Supreme Katharsis

Is it right to let us see men dying? Yes. Is it a sacrilege? No. If our spirit be purged of curiosity and purified with awe the sight is hallowed. There is no sacrilege if we are fit for the seeing … I say it is regenerative and resurrective for us to see war stripped bare. Heaven knows that we need the supreme katharsis, the ultimate cleansing. We grow indifferent too quickly … These are dreadful sights but their dreadfulness is as wholesome as Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’. It shakes the kaleidoscope of war into human reality … I say that these pictures are good for us.

~ James Douglas, The Star, 25th September 1916

This quote is so powerful. What Douglas is here dealing with is one of the toughest issues man faces. He wrote this after a viewing of the 1916 film The Battle of the Somme, a battle which occurred the same year. Two cinematographers filmed during the war and made a movie out of it which was then released in the British Isles. It was very popular and its effect was enormous. Not until then had the reality of World War 1 hit the British peoples. This quote captures so much of that film, and so much of the issues which surround similar situations today. Why, some would ask, ought we to watch war films or death onscreen. This would be my reply. Not because it is good, but because we are bad and require a jolt to think outside our own reality.