They Shall Not Grow Old
November 29, 2018 1:16 PM Subscribe
The above-titled World War I documentary by Peter Jackson makes heavy use of contemporary footage which has been digitally colorized, cleaned up, and corrected for speed. Trailer; behind-the-scenes; early reviews are quite good.
The movie will be shown in the United States on December 17 and 27.
The movie will be shown in the United States on December 17 and 27.
I'm not saying this isn't amazing and exciting work, but anyone else experiencing a little uncanny valley from this?
posted by es_de_bah at 1:25 PM on November 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by es_de_bah at 1:25 PM on November 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
I think the uncanniness may come from the speed correction making things seem a bit swimmy.
posted by BungaDunga at 1:27 PM on November 29, 2018
posted by BungaDunga at 1:27 PM on November 29, 2018
Something I didn't mention above: they've also added sound, in some cases getting effects for the loading of guns from recording actual guns.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:28 PM on November 29, 2018
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:28 PM on November 29, 2018
It's remarkable to me how much energy Peter Jackson has been putting into WWI history. I saw the exhibit at Te Papa on Gallipoli that Weta Workshop helped produce and it was extraordinary. There's also The Great War Exhibition, a full museum.
I'm always a little wary of modified film footage, but I'm excited to see this production. There's real value in making it seem relatable and human, not just weird old timey silent jerky films.
posted by Nelson at 1:29 PM on November 29, 2018 [8 favorites]
I'm always a little wary of modified film footage, but I'm excited to see this production. There's real value in making it seem relatable and human, not just weird old timey silent jerky films.
posted by Nelson at 1:29 PM on November 29, 2018 [8 favorites]
That, and colorized faces really never look quite right, they always look like someone went over them with a sepia-colored marker. I expect in a cinema you'd get used to it.
posted by BungaDunga at 1:29 PM on November 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by BungaDunga at 1:29 PM on November 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
After listening to Dan Carlin's "Blueprint for Armageddon" and hearing just how horrific this war actually was, I'm both excited and scared to see this. I'm a history fan, but I'll be a 58 year old history fan crying in the theater.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 1:45 PM on November 29, 2018 [6 favorites]
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 1:45 PM on November 29, 2018 [6 favorites]
My heart stopped two or three times just in the trailer. World War 1 was so horrific and something about the color images of the soldiers with sound makes me hurt inside. 100 years ago and we've learned nothing.
posted by Joey Michaels at 1:50 PM on November 29, 2018 [13 favorites]
posted by Joey Michaels at 1:50 PM on November 29, 2018 [13 favorites]
I very much want to see this documentary, but doing so will hurt.
Watching speed-corrected old films is always odd; in part (for me at least) because of the deeply-ingrained sense, the irrational belief, that somehow, the distant past looked different. It’s a difference that makes certain uncomfortable things feel comfortably remote. Seeing moving images of men in trenches that looked like they were shot recently is jarring... for although I don’t want to believe that such things can happen again, as Joey Michaels said above we’ve learned nothing.
posted by kinnakeet at 2:16 PM on November 29, 2018 [9 favorites]
Watching speed-corrected old films is always odd; in part (for me at least) because of the deeply-ingrained sense, the irrational belief, that somehow, the distant past looked different. It’s a difference that makes certain uncomfortable things feel comfortably remote. Seeing moving images of men in trenches that looked like they were shot recently is jarring... for although I don’t want to believe that such things can happen again, as Joey Michaels said above we’ve learned nothing.
posted by kinnakeet at 2:16 PM on November 29, 2018 [9 favorites]
Both my grandfathers were too young by just one year to have fought in WWI. I found this (just the trailer!) pretty heartrending to watch. In a theater watching the film I'd be a sobbing old puddle within the first few minutes I imagine. Probably good to watch for anyone and everyone who thinks of the history of war as even remotely grand and glorious.
posted by anguspodgorny at 2:29 PM on November 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by anguspodgorny at 2:29 PM on November 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
I'm not commenting on the larger project and I don't know anything about PJ's politics, but that two of the few audio pulls refer to it as 'a job' and 'work' [to be done] is a harrowing way to frame what was a spectacularly gruesome and lethal activity.
What I took away from HardCoreHistory's podcast on the subject is that the enormity of what was going on dwarfed the specific understanding of anyone involved. In WW2 you got the feeling that commanders had a sense of the scale. Not here. Not even at the strategic level.
