How I Filmed the War

In 1916, a young British cinematographer named Geoffrey H. Malins strapped his camera to the front lines of the Somme and captured images that would haunt a generation. This memoir is his account of those eighteen months behind the lens: the mud-choked trenches, the soldiers who posed for his camera with grim humor, the terrible beauty of bombardment at dawn. Malins was there when the cameras went in, one of the first to document modern industrial warfare, and his prose carries the raw specificity of someone who watched death from fifteen feet away. He describes not just what he filmed but how he filmed it, the technical obsessions of early cinema colliding with the unspeakable reality of the Western Front. This is war seen through a viewfinder, mediated by the flickering urgency of silent film, written by a man who understood that he was making history even as he made movies. It remains a singular document: part war memoir, part love letter to the nascent art of moving pictures, part unflinching record of the century's first catastrophe.