Lights, Camera, fire! cinematic representations of World War I's Middle East front and its Palestine campaign

Two important Australian feature films, separated by nearly 50 years, form the basis of this article's examination of World War I's Middle East front through a study of the cinematic corpus referring to the war and its images. Charles Chauvel's 40,000 Horsemen (1941) and Simon Wincer's The Lighthorsemen (1987) offer a springboard for the exploration of the visual aspects of viewers' historical, social and cultural memory shaping the nearly forgotten story of the forces of the British Empire that fought in Palestine and eastern Transjordan. The cinematic medium developed its own unique signs for wars, usually portraying wartime as a romantic epoch, and not as death and destruction.