They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)

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.
(Synopsis from the official movie website)

I went to see this movie last night wondering if it would live up to the hype it has received, and for the most part I'd have to say it did. There is a wealth of information and reviews about the movie available online so I won't go into great detail here, but if you're interested check out some of the links in this post. A quick online search will turn up much more.

The half-hour documentary that follows the movie provides information on the task that Jackson faced and details the challenges his team had to address. They had 100 hours of film footage from the time of the war, much of it copies instead of original shots, and 600 hours of audio interviews with World War I veterans from the 1960s and '70s. Clips from these interviews "narrate" the movie, and it's interesting to hear the participants' perspectives of what we're seeing on the screen.

Jackson lays out his thoughts on the approach he chose. While noting the importance of the participation of British subjects and other countries as well as women on the homefront and the war theater, he wanted a specific concentration: “I didn’t want to do a little bit of everything. I just wanted to focus on one topic and do it properly: the experience of an average soldier infantryman on the Western Front.” This narrowed focus makes for an effective storyline. We see and hear about enlistment and training in Britain, arrival on the continent, life in the trenches, experiences on leave, what it was like to go "over the top," engagement with German POWs, and the bittersweet return home. It leaves you wanting more, but that is exactly Jackson's goal—for us to find out more about those who experienced the war, especially participants in our own families.

Since most of the family and acquaintances I knew that had been in a war would rarely (if ever) talk about it, I'm always interested to hear other participants' experiences, not just what happened but also how they tell it. In the early parts of the movie, the men relay lively tales of signing up and training. As the movie progresses, the tone changes. It's not exactly somber, but more matter-of-fact. The most moving moment for me was a veteran recalling shooting an ally to put him out of his misery after he had an arm and leg blown off. As the veteran's voice cracks, it's easy to imagine him living with that moment in the years since the war.

There were a few more things I'll note, but these are more of a personal taste. Or lack thereof. I'm not a fan of the 3D feature. While it adds some nice touches, it seems to me that the quality suffers from it. I guess I'm reminded too much of my old ViewMaster discs. I would have loved to have seen more of the corrected and enhanced black-and-white footage as well. Colorization techniques have improved, but I wouldn't honestly say it appeared "as if they were shot yesterday." What it did, though, was give an additional appreciation for what it was like beyond any realistic recent movie recreation.

If you get a chance to see the movie, I highly recommend it. For now you'll have to be on the lookout for additional screenings and check the Fathom Events site for locations. Hopefully this will soon be released for home viewing, but it is definitely a great experience on a big screen.

Links

• The New York Times weekend feature by Mekado Murphy: How Peter Jackson Made WWI Footage Seem Astonishingly New With They Shall Not Grow Old
• YouTube video from the Daily Mail: Director Peter Jackson on his new WW1 documentary film
• YouTube video from Kermode Uncut on the making of the movie
• Images at Fathom Events

American artists' sketches from World War I

Maybe I'm back? I hope so…I've missed this place.

While we're in the middle of so many -ennials, such as the War of 1812, the Civil War, and World War I, I did want to pass on this article from Simithsonian.com about American artists sent to Europe by the War Department (as it was called then) to sketch a historical record of what was happening. While the artists were sent late in the war (coinciding with America's late entry), it "marked the first time that the U.S. government commissioned artists to capture a war effort." [A serious aside to the Smithsonian and other sites…don't make it so difficult to copy a short quote if you'd like an article to be shared.]

Other countries were already doing this, realizing this was a history-changing event. According to the article, the American sketches were much more documentary, though, compared to other artists' expressionistic works.

The American History Museum digitized the collection and a paperback version of Art from the Trenches: America’s Uniformed Artists in World War I by historian Alfred Cornebise will be released next month.

Troops Leaving Esnes by Ernest Clifford Peixotto
Date of work: September 26, 1918

This weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal

If you have a chance to pick up a copy of the current Weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal I recommend you do so. The review section has reviews on books about World War I in addition to several essays about the conflict. There's also a review of The Professor and the Siren by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (author of The Leopard), a NYRB Classics collection of three stories recently translated by Stephen Twilley. The stories include the title story of the book, his final work, as well as “Joy and the Law” and "The Blind Kittens."

Two of the stories pick up on parts of The Leopard. Since the review is behind an online paywall I'll only provide a short quote from the final paragraph that looks at "The Blind Kittens," intended to be Lampedusa's second novel. Only the first chapter was completed, which is what is included here. "The Blind Kittens" starts with a nod to The Leopard, with the upstart Batassano closing a deal on the selling off of lands by aristocrats to prop up their dwindling estates. His meteoric rise seems tainted by his acquisition of tainted land.

Here once more is Lampedusa's dry irony; here is his tender gaze at the anachronistic Sicily, its cruelty and provincialism; here is one last shot at the impotence of its shunted-aside ruling class.

