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Clip description
As in clip one, the camera is on the wharf at Anzac Cove, but the pan is longer, covering more of the scene, and from a longer distance. The size of the encampment and the logistics required are more obvious. At the end of the first shot, you can just see men bathing on the beach. In a ‘mile-long avenue’, signallers lay telephone cable on makeshift crosses. The scene then shifts to Imbros Island, where British troops board ‘lighters’ to transport them across the 21 km stretch of water to the Gallipoli peninsula. These troops are heading to a landing at Suvla Bay north of Anzac Cove in the offensive of early August 1915.
Curator’s notes
Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett had two lenses with his camera, a longer one for telephoto shots, and a shorter one for scenes where he was closer to the action to be filmed. He had no idea initially of how to use them, which makes identifying which one is used for which shot more difficult. It is likely that the long pan across Anzac Cove here is done with a short lens, giving a wider angle of view. The similar shot in clip one is much closer to the action, suggesting he used the long lens – although he may just have been physically closer on the jetty from which he shot.
The differences in quality and clarity between shots in the film may have less to do with differences in lens quality and more to do with Ashmead-Bartlett’s skill in operating the camera. He got better after the first few weeks of using it, in late July and early August. The scenes of embarkation at Imbros are much clearer than the scenes at Quinn’s Post in clip one, for example. Some of this may be a difference in rates of deterioration of the original nitrate negative, but not all of it.
Note the soldier wearing braces and a satchel in the scene with the signallers. He seems to reappear in clip three, walking away from camera along a sunken road. The man who holds the lines up in clip two appears to be in front of him in the same shot in clip three, suggesting at least that these two shots are taken in the same stretch of sunken trench at the same time. The intriguing thing is that two of the men in the Quinn’s Post sequence in clip one, shown walking towards camera, appear to be very similar. The man in the tie in clip one wears a dark shirt and carries a pair of binoculars in a shoulder case; he appears to be the one holding the wires up in clip two, and walking in the middle (of three men) in the sunken road in clip three. The man in white undershirt with the satchel who follows him in clips two and three appears to be the first of three men who walk towards camera in the covered trench shots at Quinn’s Post (after the shot of the man who hands in a note at headquarters).
Why is this significant? Because it seems to indicate that Ashmead-Bartlett was accompanied by these men on the day he filmed at what Peter Stanley claims is footage of Quinn’s Post. Stanley uses the man in the tie to add weight to his claim that these are men of the Wellington Battalion at Quinn’s Post. But if that is true, why are these same men shown in another location entirely? It makes it more likely that they were accompanying Ashmead-Bartlett on this day’s filming, rather than men he found at Quinn’s Post. And if they’re not men of the Wellington Battalion, is this really Quinn’s Post? We know that Ashmead-Bartlett filmed there, but the man in the tie appears not to be firm evidence.
