I guess you could call them "fakes" and wonder about their depiction of
"real warfare" and wonder what veterans thought of them. However, that
begs the issue with early film depictions of any event. The Edison films
that "reported" on the Spanish-American War were shown in a way that we
would call journalistic reporting, e.g. the battle of Manila, but were
total recreations.  The issue seems to me to be of the popular
expectations for film media at the time. In the very early 20th century
the very idea of a motion picture was so new that the way people viewed
films was not yet set. For instance, narrative films, with a story
line,  beginnings, middles, and ends were not common until the end of
the first decade of the 20th century. "Newsreels" were just being
invented. The "authenticity" or realism of films was a vague idea which
was not yet established in any sense of how we now view them. Were the
Boer War depictions "hokey" by modern standards? Undoubtedly. Were they
viewed as such by contemporary viewers? I doubt it.  I am making the
point that the questions one puts to these early films need to be
carefully constructed. Veterans may have pooh-poohed them, but they
weren't "fakes" in the sense of the producers expecting to deceive film
goers. Suspension of disbelief is one of the great powers of good
literature and good film.

--
Edward Jay Pershey
Curator at Edison National Historic Site, West Orange, NJ 1981-1987
currently:

Task Force Director
Crawford Museum of Transportation & Industry
Western Reserve Historical Society
Cleveland, OH  441106
216 721-5722 x228

"Building a New Future for the Past" on Cleveland's Lake Front