Daniel Reynaud

Other films unearthed during Reynaud's research include a British compilation film, For the Honour of Australia, which worked together two Australian films about the Sydney-Emden battle of December 1914, For Australia (1915) and How We Beat the Emden (1915).

In the course of his research, Reynaud rediscovered several lost or partially lost Australian silent films on World War I. The most significant of these films was The Hero of the Dardanelles (1915), Australia’s first Gallipoli Campaign movie.

The film was made during the campaign and was a huge commercial and critical success.

The film, now available at the NFSA, preserves footage of the wrecked SMS Emden after the Battle of Cocos, filmed for a feature documentary in 1915.

The last film was the 1928 production The Exploits of the Emden, which Reynaud re-edited together after it had been split into two films.

Reynaud has published extensively on Anzac cinema, showing how the representation of the Great War has shifted over time to reflect national interests and concerns, helping to buttress popular perceptions of the Anzac legacy.

Representations have changed over time, particularly in showing the ideal Australian soldier, who has transformed from a well-to-do city boy in many World War I movies to a larrikin but good-hearted boy from the bush in films from the 1930s onwards.

Reynaud’s interest in film was sparked by his film director brother Gabe Reynaud (1953-2000), who made a series of influential documentary series for Adventist Media, including Keepers of the Flame, Chasing Utopia and The Search.

Daniel Reynaud (born 27 August 1958) is an Australian historian whose work on Australian war cinema and on Australian World War I soldiers and religion has challenged aspects of the Anzac legend, Australia’s most important national mythology built around the role of Australian servicemen, popularly known as Anzacs

Reynaud was born in Armidale, New South Wales in 1958 shortly after his parents emigrated from France.

Similarly, the representation of the British in Australian war films has shifted from the idealized man of the World War I years to the antithesis of the noble bushman Anzac, a shift that began in the 1970s.

Reynaud’s second principal area of research is challenging the myth of the universal secularity of the Anzacs.

Two major monographs to date reveal that religion was an important factor in the lives of a large minority of soldiers.

His father Jean (John) Reynaud was for some years a Lecturer in French at Avondale College from which Daniel Reynaud obtained his teaching degree in History and English in 1979.

He taught secondary History and English at Longburn Adventist College, Auckland Adventist High School and Rosmini College between 1980-1991.

In 1992, Reynaud began lecturing at Avondale University in the field of media and English.

Daniel Reynaud’s doctoral thesis from the University of Newcastle in 1997 was titled Celluloid Anzacs: representations of the Great War in Australian Cinema and Television Dramas.

In 2003, he shifted his teaching focus primarily to history.

It was later published as Celluloid Anzacs: The Great War through Australian Cinema (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2007).

It explored over 40 representations of World War One in Australian film and television productions.

He was a founding Associate Professor of Avondale when the rank was introduced in 2009, in the same year winning an Australian Learning & Teaching Council Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning, particularly for his innovative use of tabletop wargaming to teach the World Wars at university level.

He was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts in 2010, and of the Faculty of Arts & Theology in 2011, a position he retained until 2013.

One, //Faith of the Anzacs//, screened on Channel 7 on Anzac Day 2010, setting new records for audience response for Adventist Media Network, and winning American and Australian media awards.

Another, on Fighting Mac McKenzie, also rated well.

Reynaud has been involved in various other research projects, including on online learning and Romanian poetry translation.

He has won awards for his academic and popular writing, as well as sharing awards as part of a team in poetry translation.

He has also recorded three albums of original music.

Reynaud’s research uncovered lost footage, movie stills and the original screenplay, and he oversaw a reconstruction of the film which was released by the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) in 2015, the centenary of its original release.

It is the second-oldest commercially available Australian silent film.

The Man the Anzacs Revered (Signs Publishing, 2015) is a biography of legendary Anzac chaplain William ‘Fighting Mac’ McKenzie, arguably the most popular soldier of the Australian Imperial Force and yet largely unknown today.

In 2017, he was Visiting Professor at Southern Adventist University in Chattanooga, Tennessee in the United States.

Reynaud's other work, Anzac Spirituality (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2018) explores soldierly attitudes to a range of formal and informal religious and spiritual issues, drawn from the reading of the diaries and letters of about a thousand Anzacs.

The book has been described as ‘a genuinely world-ranking book’, while his work in the area of Anzac religion has been labelled ‘an exceptional gift to Australia and to our understanding of our history.’

Reynaud has also written and appeared in eight documentaries about the Anzacs and religion.

He was promoted to Professor in 2019.