We’re delighted to welcome Dr Toby Haggith, Senior Curator of the Imperial War Museum, and internationally renowned silent film musician and composer Stephen Horne to Archive Screening Day 2019 for this special presentation of the IWM’s latest archive restoration project.
Towards the end of 1930, two veterans of the First World War – one German, one British – came together to film a pilgrimage through the battlefields of the Western Front, hoping to impress upon younger generations that war ‘is not a childish game, a glorious adventure’, but ‘a hideous ugly thing.’
Released in 1931 as a second feature, Peace on the Western Front gained a following among the burgeoning peace movement and became an unofficial film for the League of Nations Union.
The original soundtrack was sadly lost, but a new script has been created from the film’s original synopsis and contemporary accounts of the battlefields and war-ravaged towns. This script, alongside music composed by Stephen Horne, will be performed live to accompany IWM’s digital restoration of the print, at a special ‘work in progress’ screening presented by Dr Haggith that promises to offer fascinating insight into all aspects of the restoration process.