Film gives peek into World War I

KOLKATA: Even as cine-buffs warmed up to the first day of screening at the Kolkata International Film Festival hub Nandan, it was a movie on World War I shown at the Goethe Institut located 2.5km away that left its mark on Tuesday.
‘The Halfmoon Files’ screened at Max Mueller Bhavan on Tuesday evening is an experimental film by Philip Scheffner that explores an archive containing voices of colonial soldiers of World War I.The recordings were produced as a result of a unique alliance between the military, the scientific community and the entertainment industry. In his experimental search, Scheffner follows the traces of voices to the origin of their recording. Like a memory game which remains incomplete till the end, he uncovers pictures and sounds that retrieve the ghost of the past.
In 1892, 15 years after Thomas Edison invented the phonograph, Mall Singh is born in the north Indian village Ranasukhi in Ferozpur district of Punjab. His father is also from Ranasukhi, his mother from Derki in Ludhiana district. He attends the Regiment school in Naushera, Peshawar and joins the army at the age of 19.
At the time he becomes a protagonist of the narrative, Mall Singh is 24 years old and imprisoned in the Half Moon Camp for colonial prisoners of war in Wünsdorf, a small German town near Berlin, thousands of miles away from home. At 4pm on December 11, 1916, Mall Singh is asked to speak a short text in his mother tongue into the funnel of a gramophone. The duration of his speech is exactly one minute and 20 seconds.
For one minute, Mall Singh sings a heartrending song into a phonographic funnel connected to a recording device for shellac records. The words and melody originated then and there.
This recording is part of an ambitious sound archive representing all nations of the world. The screen remains black while the audience listens to the exotic voices from Half Moon Camp. The prisoners were interesting and easily manageable study material for ethnographers, musicologists and linguists. When the archive was later discovered, it unravelled voices of 'ghosts', persons who were long dead. Debate
In ‘The Halfmoon Files’, Scheffner uses the recorded 'life units' as Edison called them to construct personal stories based on historical archive material that deals with concrete persons and events. The Halfmoon Files is about missing links, omissions and the construction of history, featuring protagonists who are, for the most part, invisible, but whose presence is nevertheless palpable. It is a ghost story.