They Shall Not Grow Old

[sienamystic]

I got to see this Peter Jackson documentary today. Documentary doesn't seem like the right word, actually. He was asked to use footage from the Imperial War Museum in a novel way. Using colorized film that has also been treated to remove flickers, age, and damage, and with interviews from veterans captured by the BBC, he shows an overview of the war from the point of view of a generic British soldier on the Western Front.

It's remarkably effective. Suddenly you find yourself seeing small details in the background. You study faces. The entire theater laughed at the clowning of one young soldier bonking his friend's helmet, because we all know that kid, or have been that kid, and we were suddenly united with him over the years.

It's also an effective way to realize, past all the deadpan "stiff upper lip" descriptions by the veterans, how absolutely like hell the time in the trenches was. You see laughing faces staring into the camera, you see corpses blown to bits. You see men clowning with a regimental pet goat, and what trench foot really looked like.

This historical period is one I read about a lot, so of course I remembered an early passage in the first Peter Wimsey novel.

"The vile, raw fog tore your throat and ravaged your eyes. You could not see your feet. You stumbled in your walk over poor men's graves.
The feel of Parker's old trench-coat beneath your fingers was comforting. You had felt it in worse places. You clung on now for fear you should get separated."

Comments

[kore]

Wow, this sounds really neat (and devastating).

[sienamystic]

It really was. It's also hilarious to see all the men staring into the camera looking doofy, because SOMEBODY IS TAKING OUR PICTURE! WHAT DO?

[alphaflyer]

I saw it this past weekend at the Rotterdam Film Festival, and .... wow. It was very British though, what with all the "went over the top, sure was hell" understatement and repression.

Having been to Tyne Cot and Vimy and Passchendaele and Thiepval and Amiens and Essex Farm and many of the other battlefields and cemeteries of the Ypres Salient and the Somme, all I could think of seeing those smiling faces was "how much longer did you live after this shot was taken?" Devastating.

And the teeth. Really brought home how much of a class thing war is. The ones giving the orders are healthy, sitting safely behind the line; the ones doing the dying are the kids who grew up malnourished and used their toothbrush to polish their buttons because they had no idea what it was for.

[sienamystic]

Yeah, and the film frontloads all the "we were just doing a job, pip pip" stuff and then BAM trenchfoot. I've never done any sort of battlefield tour besides some of the American Civil War stuff since I spent a lot of my childhood living near a bunch of them. I'm sure those places are fascinating and sad. And yeah, that question in your head was answered by Peter Jackson in the little post-movie making of bit. He references a specific film clip that was taken before a battle and says "most of these men have about thirty minutes left to live" and I nearly wailed out loud in the theater.