trench warfare – thru film and tech

Yes­ter­day was able to snag the last lo­cal tick­et to the kin­da one-day-only First World War Pe­ter Jack­son pas­sion project doc­u­men­tary event They Shall Not Grow Old (2018).
 

And it is to­tal­ly a Pe­ter Jack­son thing. 

They Shall Not Grow Old is an ob­ses­sive, over the top, doc­u­men­tary built from 100-year-old film reels from the Im­pe­r­i­al War Mu­se­ums, col­lect­ed ephemera, BBC in­ter­views and a lot of dig­i­tal-en­hance­ments – such as as tak­ing over­ex­posed film and pulling im­ages from the dark­ness; some­thing oth­er film­mak­ers nev­er quite tried with the same footage (ad­just­ing curves in Pho­to­shop is good for this). 

Vin­tage frame rates were all over the place (orig­i­nal cam­eras were cranked by hand) so a lot of guess­work hap­pened con­vert­ing messy film­stock to today’s 24-frames-per-sec­ond stan­dard – in­clud­ing Jack­son va­ca­tion­ing to the orig­i­nal trench­es and match­ing the colour of grass­es and plant life.

With around 100 hours of re­stored black and white footage com­plet­ed (and giv­en back to the mu­se­um for its hold­ings), Great War (1914–18) afi­ciona­do Jack­son de­cid­ed to take some of these ma­te­ri­als and tell the sto­ry of the British In­fantry and their ex­pe­ri­ence in the trenches. 

Avoid­ing pol­i­tics and for­mal caus­es of this glob­al con­flict, the rush to war is ex­plained through the words of British cit­i­zens who vol­un­teered. From their POV, things were brew­ing against Ger­many and a lit­tle war was go­ing to be the or­der of the day. 

The con­flict start­ed as a pop­u­lar, fash­ion­able rite of pas­sage. Oh we’re go­ing to fight Ger­many now. So sign­ing up was the cool thing to do. 

With tea. Lots of tea is con­sumed in this film.
 

Small ‘mun­dane’ things are cov­ered in the sol­diers’ own voic­es (the BBC has a huge li­brary of WWI vets they record­ed in the 1960s/70s) de­scrib­ing the hodge podge train­ing, the at­ti­tudes, the hor­ri­ble food, the petrol con­tain­ers they drank wa­ter out of and some­thing I’ve al­ways won­dered: Why the uni­forms al­ways seem to look fun­ny in old pho­tos. Cause it was a few sizes fit all situation. 

One vet­er­an not­ed, the boots don’t fit you, it’s that you don’t fit the boots.

The doc­u­men­tary has no an­nounc­ing track or com­mon sub­ti­tles – just de­scrip­tions from the men who were there. Pieced to­geth­er from hun­dreds of in­ter­views, the nar­ra­tive is one quick edit voice af­ter an­oth­er sim­ply talk­ing as im­ages sup­ple­ment what we are hearing. 

Jackson’s at­ten­tion to de­tail fits this project well, though lim­i­ta­tions both help and hurt this film. Film­mak­ing is lim­it­ed by bud­get (and monies sup­plied through grants), what footage is avail­able, cob­bled to­geth­er with still pho­tographs and what­ev­er voice clips that keep the sto­ry on track. The 3D ef­fects kind of over­whelm, sim­i­lar to how the world is seen through binoc­u­lars. A bit less pho­to­re­al­is­tic than it could be. I’d like to see it in 2D.

Vi­su­al­ly, this film felt a lot like Gior­gio Moroder’s 1984 rock mu­sic re­con­struc­tion of Me­trop­o­lis (1927); in that one can feel the tech­nol­o­gy of the movie work­ing over­time to tell the story.

Be­yond the restora­tions, the sol­diers have a strange look to them. This is ex­plained in a ‘mak­ing of’ short shown af­ter, not only were they about to go into bat­tle; they had nev­er seen a mov­ing film cam­era be­fore. And didn’t know how to re­act. Many just sit still as they would in a photographer’s por­trait stu­dio. There are a LOT of cam­era shy sol­diers in this film and it shows. 

The film takes the view­er through en­ter­ing the trench­es, liv­ing in the trench­es and pieces to­geth­er a bat­tle that was typ­i­cal of the era – and know­ing this go­ing in helps, cause to a ca­su­al view­er it could look like every­one talk­ing was in the same unit and the whole war con­sist­ed of just one big battle. 

Then it was over. And the troops re­turn home to face friends and fam­i­ly who had no idea what they went through. Home­front pro­pa­gan­da kept the gen­er­al pub­lic from know­ing what the sol­diers ex­pe­ri­enced. British his­to­ries of the era (pub­lished in the 1920s) are of­ten hero­ic and romanticized.

This was some­thing my fa­ther used to com­plain about re­gard­ing his own war ex­pe­ri­ence. WWII War De­part­ment pro­pa­gan­da and dra­mat­ic ‘Hollywood’s Ver­sion of the War’ movies nev­er quite got things right. And this to­tal­ly warps what the gen­er­al pub­lic would think about war and the hor­rors of war.

The ex­am­ple he talked about the most: Ac­tion in the North At­lantic (1943) was based on the US Mer­chant Ma­rine, but when he and his ship­mates were in Lon­don and saw the film, they filled the the­atre with laugh­ter – es­pe­cial­ly about Humphrey Bogart’s uniform. 

Where the hell did he get that uniform??
 

They Shall Not Grow Old is a great in­tro­duc­tion to trench war­fare in World War I – but it only tells what it can. For mor, I rec­om­mend PBS’s The Great War and the Shap­ing of the 20th Cen­tu­ry (1996) and Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Mod­ern Mem­o­ry for nu­ance not avail­able to Jack­son in this format.

I’ve done a lot of re­search about WWI over the years – amped up when I was de­vel­op­ing the mod­ernist ‘weapons’ of the FLOMM game – there are oth­er things to ex­plore in the Mod­ern His­to­ry and De­sign sec­tion on our Bib­li­og­ra­phy page.

I am a huge fan of his­to­ry told thru con­tem­po­rary me­dia. And I like when non-doc­u­men­tar­i­ans make doc­u­men­taries. Be­cause the ap­proach is dif­fer­ent – not al­ways great, but dif­fer­ent. In this case, the film doesn’t have the aca­d­e­m­ic depth of a Ken Burns piece – and it’s not sup­posed to.

I give the film ⁴⁄₅. It is sched­uled to open in lim­it­ed re­lease next year. And I hope Jack­son even­tu­al­ly tells some of the oth­er sto­ries he found (the British colonies in com­bat, the home­front, women in the fac­to­ries, etc.) while dig­ging through the archives.
 
 

—steve mehal­lo

Flom­mist Steve Mehal­lo is a graph­ic de­sign­er, il­lus­tra­tor, font de­sign­er, ed­u­ca­tor, food­ie and gad­fly. He is the cre­ator and founder of FLOMM!

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