From a letter to Andrew Macphail, April 1917:
Make up your mind that we of this generation cannot overtake the war as it is. That will be done by the ’emotion recollected in quietude’ of our children – or our grandchildren. Even for us at the back emotion and passion is overlaid like a crazy cinema on passion and emotion till the whole thing is a blurr of white lights and flying faces.
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2 Comments
I like the “blur.”
It was, of course, the first newsreel war, and combat is still described with bewilderment as “like a movie.”
Florence Ripley Mastin’s “At the Movies” (1916), describes the impact of newsreels on at least some film-goers.
Kipling himself wrote about the bewildering effect of film in the story ‘Mrs Bathurst’.