If you see a good description of the rain filled mortar pits that these poor men had to navigate, filled with sludge, toxic chemicals and the dead,...basically the size of moon craters that you could easily slip into and drown. It's horrific.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 2:35 PM on November 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
What I took away from HardCoreHistory's podcast on the subject is that the enormity of what was going on dwarfed the specific understanding of anyone involved. In WW2 you got the feeling that commanders had a sense of the scale. Not here. Not even at the strategic level.
If you see a good description of the rain filled mortar pits that these poor men had to navigate, filled with sludge, toxic chemicals and the dead,...basically the size of moon craters that you could easily slip into and drown. It's horrific.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 2:35 PM on November 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
But to be fair to PJ and company - that's how a good many people viewed it as a thing that had to be done. Saw the same attitude with my grandfather and WWII.
I can't imagine you'd get into all that footage and not deliver a message that delivers some of the horror of it all, particularly with coming at it from a modern view point on the war as a meat grinder.
posted by drewbage1847 at 2:47 PM on November 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
I can't imagine you'd get into all that footage and not deliver a message that delivers some of the horror of it all, particularly with coming at it from a modern view point on the war as a meat grinder.
posted by drewbage1847 at 2:47 PM on November 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
I watched this twice during the week it was on iPlayer. It's amazing. There was also a half-hour behind-the-scenes documentary on the BBC at the time showing how they did it - incredible attention to detail. Jackson is a WW1 obsessive, and devoted four years to the project.
It brought the soldiers to life better than any other WW1 documentary I've seen. It's a combination of restored silent footage, voiced-over interviews recorded with veterans in the 1960s and 1970s, and foley and lip-synched actors' voices matched to the restored scenes.
The film starts with black and white footage in its original grainy, sped-up style, as the veterans talk about the start of the war, signing up and training. The moment when it shifts to restored colourised film on the battlefield is unforgettable.
There is plenty of the horror of it all. Colourising the footage brings out detail that's lost when you watch it in grainy black and white: not least, the blood.
posted by rory at 3:08 PM on November 29, 2018 [12 favorites]
It brought the soldiers to life better than any other WW1 documentary I've seen. It's a combination of restored silent footage, voiced-over interviews recorded with veterans in the 1960s and 1970s, and foley and lip-synched actors' voices matched to the restored scenes.
The film starts with black and white footage in its original grainy, sped-up style, as the veterans talk about the start of the war, signing up and training. The moment when it shifts to restored colourised film on the battlefield is unforgettable.
There is plenty of the horror of it all. Colourising the footage brings out detail that's lost when you watch it in grainy black and white: not least, the blood.
posted by rory at 3:08 PM on November 29, 2018 [12 favorites]
I put my immediate thoughts down in that FanFare thread a couple of weeks ago when I saw it, but what has stuck with me - even more than the images - are the words of those men. They were by turns naive, humble, honest; almost every possible shade of human experience. And above all, hiding behind the typical British matter-of-fact, "stiff upper lip"-ness of it all, was the sheer humanity of it. Hearing them describe the horror, and watching them fraternise with the captured Germans... it really hammers home how much it was the most senseless and brutal waste of human life imaginable. And yet the 20th Century still had so much more in store, and the 21st is shaping up to be as bad. I hope I'm wrong.
posted by Acey at 3:36 PM on November 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Acey at 3:36 PM on November 29, 2018 [3 favorites]
I can't watch the behind-the-scenes right now.
Are the faded or washed out colors are stylistic choice or a limitation of the technology?
The dental health really stands out, you never really notice in the black and white footage how unhealthy a lot the recruits were.
posted by madajb at 4:31 PM on November 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
Are the faded or washed out colors are stylistic choice or a limitation of the technology?
The dental health really stands out, you never really notice in the black and white footage how unhealthy a lot the recruits were.
posted by madajb at 4:31 PM on November 29, 2018 [2 favorites]
If you see a good description of the rain filled mortar pits that these poor men had to navigate, filled with sludge, toxic chemicals and the dead,...basically the size of moon craters that you could easily slip into and drown. It's horrific.
Modris Ekstein's Rites of Spring comes to mind with descriptions of trench warfare that ultimately made me thankful that the photographs and motion pictures I've seen haven't done it justice, because ... horror.
