AustLit logo
person or book cover
Screen cap from promotional trailer
form y separately published work icon The Lighthorsemen single work   film/TV   war literature   historical fiction  
Issue Details: First known date: 1987... 1987 The Lighthorsemen
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

Set during World War I, The Lighthorsemen recreates the incidents that led up to the battle for the Middle Eastern city of Beersheba in 1917. The British campaign was stalemated in Palestine when a mere eight hundred cavalrymen rode against thousands of Germans and Turks and captured the desert town, thereby changing the course of history. The story focuses on the heroic deeds of a four-man section of the Australian Lighthorse Regiment and climaxes with the last great wartime cavalry charge. Largely reviled at the time, Wincer's film demonstrates his mastery in shooting equine stories.

Exhibitions

7575857
7562457

Notes

  • The trailer for this film is available to view via YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdFsIYiq_jU (Sighted: 31/8/2012)

Works about this Work

Films That Help Us Remember Them David Stratton , 2020 single work column
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 25 April 2020; (p. 13)

'On May 1, 1980, I was invited to attend a reception held at the Hilton Hotel in Sydney, at which two of Australia’s best-known businessmen made an important announcement to the invited guests. The men, Rupert Murdoch and Robert Stigwood, were Australians who were well known around the world: the “media magnate and [the] entertainment entrepreneur” (as The Sunday Telegraph reported a few days later) used the occasion to announce the formation of a new company, R&R (later known as Associated R&R Films), a joint venture between News Corporation and the Robert Stigwood Organisation; the latter company had been responsible for hit films such as Tommy, Saturday Night Fever and Grease. A total of $10m would be invested in local productions, the first — and, as it turned out, the last — of which would be Gallipoli, directed by Peter Weir, produced by Patricia Lovell and scripted by David Williamson.' (Introduction) 

“They Said It'd Be an Adventure” : Masculinity, Nation, and Empire in Centennial Australian World War I Film and Television Glen Donnar , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Popular Culture , vol. 51 no. 6 2018; (p. 1356-1375)

'The World War I Gallipoli campaign in modern Turkey in April 1915 was calamitous from the outset, with the amphibious assault by British and Allied forces landing well off course. Australia's first major military engagement since achieving nationhood in 1901, its chief success would become their stealth evacuation, which saw seventy thousand men covertly withdrawn over nine days and nights in December 1915. The campaign was ultimately futile and deemed immaterial to the outcome of the war. Such an ignominious defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Empire would seem an unlikely source for a national myth. It lacks, for example, “the psychic reassurance of triumph over the sources of threat” and the defeat of enemies that Graham Dawson identifies as a key psychic and social function of adventure narratives and soldier heroes (282). Yet, the ill‐fated Gallipoli campaign is popularly held in Australia's cultural imagination as the “birth of a nation” for a former colony then still under the yoke of the British Empire. In Australian politics and culture, the youthful nation's presumed character was forged in war and embodied in the deeds of its young men, in spite of ultimate defeat.'  (Introduction)

Film Honours Bravery 2015 single work column
— Appears in: The Advertiser , 21 April 2015; (p. 9)
National Versions of the Great War : Modern Australian Anzac Cinema Daniel Reynaud , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film 2014; (p. 289-304)
Lights, Camera, Fire! Cinematic Representations of World War I's Middle East Front and its Palestine Campaign Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society , December vol. 99 no. 2 2013; (p. 170-189)
'Two important Australian feature films, separated by nearly 50 years, form the basis of this article's examination of World War I's Middle East front through a study of the cinematic corpus referring to the war and its images. Charles Chauvel's 40,000 Horsemen (1941) and Simon Wincer's The Lighthorsemen (1987) offer a spring board for the exploration of the visual aspects of viewers' historical, social and cultural memory shaping the nearly forgotten story of the forces of the British Empire that fought in Palestine and Eastern Transjordan. The cinematic medium developed its own unique signs for wars, usually portraying wartime as a romantic epoch, and not as death and destruction.' (Author's introduction)
Triumphant Return of the Cavalry Jim Schembri , 2011 single work column
— Appears in: The Age , 1 April 2011; (p. 4)
Lights, Camera, Fire! Cinematic Representations of World War I's Middle East Front and its Palestine Campaign Yvonne Kozlovsky-Golan , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society , December vol. 99 no. 2 2013; (p. 170-189)
'Two important Australian feature films, separated by nearly 50 years, form the basis of this article's examination of World War I's Middle East front through a study of the cinematic corpus referring to the war and its images. Charles Chauvel's 40,000 Horsemen (1941) and Simon Wincer's The Lighthorsemen (1987) offer a spring board for the exploration of the visual aspects of viewers' historical, social and cultural memory shaping the nearly forgotten story of the forces of the British Empire that fought in Palestine and Eastern Transjordan. The cinematic medium developed its own unique signs for wars, usually portraying wartime as a romantic epoch, and not as death and destruction.' (Author's introduction)
Film Honours Bravery 2015 single work column
— Appears in: The Advertiser , 21 April 2015; (p. 9)
National Versions of the Great War : Modern Australian Anzac Cinema Daniel Reynaud , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Great War in Post-Memory Literature and Film 2014; (p. 289-304)
“They Said It'd Be an Adventure” : Masculinity, Nation, and Empire in Centennial Australian World War I Film and Television Glen Donnar , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Journal of Popular Culture , vol. 51 no. 6 2018; (p. 1356-1375)

'The World War I Gallipoli campaign in modern Turkey in April 1915 was calamitous from the outset, with the amphibious assault by British and Allied forces landing well off course. Australia's first major military engagement since achieving nationhood in 1901, its chief success would become their stealth evacuation, which saw seventy thousand men covertly withdrawn over nine days and nights in December 1915. The campaign was ultimately futile and deemed immaterial to the outcome of the war. Such an ignominious defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Empire would seem an unlikely source for a national myth. It lacks, for example, “the psychic reassurance of triumph over the sources of threat” and the defeat of enemies that Graham Dawson identifies as a key psychic and social function of adventure narratives and soldier heroes (282). Yet, the ill‐fated Gallipoli campaign is popularly held in Australia's cultural imagination as the “birth of a nation” for a former colony then still under the yoke of the British Empire. In Australian politics and culture, the youthful nation's presumed character was forged in war and embodied in the deeds of its young men, in spite of ultimate defeat.'  (Introduction)

Last amended 30 Sep 2014 08:58:00
X