Belfast volunteer George Hackney, Royal Irish Rifles, 14th Division, took his camera along to France in the Great War. (A ‘pocket’ camera that needed a very large pocket.) Unusual for the time, especially at the front where he served from 1915 to '16 (Hackney about 30 at the time) as amateur photography was strictly banned. (There’s not an amateur composition in his work.) He got around detection largely by shooting on plates rather than film. It allowed him to process in the field, each plate holding multiple images. Unsurprisingly, he came back a changed man, many friends lost, his religious beliefs in question, though he long remained an elder in the Presbyterian Church. Carefully made into prints for albums, the collection went largely unseen before albums, prints, negatives, accompanying diaries were donated to an Ulster Museum. Rediscovered in time for the WWI centenary, this BBC documentary gave them new circulation. This film, though filled with too much supposition and not enough detail on his process (dir. Brian Henry Martin/script Ian McElhinney), brings some remarkable images, sharp in clarity and in Hackney’s choice in subject matter, to light. Probably at its most revealing in the visible changes that appear before-and-after the 1916 Battle of the Somme. And it’s thru these casual portraits of men, including many who were lost, and their grave sites, that Hackney best captured his temporary world.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: The film uses a technique that pans, scans and lifts certain elements to create a 3D effect. Peter Jackson did something different with restoration and color on his digital revamp of WWI archival motion pictures in THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD/’18. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/03/they-shall-not-grow-old-2018.html
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