would, and the stretcher bearers take the victim away. The ambulance drives up, and off to the field hospital he goes for an Xray examination. And the last picture is in the General Hospital at Compeigne, where Dr. Alexis Carrel is operating on the man you saw fall at his post. But the most marvellous picture of all is the battle of Hartmannsweiler Kopf in Alsace. It is the best battle picture of all, for the fighting was on a hillside, and the German trenches stretched out like a gridiron at one's feet. Everything can be seen with the utmost distinctness 1 —the white bursts of shrapnel that look like balls of cotton; t-ae great clouds of dirt that suddenly splotch the sky as the high explosives hit the mark. And then suddenly a wave of poison gas, eight or ten feet high, sweeps across the whole pictura'.