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WAR FILMS 171
what has happened — he is present at the happening itself and participates in it.
When someone tells about past battles, these battles are already over and the greatest perils are no longer perils, once they are past and can be told by word of mouth or print.
The camera image is different. It is not made after the event. The cameraman is himself in the dangerous situation we see in his shot and it is by no means certain that he will survive the birth of his picture. Until the strip has been run to its end we cannot know whether it will be completed at all. It is this tangible being-present that gives the documentary the peculiar tension no other art can produce.
Whoever has listened to a report given over a field telephone, when the noise of battle, the rattle of shots and the screams of the wounded can be heard together with the words spoken into the microphone, will have experienced this tension in the acoustic sphere. Such telephone reports sometimes break off in the middle of a sentence and the silence that follows is as eloquent as a scream of mortal agony.
In the French war film just discussed, a sequence suddenly breaks off. It darkens and the camera wobbles. It is like an eye glazing in death. The director did not cut out this 'spoilt' bit — it shows where the camera was overturned and the cameraman killed, while the automatic mechanism ran on. In another picture we see the cameraman dying for the sake of his picture.
The significance of such shots lies not in the death-despising courage to which they bear witness. We have often heard of men who could look death in the eye. We may even have seen them. What is new and different here is that these cameramen look death in the face through the lens of a movie picture camera. This happens not only on battlefields.
Who could forget Captain Scott's film, which is almost as if he had shot his own death and breathed his last sigh into a microphone.
Who could forget Sir Ernest Shackleton's magnificent pictures of his Antarctic journey or the film taken by the Soviet Polar explorers camping beside the wreck of the ice-breaker Chelyuskin?