This Painting is Called "Rain of Terror"
But what I really want to tell you about is the work of Jessica Borthwicke
Update on 30 March — just stumbled upon this, in my Saturday morning reading: Arthur Firstenberg has put together a really eloquent thesis on another aspect of the digitized rain of terror that I have been wondering about. Check out his Substack on electromagnetic radiation, and particularly this post: Where have all the insects gone …If you have been wondering too….
And now on to Jessica Borthwicke
When I was writing my dissertation on the earliest use of film technology to make art, I stumbled upon a fantastic anthology on the subject by Kevin Macdonald and Mark Cousins, who had gone back to original archives in 1988, as I was doing in 2005. They had republished a 1914 essay by Jessica Bortwicke describing her work filming war in the Balkans.
Jessica Borthwicke had originally published her account in a trade magazine contemporary to the time, called The Bioscope which was discovered and reprinted by Kevin Brownlow in 1979 in a book called The War, The West, and The Wilderness and then picked up again by Macdonald and Cousins a decade later.
Hopefully the films themselves will one day also be available to the general public.
Jessica Borthwicke was one of the very first war reporters ever. Proven fact — one that she documented herself in “The Bioscope” right after she returned to her native England. She talked about what she saw and experienced, rather than opinion and spin.
And now, without further ado, Jessica Bortwicke, in her own words, broadcasting across the ages to you 110 years after her adventures here:
“The difficulties of taking cinematograph pictures on the battlefield, especially when you are alone and unaided by any assistant are, as you can imagine, tremendous. The use of a tripod is a particular embarrassment. Things happen so quickly in time of war that, unless one can be ready with one’s camera at a few second’s notice, the episode one wishes to record will probably be over. During the Serbian war in Macedonia, my tripod was smashed by a shell, and although the camera was intact, the film. . .
got hopelessly jumbled up and had to be cut away from the mechanism.
Another great difficulty was the want of a darkroom. One day, while taking films in the Rhodope Mountains, I came to a strange village of wooden huts inhabited by a nomadic race called Vlaques. Something went wrong with my camera, and I tried to make the people understand that I wanted some place which would serve as a darkroom. It was impossible to get them to grasp what I meant, however, until eventually I found a man making rugs out of sheeps’ wool. After much persuasion, I induced him to cover me up with his rugs, and in this unusual and very stuffy ‘darkroom’ I managed to open my camera in safety. Having no film box with me at the moment, I wrapped the negative up in pieces of paper and stowed it away in my pocket, carrying it thus for fifteen days until I handed my coat to a servant who, being of an inquisitive nature, unwrapped the negative, and finding it uninteresting, put it back in the pocket without the paper, afterwards hanging the coat to air in the sun. Subsequently I developed the film — and found it to be one of the best I had.
The want of a technical dictionary, combined with the natives’ ignorance of photography, brought about several rather amusing situations. On one occasion, in Adrianople, I lost a rivet from my tripod. There were shops of most other kinds, but no ironmongers, and at last, in despair, I tried to explain to an officer what I wanted in dumb show, not knowing the world for ‘rivet’. Having followed my actions for some moments with apparent intelligence, he suddenly hailed a cab and bundled me hastily in. We drove right across the city, until we eventually entered some massive gates and drew up — inside the prison. However, I turned the misconception to advantage by securing some excellent snapshots and having some very interesting talks with the prisoners. One convict — a German of considerable education — invited me to go and see him hanged the next morning. I saw two executions in that prison.
During the cholera rage in Adrianople, everything connected with that terrible disease was painted black. The carts in which the dead bodies were carried away were black, for example, as were the coffins in which cholera victims were buried. While the scourge was at its height, I went down into the gypsy quarter to take a film. The people in this part of the city had never seen a camera before, and when they saw me pointing my black box at various objects they thought I was operating some wonderful new instrument for combating the disease which was destroying them. Quickly surrounding me, they came and knelt upon the ground, kissing my feet and clothing, and begging with dreadful pathos that I should cure them. It was a task as sad as it was difficult to explain that their hopes were mistaken, and that I was powerless to help them…”
— Jessica Borthwicke, 1914 “The Bioscope”
P.S. Back when I was writing my dissertation, not so many people wanted to talk about this, the archives were pretty tight-lipped, and getting any access to this type of firsthand account was a lot more difficult.
As time has passed, the archives themselves have seen the publicity value of this kind of information, and are releasing more and more of it to the public at large.
You can now go directly via the evermore world-wide-web to what appears to be the Bioscope’s own blog on Wordpress and read more about Borthwicke here:
https://thebioscope.net/2007/05/27/a-girl-cinematographer-at-the-balkan-war/
No idea though, why they still seem to want to call her just a “girl”.