Seminars

#2608 Filming Gallipoli from the Other Side of No Mans Land

Speaker Christopher Pugsley

Date Saturday 11th July 2026  10am-1pm

Venue Waikanae Presbyterian Church Hall, 43 Ngaio Road, Waikanae

Chris Pugsley is a retired Lieutenant Colonel and military historian who is a regular contributor to the WEA Seminar Programme. He has written on many aspects of New Zealand’s war history. He was the History Director for the Te Papa Gallipoli Exhibition and, in 2022, together with Michael Keith and Puawai Cairns, wrote Gallipoli: The scale of our war, a book about the exhibition.

This seminar is different from his other talks. Chris will present films of the Gallipoli campaign that you will never have seen before. The digitization of film archives around the world over the last 10 years have revealed many films known to have been taken but believed lost. Twenty years ago, it was common to speak of only one film of the Gallipoli Campaign, and this was shot by the British journalist Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett as a private venture bankrolled by a British Theatre Magnate. All this has changed.  

There is now a large number of French films taken by the Gaumont Film Company on behalf of the French military showing all aspects of the Gallipoli Campaign including the first known film of Australians and New Zealanders on Gallipoli and on Lemnos Island. More recently we have film taken by Sascha Films a Vienna-based film company on behalf of the Austro-Hungarian Army which sent a film crew with the two artillery batteries of heavy guns in October 1915 to Gallipoli to support the Ottoman Forces besieging the Anzac and British Imperial Forces in the last months of the Gallipoli Campaign. There are also many films taken by an official Ottoman camera team of the Ottoman armies at Gallipoli, including film of British prisoners of war captured at Gallipoli that also shows Australian and New Zealand prisoners. There is also German film taken during Emperor Wilhelm II's visit to Turkey showing him in the Anzac area in 1917.