Posted on 12/18/2018 6:37:12 AM PST by C19fan
It’s been 100 years since World War I ended. To mark the occasion, director Peter Jackson took hundreds of hours of battlefield footage from the Imperial War Museum in London, updated it, and turned it into a moving documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old.
Since none of the footage had sound, Jackson’s production company, Park Road Post Production, in New Zealand, added it in. “We wanted the full gamut of sounds,” Jackson says. “From the wind in the trees to footsteps in the mud to the jangle of the equipment to the click-clack of the rifle bolts to the horse hooves and the squeak of the leather. Subtleties upon subtleties.”
(Excerpt) Read more at popularmechanics.com ...
It’s almost like bringing these men back to life.
I had no idea what I was getting into last night. People were deeply moved. There were audience members with their families whose fathers had been in WWI. Everyone in the theater we were in stayed and watched the half hour piece discussing how the movie was made.
My wife and her friends are military historians. She has been setting up displays at museums and special events honoring those who served in WWI all year. We all went dressed in WWI uniforms and answered questions after the movie.
There is a lot more footage on the website for the movie. It’s incredible. It’s amazing how this process changes the men from looking like grainy sort of old looking fellows into what they really were: young men in the prime of life. You see it clearly now, and you it makes it more immediate when you say “many of those men died shortly after this film was taken”.
This sounds like a Total
Experience,
Thanks
My son and saw it last night. Honestly, it was the most amazing cinematic experience we’ve ever had. If you go, be SURE to stay for the extra 30 minutes after the movie ends where the director talks about making the movie. That is as spellbinding as the film itself. What an achievement.
At the very end, the director talks about why he made the movie. He’s concerned that all the direct participants have passed on, most of their children have passed, and today we have only grandchildren with a direct family connection to the war (i.e., could talk to their grandparents about their experiences). We are starting to pass now and soon there will be zero direct connection to the war.
We went to dinner before the film and we discussed my grandfather’s role in the war. He fought for Germany on the Eastern Front against the Russians, was captured, was a POW for a year, escaped, and walked back to Germany. He wrote a thirty page memoir about his experiences which I have to get out today and give to my son to read.
If you see only one movie this year, make it this one!
I saw that show too. If you really want a great source on WWI listen to Dan Carlins Blueprint for Armegeddon. Absolutely amazing, I learned so very much from that podcast and the details will amaze you.
I will try to quote one from memory. He speaks about Russia and how at the start of the war they are producing 35k artillery shells a month. Sounds pretty good right? Until you find that ince the war starts they are firing 45k shells a DAY!
The director said that they expected all the archive film had been shot at 16 fps, but they were surprised to find it had been shot at many different speeds including 11, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18 fps. Something as simple as frame rate had not been standardized in the teens. They had no archival data to use to play the film back at the correct speed, so they experimented and found they could restore it at one frame too slow and one frame too fast, but neither looked right. He said they knew when they got it right. At the end, he showed clips one frame too slow, one frame too fast, and just right. It was indeed obvious which was correct.
His attention to detail was just astounding. They looked at regimental markings to learn where a unit came from. Then, they would use oral histories by men from those unit hometown shows to narrate the movie!
The director didn’t want to use New Zealanders to sing a WW I song at the end, so he went to the British consulate and got men who were amateur singers to si g the song. All for authenticity.
There was nothing in the trailers like what you will see in the movie. The film was for propaganda purposes back home, so the cameramen didn’t even film the most gruesome scenes on the battlefield. But, what you do see in the trenches and in the fields is gruesome and horrific beyond belief.
Bump
Keep looking and don’t miss the chance to see it on the big screen. The 3D is extremely well done. Even a huge big-screen TV will not match the theater experience on this one. I rarely go to the theater, but this is a must-see in the theater.
The audience was DEAD STILL and somber after it was over. That alone was very eerie.
The concussion of the artillery is another reason to go see it in the theater.
This happened after I saw Saving Private Ryan.
It was indeed like they were all alive and with you. My son and I had to keep reminding ourselves all the people in the film are dead. The director told us that most of the men in one roadside trench were dead 30 minutes after the film was shot.
Mark
Here are three YouTubes about this movie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUReYO2n06w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrabKK9Bhds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdY-1u-rk_M
Whew, I thought it was running Dec.17th THROUGH the 27th but at least I can and will get to see it on the 27th!
How sad. What a tragic and needless war.
I am a big silent movie fan, and I know that when they shot with hand-cranked cameras they could vary the speed on the fly. I am glad they made these adjustments for these war films. A speed that looks great in a silent comedy looks silly when used in a WWI documentary.
That frame rate issue was due to hand cranking of cameras by the cameraman in that era. The playback had to account for that rate and we always see that speeded up rate because of the 24 frames per second that was standardized when motor drives were introduced.
There is a YouTube series—The Great War that just finished last month. They started in 2014 and did a 10-minute show each week showing what happened in the war 100 years earlier. Fantastic detail and they cover the war on all of its fronts—the Pacific, the Middle East, Western, Eastern, Italian, Africa.
The same host, Indie Nidel is giving WWII the same treatment—latest episode is covering third week of December, 1939.
Historians will one day look back at WWI and the event that lead to the end of Western Civilization.
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