Time 7:00pm, talk starts at 7:30pm.

Our zoom talk for August is now planned in and it's bound to be a real belter!

We welcome back the wonderful Chris Pugsley who will be talking to us about Gallipoli in film. Details below:

Until the last 15 years or so,  British Commonwealth audiences believed that Ellis Ashmead Bartlett’s With the Dardanelles Campaign Expedition, released after the evacuation in February 1916 was the only film taken of the 1915 Gallipoli Expedition. The digitisation of the major film archives has revealed a treasure trove of Gallipoli-related film. Gaumont released its first of at least two feature films during the campaign in July 1915. These were shown world-wide.

A Gaumont camera team under Pierre Perrin was sent as an official French film crew. It arrived in March 1915 and filmed extensively at Cape Helles, Lemnos and Tenedos. Two films and a series of newsclips were released worldwide in 1915 and film taken in January 1916, immediately prior to the final evacuation, was released in early 1916. The film’s intertitles were edited by Gaumont’s British Office for an English-language audience. Censored material was kept and archived by Gaumont in the 1920s.

This is a selection of censored film covering the nine-month campaign.

Lt Col (Retd) Christopher Pugsley, ONZM, DPhil, FRHistS is a freelance historian living at Waikanae Beach in New Zealand. He was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of War Studies, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst from 2000-2012. A former infantry officer in the New Zealand Army, he is regarded as one of New Zealand’s foremost authorities on New Zealanders at war. He has written and edited over 20 books.

His history of silent film in New Zealand, The Camera in the Crowd: Filming New Zealand in Peace and War, 1895-1920, was published in 2017.

If you would like to reserve a place for the talk please email comms officer Warren Smith on the email address below.

[email protected]