The project centred on a visit to the battlefields, musuems and memorials of Northern France to collect source digital film and sound material based on the First World War. This material will be edited and manipulated both in situ in France and also in the UK to provide large screen video projections, and sonic interventions for a day to produce an event using the cultural memorialisation of the First Word War to raise questions about the nature and form of remembrance.

The event will be held in the main hall of Kendal Town Hall on 11 November 2004.

Thomas Hardy wrote of the concept of the Second Dying, the moment in time when all those who have a lived experience of an event pass away and the event becomes written or documented history. Those who were victims of great, or small, events die again as those who knew them in their lifetimetake their living memories to the grave. We are literally at the moment of the Second Dying for those who fought in the trenches of the First World War.

It is at this moment that the Great War, which was supporting, generating and creating myths as it was being contested, becomes ripe for reinterpretation and reinvention. It most definitely becomes history and the ideological claims for that history become played out (it was during WW1 that the term Theatre of war became common currency having been planned on the playing fields of Eton)..

Patriotism and sacrifice became secondary to the act of remembrance following the First World War. Victorian and Georgian pastoralism and romanticism had collided with the realities of modern technological warfare (a technology which created the stalemate for much of the four years) with nihilism and absurdity vying with religion and patriotism for supremacy in the lived experience at the front line. Crucially, the perceived waste of human life began to turn minds to thoughts of remembrance. Was it so pointless as to be forgotten?

In this way the collective act of remembrance became a cultural end in itself beyond the framework of the painful, individual act of remembering.

The material projected and relayed will form part of an installation of which the audience will be a part of. The images used will not only be of the official memorials but will also look at the museums, musuem displays, historical sites, historical images and sounds, contemporary images and sounds, to provide a environment which provokes memories as well as looking at what the nature of these memories are.

The footage from the 1916 film“The Battle of the Somme” by Geoffry Mallins is the film of choice for news editors and documentaries the world over but much of the action shots were ironically “played” for the cameras in 1916. A few short pieces of footage from this film play a crucial role in the British perception of World War One. It is ironic the entire film was made from a compendium of images that are reality and fiction.