ryanmeft:

The press around They Shall Not Grow Old has focused on the techniques filmmaker Peter Jackson used to restore World War I footage and imbue it with the colors of life loved and lived and lost, even though all you need to do to realize it is not about the tech is read the title again. Jackson and his team have again pioneered a new frontier in film—this time, inventing a way in which the past can most urgently be made into the now—but if that were the point, the film would have been titled something like The Colors of War. Instead, it was named in emotional, rending honor of those, many teens, whose lives ended in the trenches of a senseless conflict.



The techniques in question involve taking old footage, colorizing it to a degree of quality I cannot remember seeing before, using actual voices of World War I soldiers instead of narrators or historians, sometimes splicing together the original single-frame shots into a greater panning shot to drive home the scale of the reality, and even hiring lip readers to understand and recreate what soldiers were saying in the silent film footage. They mostly did not talk about charges at the enemy over the trenches (where we get the term “over the top”), of battle glorious or otherwise, and they certainly care nothing for the complex and ultimately meaningless causes of the war. They talk about what they had to eat, the ways in which they had to use the bathroom, visits to brothels, keeping clean or rather entirely failing to, and rare little moments when they could gain a reprieve. It takes no special focus to listen to stories of violence and death; that’s the unspoken goal of much entertainment. What we learn here brings trench warfare home in a far more intimate and immediate way.

The choice has been made not to try and encompass the entire war and every nationality which fought in it, but to focus on a handful of British soldiers. In other circumstances, I might be quick to point to this as a failing, and bring up the fact that the British take quite as much of a themselves-centric view to history as Americans do. In this case, it is the right decision. The film needs to zero in on the humanity of soldiers, not the details of involved nations and war weapons and treaties and such. It isn’t that other countries don’t deserve a spotlight. It is that they deserve their own spotlight, and to try and cram them all in here would be a disservice. Though Jackson has said he imagines the experience was similar for soldiers hailing from all places, I rather dearly hope he or his acolytes choose to give us such films.



Jackson’s grandfather, who fought in the war, is mentioned as someone who survived the trenches but later succumbed to battle’s other effects; the fallout of World War I not only affected soldiers ever after but led directly to World War II. The film only briefly touches on larger consequences, as it is about personal lives, but if there is one omission I wish time had been found for, it is the Christmas Truce of 1914. If you don’t know about that, I can’t do it justice. Read about it. The film does spend some considerable time on humanizing German soldiers, most of whom were of course as terrified as anyone else, and my personal desire for that story to have been in it is only my own. It would have been excellent to hear some veterans talking about it, but I must sadly face the possibility that none who were there were able to do so.

That Jackson and company have made this film is true, and also only partially true. They have compiled it, from a hundred hours of footage and six hundred of audio stored in Britain’s Imperial War Museum, but it was made by those who lived it, something Jackson and friends seem eminently respectful of. In most theatres the film is “followed” by a second documentary about the making of the first, but really this is an essential part of the film, for in it Jackson illuminates how little true trickery was used. He visits the site of the hedge road where the soldiers in the film waited to charge the Germans, and forlornly reminds us that almost all of the men in that footage were living the last 30 minutes they had. He shows brief clips from the interviews from which the audio recordings were taken, and we see men we saw in the war in civilian clothes, 50 or 60 years later. While the Space Race was being duked out and hippies were marching with peace signs, these men were still alive. Yet we have, as a culture, consigned them to the dustbin of history, in service of an unspoken agreement seemingly made in which the 20th century really started with the second World War. Several of the audio clips lament that when these soldiers returned, they and the war were ignored by an indifferent populace, to the point of employers outright refusing to consider them (in America, Herbert Hoover’s infamous burning of makeshift towns constructed by destitute veterans ensured Franklin Roosevelt the Presidency).



That the veterans of this war have been quietly forgotten is the sense in the final audio clip shared, in which a soldier returns to the shop where he works after four years, and the employee asks “Where have you been—on nights?”

Verdict: Must-See



Note: I don’t use stars, but here are my possible verdicts.



Must-See

Highly Recommended

Recommended

Average

Not Recommended

Avoid like the Plague

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