As seen on BBC2
Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) directed documentary about the British experience of World War 1.
The big deal is that he’s taken creaky black and white footage and colourised it and dubbed on recreated soundtracks (including dialogue identified by lip readers). The intention is to make the Charlie Chaplin figures of war documentaries come alive and feel less like old people from a very long ago time. The technique works and looks great (if a little 40s Technicolor) with only the very occasional odd looking moment (one man’s black hair looked like an oil slick). It achieves the desired effect and brings the footage to life with an immediacy that it previously lacked. A large portion at the start (circa half an hour) and a small section at the end (circa five minutes) are in black and white with maybe an hour in the middle made up of newly coloured material.
The soundtrack is made up of voiceovers by servicemen reminiscing about their experiences. I assume they were recorded several decades after the events described. These voiceovers dominate and we get very little of the newly dubbed soundtracks, but little is said by the people on screen so this is not an issue.
My only complaint is that there is little sense of time. They train for war, seem to fight their first battles and then suddenly Armistice Day arrives. There is no sense of the passing of years. Also the multitude of men talk about various battles but the voiceovers are edited together in a way that could imply they are talking about the same battle when they are really discussing unconnected events.
It’s a good documentary and the colourising of the footage works wonders to make the war far more immediate than it has been before. It might technically be a gimmick but it’s a good one that serves a very worthwhile purpose. I wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if it sets a precedent of future documentaries colourising creaky footage and dubbing on recreated soundtracks.
I recorded it, and will watch soon.
There is also a documentary on how they did the colourising and lip-synching.
Peter Jackson’s company ‘Wingnut Wings’ make the most wonderful 1/32 scale kits of World War I aircraft, from all sides.
Would it be too pedantic to point out – as someone did in thegrauniad on Saturday – that the actual line from the poem is ‘they shall grow not old’, which might have a subtly different meaning to that in ‘they shall not grow old’.
Stunning. The final moments made me laugh… then cry a bit.
I like reading your comments in Updates and trying to guess what the subject is without looking at the thread title.
Truth is, I rarely know what thread I’m on.
What made me catch my breath more than anything was the re-settng of the pace of the footage. Eradicating the too-fast feel and slowing it to a natural speed.
That, tied to sound effects and the mumbled dialogue, made it immediately real.
How matter of fact they all seemed. Grins, thumbs up, fags on, drinking tea. Climbing up the trench ladders and walking upright into No Man’s Land. No close ups or movie plot arc to get in the way. Just young men walking into a carnage.
The narrations came from veterans interviewed for the BBC’s ‘The Great War’ made in the mid-60’s. That’s very much worth finding.
Apparently the footage was usually manually hand cranked at about 14 or 15 frames a second. They have created new frames that didn’t previously exist using computer technology to get it up to 24 frames a second.
I can’t imagine them sitting on this technology and not using it for more archival exhumations. The mind can’t help leaping forward to the technically superior and more bountiful WW2 footage. I would imagine there would also be more talking on screen for the lip readers to help recreate.
I’ve been pondering a visual oddity. There is a shot of an artillery gun firing and the roof of a building in the background crumbling with the force of it. The (presumably ceramic) tiles took a fraction too long to fall to the ground. It looked weird as it cheated the laws of physics as they sort of floated rather than fell. Now that I think about it, what probably happened was that the camera operator got a sudden physical fright and momentarily hand cranked the camera faster for less than a second. This resulted in an almost imperceptible moment of slow motion. In other words: for a moment the frame rate jumped from 15 to 30 frames a second. The makers of the doc didn’t notice this and correct their computer programme. So they created extra frames for a moment that didn’t need extra frames. Hence I saw ‘floating’ tiles instead of falling tiles.
Have recorded it and hopefully will watch later.
Trying to imagine what would happen today if something similar occurred to the “climbing up the ladders on their way to carnage” scenario. At what point would someone say no? Did that not happen at all in the first war, I don’t really recall much reporting on it , if any.
