Post Script: What About that Movie? Where Did it Come From?
In publishing this clip on YouTube, user Gilbert Kantin identifies a Smithsonian Magazine article from 2010, "The Faces of War," as its source. Full of information about the development of plastic surgery in the wake of the war's unprecedented savagery, this article includes, as in illustration, this short film: but also does not say where it came from. It does describe the action as taking place in 1918, in the Paris studio run by an American sculptor Anna Coleman Ladd.
By contacting the magazine, two University of Illinois students (Amanda Marcotte '15 and Alex Villanueva '17) were able to learn the following.
“Red Cross Work on Mutilés at Paris, 1918,” as the item is formally known, was shot by a special film division of the Red Cross. As part of its efforts to mitigate the horror of war–and to present Allied governments as doing something about it–the Red Cross apparently produced scores of such films in that decade. They were shown widely in movie-houses, as shorts preceding the main feature. Only a few of these films survive today, however.
This particular footage, which indeed features work being done in a Red Cross studio run by Anna Coleman Ladd, is now preserved by the Otis Historical Archives of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, in Silver Spring, MD. Comparing a digital copy of the original footage, sent to us by the Otis Historical Archives, with the YouTube version provided by Gilbert Kantin (and Smithsonian Magazine), we have been able to identify that they are identical, and the latter are a full copy. That said, we have also, with the permission of the Otis Historical Archives, placed a copy in the public, fair-use archive, Critical Commons.
For further information about the film and the era in which it was made, see the following bibliography.
Alexander,
Caroline. “Faces of War: Amid the horrors of World War I, a corps of
artists brought hope to soldiers disfigured in the trenches.”
Smithsonian Magazine, February 2007.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/faces-of-war-145799854/?no-ist.
“An American Sculptor’s Splendid Work.” American Magazine of Art, June 1919.
Graff,
Mercedes. “Anna Coleman Ladd and the Red Cross Studio of Portrait Masks
in WWI.” In On the Field of Mercy: Women Medical Volunteers from the
Civil t the First World War, 293-310. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books,
2010.
King, Padriac. “How Wounded Soldiers have
Faced the World Again with ‘Portrait Masks.’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Sunday Magazine, March 26, 1933.
Lubin, David M., "Masks, Mutilation, and Modernity: Anna Coleman Ladd and
the First World War," Archives of American Art Journal vol. 47, nos.
3-4 (Fall 2008): 4-15.
Muir, Ward. “The Men with New Faces.” The Nineteenth Century and After 82, October 1917 (1917): 746-753
Red
Cross Work on Mutilés at Paris, 1918 (Red Cross, 1918), 16mm film,
National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of
Pathology, Otis Historical Archives.
Veeder,
Gerry. “The Red Cross Bureau of Pictures, 1917-1921: World War I, the
Russian Revolution and the Sultan of Turkey’s harem.” Historical Journal
of Film, Radio and Television 10, 1 (1990): 47-70