One point he keeps returning to is that we (so-called modern humans) can't really know what it was to be human before 1914, because it's impossible to comprehend what could compel so many millions of men to just keep voluntarily stepping into the meat grinder. Maybe there was some ignorance at first, but as the war dragged on, as the horror stories filtered homeward, men (normal men, family men, gentlemen) kept signing up, kept going, kept being annihilated ... by the millions. It's almost like trying to understand an alien race.
And the art history's pretty strong.
For Eksteins, professor of history at the University of Toronto, the seminal modernist artwork is Igor Stravinsky's 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring , a celebration of life through sacrificial death. Moving easily between the cafes of Montmartre and the battlefields of Flanders and Verdun, this brilliant, eloquent study ties the modernists' flight from history to the warring powers' preoccupation with speed, regimentation and newness, the Germans' mythic invocation of a tribal and folk past, Mussolini's esthetic of brutality. Eksteins observes that the bloody Western Front in WW I was a ``surrealistic'' landscape before poet-soldier Guillaume Apollinaire invented the term in 1917.
posted by philip-random at 6:06 PM on November 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
Modris Ekstein's Rites of Spring comes to mind with descriptions of trench warfare that ultimately made me thankful that the photographs and motion pictures I've seen haven't done it justice, because ... horror.
One point he keeps returning to is that we (so-called modern humans) can't really know what it was to be human before 1914, because it's impossible to comprehend what could compel so many millions of men to just keep voluntarily stepping into the meat grinder. Maybe there was some ignorance at first, but as the war dragged on, as the horror stories filtered homeward, men (normal men, family men, gentlemen) kept signing up, kept going, kept being annihilated ... by the millions. It's almost like trying to understand an alien race.
And the art history's pretty strong.
For Eksteins, professor of history at the University of Toronto, the seminal modernist artwork is Igor Stravinsky's 1913 ballet The Rite of Spring , a celebration of life through sacrificial death. Moving easily between the cafes of Montmartre and the battlefields of Flanders and Verdun, this brilliant, eloquent study ties the modernists' flight from history to the warring powers' preoccupation with speed, regimentation and newness, the Germans' mythic invocation of a tribal and folk past, Mussolini's esthetic of brutality. Eksteins observes that the bloody Western Front in WW I was a ``surrealistic'' landscape before poet-soldier Guillaume Apollinaire invented the term in 1917.
posted by philip-random at 6:06 PM on November 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
If you're intrigued by this I'd very much recommend the TV series America in Color. The first season was narrated with warm gravitas by Liev Shchrieber and each episode used newly colorized footage to examine a different decade of the 20th century. I'm not a fan of colorization in general but in this case it does give the footage a startling immediacy. It's the kind of thing they really should be showing in schools, if they're not already. The new season has a different narrator and each episode is devoted to a topic rather than a decade, but from what I've seen so far it's good too.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 6:11 PM on November 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by Ursula Hitler at 6:11 PM on November 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
Ted Turner leans back in his chair and smiles. His job is done. All the world is colour.
posted by Yowser at 11:22 PM on November 29, 2018
posted by Yowser at 11:22 PM on November 29, 2018
Every time I watch the trailer I'm moved to tears almost as soon as the film shifts to colour. There is something breathtaking about it. I think kinnakeet above nailed it by saying it removes the comfortable distance we can keep when watching shaky black and white footage. Although I want to, I don't know if I could watch the whole thing; I can barely make it through the trailer without being a mess.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:56 AM on November 30, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 12:56 AM on November 30, 2018 [1 favorite]
Looks really good. While not a documentary, I believe more people should know about another Peter Jackson project: Forgotten Silver.
posted by bouvin at 4:17 AM on November 30, 2018
posted by bouvin at 4:17 AM on November 30, 2018
I watched the trailer last night and, as per usual, burst out in tears as soon as I saw the couple of seconds of footage of soldiers going over the top. Doesn’t matter if it’s Black Adder or what, there’s something about that whistle and soldiers clambering out of trenches to almost certain death that gets me every time. I probably shouldn’t even attempt to see this in the theater.
posted by woofferton at 3:15 PM on November 30, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by woofferton at 3:15 PM on November 30, 2018 [1 favorite]
I still think they should call it The Great Failure
posted by philip-random at 6:32 PM on November 30, 2018
posted by philip-random at 6:32 PM on November 30, 2018
How Peter Jackson Made WWI Footage Seem Astonishingly New (NYT; via)
posted by kliuless at 2:59 AM on December 19, 2018
posted by kliuless at 2:59 AM on December 19, 2018
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