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 ...
s/b
Historians will one day look back at WWI as the event that lead to the end of Western Civilization.
I love listening to the Radio Broadcasts from that era, in particular H.V. Kaltenborn's commentary on events.
I found a local theater showing it 12/27.
I’ll be there.
bump
Thanks for that, I was very impressed, this guy knows his stuff.
Thanks for posting. Will definitely look to try and catch this.
The statistic that always boggles my mind is that at Verdun, the French and the Germans fired something like the equivalent of 10 tons of TNT for EVERY SQUARE YARD of the battlefield.
My wife is an army brat and total history buff. She is an excellent speaker and has been doing presentations and lectures on WWI all year long. We felt like this was something that we needed to go to, but we were not very hopeful that it would be a great experience. But it really was; everyone we spoke to was going on and on about how much they liked it and they were going to spread the word. So first thing this morning I got online and bought four more tickets to take some friends with us.
I normally purchase my movie tickets through Costco.com or get a discount from Entertainment.com or find some other kind of coupon to whatever theater we are going to and then use those “e-tickets” to reserve our tickets online which saves quite a bit of money. Strange that adding a middle person can sometimes save money.
This morning there was already only one set of seats left in the upper part of the theater where we could get four seats together. Pretty amazing for a military documentary. It takes up to an hour to get the e-tickets emailed back from Costco, so I bought the tickets directly from the theater before they were gone.
The director pointed out that the cameras were hand-cranked, but he seemed to indicate that the actual design frame rate was not standardized and differed with the various cameras. I would guess the cameras had some sort of built-in governor mechanism that smoothed out the hand-cranked speed and the actual design speed differed among cameras. But I don’t know anything about old cameras, so I’m speculating here.
He also pointed out that a lot of the jitter you see in old films is due to elongation of the sprocket holes. They get worn after lots of viewings and the variation in sprocket hole size causes the jitter you see.
I love listening to the Radio Broadcasts from that era, in particular H.V. Kaltenborn’s commentary on events.
My favorite line is Goebbels saying something along the line that “taking German cities will be a lot harder than taking Paris, Rome or Bucharest”—which of course used to be under Nazi control, but weren’t any more.
I completely agree. Mark Steyn wrote extensively about that in "America Alone." The war created a huge "lost generation" with far fewer young men and sent women to work in the munitions factories. It led to hedonism and turning away from God. It led to the declining birth rate as people lived for themselves, not their progeny (birth rates in many Western European countries are below replacement). It led to immediate satisfaction of desires instead of deferring those. It led directly to WW II which exacerbated all these things. Both wars led to the importation of musselmen into Europe to work the factories and the eventual take-over of Europe by mohammedans. WW I gave communism a strong foothold in Europe which led to WW II socialism and a declining work ethic as the government took over traditional roles played by the church.
Thanks for the reference to the YT series. I hadn’t heard of that. Just subscribed!
That is incredible!
Years ago, I saw a similar statistic for the amount of lead bullets fired on the British army retreat on “The Battle Road” after the fight at Concord & Lexington. Not explosive shells, of course, but lead bullets. The amount of lead in the air was incredible.
I watched every bit of that series. My maternal grandfather was in France 1917/1918. He was an infantry officer in the trenches and then transferred to the signal corps where he flew a Curtis JN-4 Jenny. His job was flying over the German lines and making maps. He mustered out in 1919 at the rank of Major. He never spoke to anyone about his time in France.
A few years ago, I read a really good book about Verdun. There were stories of whole battalions of French infantry being sent forward to reinforce the line. 500 men would set out. Less than 10 would reach their destination a mile away. They still find bones on the battlefield.
I believe it. I believe at Verdon the German openng bombardment was 2 million shells, with 40-60 million shells being fired during the entire battle. Unbelievable.....
There are many places in history where I would have hate to have been, WWI frontlines are near the very top of my list.
Probably a slim Chance
Here in SoCal.
Oh, I also get a kick out of the Lord Haw Haw broadcasts as well. The funniest of all are the songs by “Charlie and His Orchestra”....here’s a classic one...
German Submarines
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXm7n2QSVMM
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