"Unseen" World War I photos

At the risk of re-linking what you may have already seen, I wanted to highlight what Dean Putney has been doing. His blog, the Walter Koessler project, represents much work in scanning, researching, and publishing a family heirloom: his great-grandfather's photo album. From Dean's first post:

It’s incredible for many reasons:

• Walter was German, and he was an independent photographer. Most surviving photos from the war are from the Allies, and they tend to be propaganda or journalistic. Walter’s photos are very personal.
• Walter was trained as an architect. When he left Germany after the war, he moved to Los Angeles and became an art director for some of the first talkie films. His photos are beautifully composed and well-shot.
• Photography was going through big changes at the time, and Walter was a major early adopter. Film cameras were fairly new, and he took his in the trenches and everywhere else. WWI saw the first major use of airplanes in war, and Walter took aerial reconnaissance photos from biplanes and hot air balloons. Stereographs were also becoming more readily available at the time, and Walter made his own 3D images of life in the war.
• Since Walter moved to Los Angeles so soon after the war, he preserved pretty much everything. The album was made in Los Angeles, and it’s about a hundred pages long, with over 700 photos in it. Since then, the album has been tucked away in Southern California, so it has no mold and has hardly faded at all.

Dean is running a Kickstarter project to publish the photos in a high-quality book. While he's already reached his goal, the project is open for another few weeks and there are bonuses for contributions of certain levels.

I highly recommend spending some time looking and reading through Dean's blog...it's a fascinating glimpse back to the war and puts a human face on it. The photo below is Dean's great-granfather Walter Koessler.

World War I Centennial: Countdown to Catastrophe (bumped...a post in process)

Bumped to highlight the recent posts in the centennial series...

I wanted to mention a series starting at mental_floss that will look at the upcoming centennial of the start of World War I:

The First World War was an unprecedented catastrophe that killed millions and set the continent of Europe on the path to further calamity two decades later. But it didn’t come out of nowhere. With the centennial of the outbreak of hostilities coming up in 2014, mental_floss will be taking a look back at the lead-up to the war, when seemingly minor moments of friction accumulated until the situation was ready to explode.

Posts to date in the series:
All links

More centennials on The Great War:
In Flanders Fields: by Flanders House (promoting Flemish cultural activities in the US, and educational and scientific exchange). Note: their new tab with more information on events and news.

I take a quick look through the books I’ve written about over the past two years and there are quite a few where World War I was a central component of the book: Parade’s End, The Good Soldier Švejk, The Radetzky March, The Road to the Open, Debits and Credits, and The Guns of August come to mind immediately. Not to mention others where the war, whether through its impact or in foreshadowing, has a major role.

While you could start at any point in the lead-up to World War I, I’m glad they are at least starting now. Today’s opening post is on the Treaty of Berlin signed on November 4, 1911. I may add future centennial posts here as updates and will add any other sites that focus on events leading to the centennial of the war’s outbreak.

Also in process, leading to the centenary: Europeana Collections 1914-1918 will create by 2014 - the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War - a substantial digital collection of material from national library collections of ten libraries and other partners in eight countries that found themselves on different sides of the historic conflict.

I have many bookmarks on World War I but I have not congregated them in one place. I think I'll use this post to do just that. As always, if you have a link you'd like to see added to this list, history or literature related, let me know in the comments. This will be a work in process...

Links to World War I material:

Diary of EW Manifold
The war diary of blogger zmkc's grandfather, who served with the British Army in World War One.

A sampling of British poetry from the war. For a more detail and examples, see the University of Oxford's The First World War Poetry Digital Archive.
Open Culture has a post of British actors reading poetry from World War I, with links to the poems.

Stephen Pentz has many posts about World War I at his blog First Known When Lost.

Wikipedia's entry on World War I literature has many links to the works listed (as well as having a separate entry on popular culture, including art).

Rats, Gas & Shell-shock was a class blog for students of "English 342 - British Literature to 1945" and focuses on World War I literature at Simon Fraser University (from spring/summer 2006). Description is taken from the heading--see the opening post for a different course number and more detail on the class.

Trench Literature – Reading in World War I is an article at abebooks.com written by Richard Davies, Udo Goellmann & Sara Melendre.

Yale University's World War I - Documenting the First Total War of the 20th Century has plenty of topics and links to explore.

My post on color photos from the war.

Spartacus Educational's First World War digital archive provides a good overview of the war.

Tim Kendall's blog War Poetry isn't limited to World War I but it is well represented, plus there are plenty of helpful war poetry links.

For more offbeat items on World War I, be sure to check out the war's entries in Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog. My favorite entry looks at War in Dollyland (A Book and a Game), by Harry Golding and illustrated from photographs by Albert Friend.

From Beachcombing came the reminder of Niall Ferguson's study of international bond markets which concludes that, while sensitive to threats of war, investors did not anticipate the outbreak of the war in August 1914: Political risk and the international bond market between the 1848 Revolution and the outbreak of the First World War.

World War I posters from around the world, courtesy of the Elisabeth Ball Collection at Ball State University

Earlier poems from Siegfried Sassoon have been unearthed, showing a different side to one of the more famous war poets. Another article on the same subject.

Eldritch Press has a section in their free online books titled Great writings of The Great War.

Historian John Keegan has died. His book The First World War helps provides a fairly comprehensive overview. Here is Keegan's obituary at The Telegraph.

Horrible Histories by the BBC has a few videoes on World War I.


(I'm still going through my links--feel free to let me know of sites you like)