No London Film Festival would be complete without the unveiling of a major treasure from the BFI National Archive. And, on the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, what more appropriate than a powerful yet almost unknown 1927 film recreating two of its decisive naval battles.
A newly restored print of the film, The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands, will screen in the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank, with a specially commissioned score by Simon Dobson, performed live by the Band of the Royal Marines.
“It’s about two quite significant naval battles in October 1915,” says Bryony Dixon, curator of silent film at the BFI National Archive. “You’ve got these two great navies head-to-head, with the German East Asian Squadron in the Pacific harrying British ships wherever they found them.”
The director, Walter Summers, had made a number of war “re-enactment” films — about Mons, Ypres, the Somme, Zeebrugge — says Dixon, “but this was his most ambitious. Before, he’d been confined to doing things with model shots and reconstructed scenes but, in this one, he basically went to the Admiralty and said, ‘Can I borrow your fleet?’ And they said, ‘Sure’. So what he does is shoot the whole thing at sea.”
Most of the action sequences were shot off Plymouth. And, with the Falklands being too far away, the scenes set there were shot on the Isles of Scilly, with St Mary’s standing in for Port Stanley. Here, Summers allowed himself a bit of comic relief at the expense of the island volunteers — a sequence that got him into hot water with the Governor of the Falklands.
“But,” says Dixon, “the bit that I think is remarkable is the scene in the middle between the two battles where they refit the ships — a five-to-seven-minute montage which is absolutely magnificent. Summers is a really interesting director, one of the best of his style and era. He’s not well known but will be after this.”
The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands screens at Queen Elizabeth Hall on Thu Oct 16, 7pm.
Five more archive films at the LFF
Animal Farm (1954)
BFI Southbank, Sun Oct 12
Sixty years on, the British animated version of George Orwell’s political classic is as powerful as ever.
Damn the War (1914)
BFI Southbank, Sun Oct 12
An extraordinarily prophetic Belgian anti-war film made before the outbreak of the First World War.
Dragon Inn (1967)
Vue West End, Sat Oct 11; BFI Southbank, Fri Oct 17
No ifs, no buts: King Hu’s 1967 masterpiece is the greatest Chinese martial arts film ever.
German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (1945/2014)
BFI Southbank, Mon Oct 13
Footage shot in 1945 finally rescued and re-edited into a grim testimony.
Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
BFI Southbank, Wed Oct 15; Vue West End, Sat Oct 18
Cary Grant plays a pilot on the perilous Latin American mail routes in Howard Hawks’s 1939 classic.
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