In 1917, a prolific but little-known filmmaker documented one of Australia’s largest industrial conflicts on the emerging medium of moving footage. The Great Strike film was released in October 1917, promoted as ‘Interesting, Humorous, Thrilling’.  The film screened only once in NSW before being censored and suppressed. In the centenary year of the strike, surviving fragments were reconstructed, following the film’s original sequence. The restored film was a key element of the exhibition 1917: The Great Strike, presented by the City of Sydney and Carriageworks in July-August 2017.

In this paper, Laila Ellmoos will explore what the small battle over the release of the Great Strike film, between an entrepreneurial filmmaker and the NSW government, tells us about the big picture - the threat and promise of new mediums of representation in the early 20^th century, power relationships between individuals, organisations and the state, and political and class tensions against the backdrop of World War 1.