26-03-2020, 00:03
They Shall Not Grow Old
Made by Peter Jackson in 2018 to mark the 100th anniversary of the Armistice.
Jackson uses The Imperial War Museum film archives with voiceovers provided by over a hundred men who fought on the Western Front in the Great War to tell the stories of the soldiers from their enlisting to the end of the war and the aftermath. It's is a great technical achievement because the film stock was in poor condition, in black and white, and obviously silent. It also was filmed on hand cranked cameras giving variable frame rates of about 13fps. This had to be converted to 24fps with frame interpolation technology to fill in the gaps. The film is colourised and a soundtrack added. Professional lip readers and voice actors let us hear the men speaking.
One critic said that it's like time travelling back a hundred years and it is riveting to watch. You see the horror of the war with the mangled bodies and the gangrenous limbs and hear one of the men say that if you stumbled off the duckwalks into the mud then they often had to leave you there to drown. Some of the other images stick in the mind as well like the row of tommies sat on a long pole, shitting in a ditch and a howitzer letting off a round which was so loud it shook the tiles off the roof of the neighbouring barn.
Some of the old soldiers said that after the war they got little recognition and that most people just wanted to forget the whole thing. Thanks to this film at least some of their memories should live on.
Made by Peter Jackson in 2018 to mark the 100th anniversary of the Armistice.
Jackson uses The Imperial War Museum film archives with voiceovers provided by over a hundred men who fought on the Western Front in the Great War to tell the stories of the soldiers from their enlisting to the end of the war and the aftermath. It's is a great technical achievement because the film stock was in poor condition, in black and white, and obviously silent. It also was filmed on hand cranked cameras giving variable frame rates of about 13fps. This had to be converted to 24fps with frame interpolation technology to fill in the gaps. The film is colourised and a soundtrack added. Professional lip readers and voice actors let us hear the men speaking.
One critic said that it's like time travelling back a hundred years and it is riveting to watch. You see the horror of the war with the mangled bodies and the gangrenous limbs and hear one of the men say that if you stumbled off the duckwalks into the mud then they often had to leave you there to drown. Some of the other images stick in the mind as well like the row of tommies sat on a long pole, shitting in a ditch and a howitzer letting off a round which was so loud it shook the tiles off the roof of the neighbouring barn.
Some of the old soldiers said that after the war they got little recognition and that most people just wanted to forget the whole thing. Thanks to this film at least some of their memories should live on.