NZ/GB © 2018 Imperial War Museum. PC: WingNut Films. Co-commissioned by 14-18 NOW and Imperial War Museum in association with the BBC. Executive Produced by House Productions. Distr: Warner Bros. Pictures. P: Clare Olssen, Peter Jackson.
D: Peter Jackson. M: Plan 9. ED: Jabez Olssen.
A montage film based on WWI footage at the Imperial War Museum and oral history recordings at the BBC.
Music selections include vintage songs popular during the era such as:
– "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" (Jack Judge, Harry Williams, 1912)
– "Oh! It's a Lovely War" (J. P. Long, Maurice Scott, 1917)
– "Mademoiselle from Armentières" (Harry Carlton, Joseph Tunbridge, originally from the 1830s, WWI lyrics probably 1915, first recording 1915)
Filmed on location in World War I.
Dedicated: For My Grandfather Sgt. William Jackson
Released in 2D and 3D.
Release dates: 16 October 2018 (London Film Festival), 9 November 2018 (United Kingdom), 17 December 2018 (United States).
99 min
DCP viewed at a Espoo Ciné press screening at Cinema Orion, Helsinki, 24 April 2019.
Official introduction:
"On the centenary of the end of First World War, Academy Award-winner Peter Jackson (The Lord of the Rings trilogy) presents the World Premiere of an extraordinary new work showing the Great War as you have never seen it."
"This unique film brings into high definition the human face of the First World War as part of a special London Film Festival presentation alongside a live Q&A with director Peter Jackson hosted by Mark Kermode."
"Using state of the art technology to restore original archival footage which is more than a 100-years old, Jackson brings to life the people who can best tell this story: the men who were there. Driven by a personal interest in the First World War, Jackson set out to bring to life the day-to-day experience of its soldiers. After months immersed in the BBC and Imperial War Museums’ archives, narratives and strategies on how to tell this story began to emerge for Jackson. Using the voices of the men involved, the film explores the reality of war on the front line; their attitudes to the conflict; how they ate; slept and formed friendships, as well what their lives were like away from the trenches during their periods of downtime."
"Jackson and his team have used cutting edge techniques to make the images of a hundred years ago appear as if they were shot yesterday. The transformation from black and white footage to colourised footage can be seen throughout the film revealing never before seen details. Reaching into the mists of time, Jackson aims to give these men voices, investigate the hopes and fears of the veterans, the humility and humanity that represented a generation changed forever by a global war." (Official introduction)
AA: Peter Jackson brings an experimental approach to the hundred-year-old subgenre of the WWI compilation feature film. Jay Leyda discusses this subgenre in Films Beget Films (1964) as the starting point of the very phenomenon of the montage film – films based solely on pre-existing footage.
Now with digital transfers, computer colorization, and cropping from 1,33 to 1,85 the imagery certainly looks different. Jackson's film has also been made available in 3D, but I saw the 2D version.
This project has been hugely beneficial in professional archival terms: 100 hours of WWI footage has been digitized in high resolution during the project.
They Shall Not Grow Old became a big phenomenon in 2018, the centenary of the WWI armistice, in honour of the memory of those who gave their lives and suffered during WWI.
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I belong to a special audience category because I have followed WWI centenary film series for five years, starting from pacifist pre-war visions such as
Ned med Vaabnene! / Lay Down Your Arms! / Waffen nieder! (1914) based on the novel by Bertha von Suttner via a screenplay by Carl Th. Dreyer.
I have also studied the European Film Gateway portal
EFG 1914 with a massive collection of contemporary footage from the WWI period.
Five years ago I tended to support the view of the historian
Marc Ferro who stated that no non-fiction films could compete with the best fictional accounts of the Great War. The non-fiction records were usually made for military or government propaganda purposes. They showed parades of our victorious troops marching into the ruins of occupied cities.
But accounts of other aspects of the war have emerged, including documentaries of the rehabilitation of war invalids, legless, armless, blind, faceless... And accounts of millions of war orphans. Yet the unheard-of massacre in industrial scale characteristic of WWI has been best conveyed in fictional masterpieces such as
Les Croix de bois. An account of the callous Machiavellism of the military command was certainly absent from official newsreels, and was portrayed only in exposés such as
Paths of Glory.
Speaking of glory, the lesson of WWI was indeed that there was no glory in war.
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Peter Jackson is not shy in portraying violence on the screen. He debuted in the cinema as a maestro of gore and splatter with Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles and Braindead. He would be the perfect choice to make a fictional movie about WWI, the home of gore and splatter. Horror film as a genre truly blossomed in the wake of WWI, and horror cinema was one of the key reflections of WWI both in Weimar Germany and in the phenomenon known as Universal Horror.
Jackson does portray the slaughter of the war but remains dependent on the official propaganda character of much of his source material. We learn in the conclusion that the war was of a magnitude beyond comprehension and that there was a wall of silence because people never talked about the war. But the film does not convey this with full dramatical, physical and visceral impact.
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An artist is free to experiment with found footage, and Jackson has used his freedom. In the beginning and the end we see footage reduced to small size, presented in accelerated speed which makes movement look ridiculous, and played with a whirring sound evoking a film projector.
At about 9 minutes of screen time the speed returns to natural while the image grows to full screen size, but that size is 1,85:1 (reduced from the original 1,33:1) which means that the footage is cropped from the top and the bottom. The footage has also been computer-colorized in a procedure that was fashionable in the 1980s. Technically today's computer colorization is superior but the aesthetical concerns remain.
I am not a purist. All these changes have been conducted with supreme skill and taste. But personally I would prefer a straight version in glorious black and white, all natural speed, all in the original aspect ratio.
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The soundtrack consists of a symposium of voices from BBC's oral history archive. The storytellers are not identified during the course of the movie, but they are named in the end credits.
They Shall Not Grow Old is an impressionistic film. The film focuses on the eye level experience. We are often lost in chaos, lost in combat. We do not get a general view of WWI nor a vision of the course of the war. This is a film about the minutiae, not the big picture. But certainly this is a distinguished film and an inspiration to learn more.
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P.S. 17 May 2019. I visited The Nitrate Picture Show in Rochester two weeks ago and listened to the amazing introductory lecture by David Walsh, a veteran of The Imperial War Museum and one of the most distinguished representatives of the international film archive community. His presentation was for me the highlight of the festival. One of Walsh's topics was They Shall Not Grow Old. It turns out that the digital manipulation of the image is more thorough than might be imagined. When skies were cleared, birds disappeared. Elements of the image were digitally removed, buildings were replaced, and compositions were altered, even when there was no particular reason. The movie is a digital reconstruction to such an extent that its documentary credentials are questionable.
BEYOND THE JUMP BREAK: FROM WIKIPEDIA: