“And action!”
By the time that war was declared in 1914, going to the cinema was already a popular form of entertainment. The early experiments of the Lumière Brothers in 1896, showing a film of a train arriving at a station had rapidly evolved into an art form which allowed for sophisticated storytelling. By 1915 Charlie Chaplin was already a cultural phenomenon and Birth of a Nation was leaving its notorious mark. With no dialogue to dub, films had a global market needing only a pianist or an orchestra to enhance the visual spectacle on offer.
The Government swiftly recognised the possibilities for propaganda which cinema provided. In August 1916, while the Battle of the Somme was still being fought, cinemas across Britain began showing footage of it — and the public queued. Over the following six weeks, an estimated 20 million tickets were sold, in a country of roughly 43 million people. Parents went repeatedly, hoping to spot their own sons among the marching men on screen. It held the British box office record for over sixty years — beaten only by Star Wars, in 1977.
The war didn't just fill cinemas, it accidentally built Hollywood. Before 1914, France and Italy dominated world cinema; but the war shut their studios, sent crews to the trenches, and turned film lots into hospitals and munitions works. America, neutral and untouched until 1917, quietly filled the vacuum: by 1918 it was producing roughly 90% of the films screening in Europe, a dominance that never really reversed.