“While many approached cinemas with dread, as spreaders of disease, I was glad to find one gentleman who regarded the cinema and the theater as fighters against influenza.”

I have previously reported on my research into some of the debates in the cinema trade that were said to have intensified during the 1918 influenza epidemic. In the struggle between local health officials, who wanted cinemas closed, and local exhibitors, who wanted them to stay open, some rather curious ideas about how the disease spread were put about. Some exhibitors, relying on the quite mistaken connection between catching a cold and being cold, believed that the virus was more likely to be caught outdoors. Following this logic, others argued that the germ-laden air of the streets should not be carried into indoor spaces such as theaters and cinemas.

Others, meanwhile, stocked up on mothballs, valued for their disinfectant properties, and on pungent chemical products.

Reading such reports, one can see that defenses against influenza and similar contagious infections had not yet been sufficiently explored by medical science. These reports made no mention of measures such as face masks, frequent hand washing or social distancing. Yet it is clear that the benefits of such measures were well understood, and that, through the film Dr. Wise on Influenza, cinema proved a considerable tool in this respect. According to an article in the Birmingham Daily Gazette, our hero Dr. Wise offers important advice on the subject, free of charge:

Anyone who feels they have a cold or a fever should stay at home until the symptoms subside.

A lack of fresh air allows germs to grow stronger and linger in the body.

Gargle and rinse your nose with a solution of potassium permanganate and salt water.

Keeping fit is of great importance. Drinking alcohol and frequenting pubs can lead to a rise in infection.

The critic for The Bioscope wrote that it was very hard to suppress the flicker in the microscope images of the influenza germs, but that, as in all good public information films, the message was not delivered through advice and information alone but was also carried by a story:

A foolish man who does not treat his cold is shown. He goes to his office, sneezing on the tram, on the train, in the streets, in his office, onto his letters and his telephone, and is likely to have spread the germ to others everywhere he went. And spread it he did. He, the carrier, and several of those he infected died. Another man in the story took precautions when he caught a cold and quickly recovered.

In his report, the critic also noted that the film was powerful enough to set everyone in the auditorium sneezing and coughing.

Dr. Wise on Influenza was created by Joseph Best, a champion of the educational value of cinema. Before the war, he had been head of the educational and scientific department of Pathé Frères. This was not Best’s first venture into producing information films: he had previously been commissioned by the National Council for Combating Venereal Diseases to make a film called “Whatsoever a Man Soweth.” Dr. Wise on Influenza was funded by the Local Government Board (the forerunner of the Ministry of Health), which arranged for it to be distributed to medical officers of health in the regions. Those health officers, in turn, took on the responsibility of distributing the film to cinemas in their areas. Given the tensions between these officials and local exhibitors that I mentioned earlier, one might well question how widely the film was actually shown. Toward the end of the war, there was considerable resistance among cinema managers to screening state-sponsored public films. Venereal disease and other subjects that the CEA regarded as partisan were major points of contention, and during the December 1918 election the coalition government issued slides showing Lloyd George and his ministers visiting cinemas, but after lengthy debate the CEA refused to show them. The withdrawal (or suppression) of Maurice Elvey’s The Life of David Lloyd George (1918) may also be connected to this. A few years later, in 1920, an interesting debate took place at a meeting of the Leeds and District Branch of the CEA. Local health officers asked whether exhibitors might show a single slide in support of Child Welfare Week. The exhibitors’ answer was to turn the proposal down flat. During the discussion, one of the supporters of the plan pointed out that a request to show another film had been refused a short while earlier, and that showing a single slide ought now to be a reasonable compromise. The health officer was reported to hold strong views on cinema as a means of propaganda for health matters. The speaker explained to the branch that they themselves had fought against the decision to close cinemas during the influenza epidemic, arguing that cinemas could serve a far greater purpose by showing public information films on how people could protect themselves against infection, and said that he found the refusal of this request hypocritical. This argument was likewise met with a hostile response, and the discussion moved on to how absurd the restrictions of 1918 had been.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84nq2KxZMBw

Advocates of public information films such as Joseph Best faced an uphill battle. Even so, I have found reports that Dr. Wise on Influenza was distributed as the official epidemic film in Birmingham, Cambridge, Sheffield, Newcastle, Bradford and Whitby. In the report on the film that went to Whitby, the section on how to make a mask from a cloth handkerchief stands out. Thanks to this measure, which had been tried in San Francisco, a mandatory mask-wearing rule enforced for nine days had prevented the spread of the flu.

Further progress would be made as time went on. When the Local Government Board became the new Ministry of Health in June 1919, Christopher Addison, who was appointed minister, was one of the foremost advocates of using cinema for health education.
As the first Minister of Health, one of Addison’s greatest achievements was choosing a film about the influenza epidemic. Unfortunately, the film was not Dr. Wise but a shorter one. “I have seen a great many health information films that were far too long and far too dull,” said Addison,

During the 1920 influenza epidemic, together with a well-known production company, I had a film made showing girls gargling at school. The film lasted 90 seconds. Financed by the distributors, it cost 30 pounds. Within a week it had been shown to 30 million people, and so it was recommended as one of the ways of protecting oneself against the epidemic, at no cost to either the public or the Treasury. If it is run by “live” people in Whitehall, cinema used in this way can achieve a great deal.

The Silent Spectators of Dr. Wise on Influenza

Dr. Wise, in my view an excellent public information film, gets its message across not only through Dr. Wise’s didactic pronouncements but also through an illustrative drama that is realistically and convincingly acted. For audiences, though, the film’s real attraction was the chance to see postwar London. The other filming locations were the theaters and cinemas around Trafalgar Square and Leicester Square. As these shots make clear, the film crew also ventured into busy streets and filmed wherever it could. Not a single passerby who strayed into the frame failed to look at the camera with curiosity. Some, realizing what was going on, stepped out of the frame in embarrassment; some watched the proceedings in amazement; and others kept looking at the camera, as if stealing the scene from the main character on whom the camera was meant to be focused.
I have written before about passersby during filming who boldly and deliberately steal the scene, or who, through their unobtrusive presence, add an element of commentary for the audience. This is an element of drama rather than of reality. Since no one gave any warning that filming was under way, you can see passersby rounding a corner unaware of the shoot, spotting a camera and film crew in front of them, and changing their behavior accordingly. I particularly love the scene in which Brown leaves his house sneezing. A young man in a bowler hat is absorbed in watching the actor’s performance before he notices the camera and spins around 360 degrees. Having seen the camera, he then slowly tries to back out of the scene behind the actor, his eyes fixed on the lens.

In another scene, filmed in Trafalgar Square, a woman in a hat stands beside the camera watching what is going on, but then a man appears at the left of the frame, sees the camera and quickly steps back out of shot. Later, as Brown stands in front of a restaurant, a woman walks into the frame and, quite deliberately, she and her friend look straight at the camera and burst out laughing. Meanwhile, amid the stares of the doorman and other passersby in the background, the actor has to shoo the woman away in order to regain control of the scene.

In the very next shot we see three uniformed men, but they soon vanish and a woman and a man come around the corner into the scene. Watching the filming, the man grins mischievously at the camera and, with no regard for the feelings of the woman he is escorting, joins the line at the restaurant door, realizing that he is appearing in the film. These moments pass too quickly for viewers intent on following the film’s main narrative to notice them. But watching these scenes again sheds an intimate light on the unselfconsciousness of street life in 1918.

Lawrence Napper

Turkish translation: Nil Ege Özden

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