What to expect
Filmed with hundreds of mounted soldiers near Cheyenne, the production shows early American cinema using real scale to make a nineteenth-century battle newly immediate.
How to ease in
Watch how formation becomes both spectacle and tragedy. The charge is impressive because it is organised, and devastating because organisation cannot correct the command behind it.
Heads-up
The disastrous cavalry charge at Balaclava is reconstructed through massed riders, military formation, and the patriotic memory shaped by Tennyson’s poem.
A mass of riders can look magnificent even when we know the order is disastrous. I am interested in the uneasy point where visual power begins to argue with historical judgement.
Open the note ↓
A mass of riders can look magnificent even when we know the order is disastrous. I am interested in the uneasy point where visual power begins to argue with historical judgement.
— Momo
Where to go next
Want a gentler, shorter, or stranger next film?
Ask Momo for something like this →
Momo is on shift. Visit Momo Cinema →
