Soldiers of the Cross: Time, narrative and affect

The Salvation Army lecture Soldiers of the Cross (1900) is famous in Australia for incorporating some of the earliest fiction film shot in Australia into an integrated feature-length production. However, it was predominantly a life-model lantern-slide lecture; and a close analysis of the slides in sequence, correlated with contemporaneous reports, indicates that it made significant innovations on nineteenth-century modes of narrative, and deployed different modalities of time and realism into a highly affective whole. Soldiers of the Cross was therefore an even more important event in Australias media history than has been perceived hitherto.