The films made by the British Instructional Films (BIF) company in the
decade following the end of the First World War helped to shape the way
in which that war was remembered. This is both a work of cinema history
and a study of the public's memory of WW1. By the early twenties, the
British film industry was struggling to cope with the power of Hollywood
and government help was needed to guarantee its survival.The 1927
Cinematograph Films Act was intended to support the domestic film
industry by requiring British cinemas to show a quota of domestically
produced films each year.The Act was not the sole saviour of British
cinema, but the government intervention did allow the domestic industry
to exploit the talents of an emerging group of younger filmmakers
including Michael Balcon, Walter Summers and Alfred Hitchcock, who
directed the most influential of these BIF war constructions. This book
shows that the films are micro-histories revealing huge amounts about
perceptions of the Great War, national and imperial identities, the role
of cinema as a shaper of attitudes and identities, power relations
between Britain and the USA and the nature of popular culture as an
international contest in its own right.