Cinema on the Front Line: British Soldiers and Cinema in the First World War

University of Exeter Press, 2021

Winner of the Theatre Library Association’s 2021 Richard Wall Memorial Award for an exemplary work in the field of recorded performance.

About

Cinema on the Front Line offers the first comprehensive history and analysis of how the medium of cinema intersected with the lives of British soldiers during the First World War. Documenting the use of cinema from domestic recruitment drives to make-shift theatrical venues established on the front line, and then in convalescent hospitals and camps, the book provides evidence of the previously unacknowledged importance of cinema as recreational support and entertainment for soldiers living through the trauma of the first world war. Chris Grosvenor makes extensive use of war diaries and other military records to foreground the voices and perspectives of British soldiers themselves.

This is an important contribution. Work on cinema tends to privilege official views and opinions on cinema, and analyse it in a very top-down manner. This work shows the ‘nuts and bolts’ of how cinema was delivered to soldiers and what soldiers made of cinema. 

Mark Connelly, Professor of Modern British History, University of Kent

[Cinema on the Front line] is an impressive and significant piece of scholarship. Indeed, reading this book you wonder why this project has not been undertaken previously. The answer most likely lies with Grosvenor’s industrious research, discovering, cataloguing and critically analysing a rich and varied collection of materials that bring to life the experiences of soldiers and film personnel at this most tumultuous moment’.

Tom Rice, Screen, Vol. 63.4.