'The skeleton is well wrapped in flesh': Official First World War Films and Modernist Literary Corporeality in H.D. and Virginia Woolf.

This article looks at the most likely impact on audiences generated by two of the most widely viewed films of the First World War: The Battle of the Somme (1916) and The Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of the Tanks (1917). Examining commentaries on the film in the UK press and analysing the shot patterns that the films used to depict troops and artillery, I argue that both films distinguished machinery as the operant agent of the War and demoted the human to a secondary position. I argue that, as Woolf and H.D. were likely to have ranked amongst the films' viewers, this demotion of human corporeal agency below that of artillery determined the ways that both writers represented the human body in their 'war novels' Asphodel and Jacob's Room. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]