Over 300 soldiers were shot for ‘cowardice’, ‘lack of moral fibre’ etc in WW1. Presumably at least some of those were men refusing to go over the top.
There was a very good documentary on BBC2 last night (Tues 12th) by Dan Snow, about the history of ‘shell-shock’.
Fascinating bit about how the symptoms appear to have changed over time; ‘flashbacks’ became commoner in the age of cinema, and depressing about how the armed forces in general have to relearn how to treat each fighting-generation’s problems, as they keep forgetting the past.
@mikethep
Hi Mr P. I had heard a bit about soldiers being shot for “cowardice” etc. I was just trying to understand how the sheer stupidity (a weak word to describe the slaughter of thousands, I know) of it all wasn’t recognised or made apparent. Censorship maybe?
In the book Sunset Song, a young lad goes mad in the trenches, and is convinced he can hear his wife calling for him. He walks towards her voice, but away from the fighting, and, gets the firing squad for cowardice.
Michael Marra wrote a song about it called “Happed In Mist”. He tells the story of it too in this clip, but be warned, tears may fall.
I imagine that as each telegram arrived the stupidity and futility of it all became more and more apparent to all. But the government and what wasn’t yet known as the MSM kept thumping that patriotic tub, and the bereaved didn’t have a voice.
Talking of telegrams, I saw a beautiful short film the other day called The Telegram Man, about an old man whose job it was to get on his bike in the Bush and deliver those telegrams. Very affecting it was. Do watch it if you ever get the chance. Downunderites, it’s on SBS. Trailer on YouTube.
And here, as if by magic, is a song.
Grisly and grim, with Testament of Youth straight on after made for a sobering evening. The scene of the Tommies in the trenches looked just as if cut from the doco and pasted into the film.
It was a much harder watch than I’d anticipated – I don’t remember seeing so many grim images from WW1, and made more powerful by the first hand testimonies. The colourising works well, and the adjustment of the film speed brings the men to life in an extraordinary way. They do seem to have added some 3D type effects too, which I’m not so sure about, but that’s minor.
Interesting how it is on BBC 2 in UK but on art house cinema release down here.
Yes in NZ it’s a cinema release film too.
Yes – showing at only a handful of cinemas in the whole of Sydney. I thought the demand to see this would be great enough to justify a wider release.
It has an art house cinema release in the UK too – I saw it in Belfast the day before the TV screening with a decent-sized crowd in attendance, and it has been playing in selected venues across the UK for the last few weeks, having premiered at the London Film Festival in mid-October.
Maybe they think people more prepared to pay here / lack of interest in UK
It’s a BBC co-production. Fair enough that on the 11th they would want to get it out to as many people as possible.
“BBC Films” do normally get a limited theatrical release before being ont telly, but that’s not the same thing.
Watched it yesterday evening. One thing that stood out to me was how every soldier who smiled had terrible teeth.
I think that pretty much applied to the nation as a whole. Americans think it still does.
Speaking as someone who’s just come back from the dentist, so do Australians. As I never tire of pointing out, it’s all the fault of Aussie dentists who pitched up in London in the 1970s with a mission to fill everybody’s teeth before they developed tooth decay. Preventative dentistry, they called it. British dentists call it ‘the Adelaide trench’.
I was struck by the teeth too. An army of Shane MacGowans.
Shane has good teeth these days.
They’re not his, but he has them.
I climb warily and fearfully out of the trenches. First things first; my dad who fought all through WW2 hated Remembrance Day – “I’m not celebrating the senseless slaughter of so many working-class boys” – and it took me many years to realise and accept that Remembrance Day is a good and necessary thing.
So, me and Mrs W got round to watching the Jackman doc this evening and what a disappointment. The change to ‘proper’ speed and colour is breathtaking and the testimony of the combatants was very moving. However, the ‘conversations’ based on lip-reading skills seemed somehow jarring and inappropriate but the biggest flaw, and not one Jackman or anybody else can do anything about, is the almost complete absence of contemporary film of the real horrors of crossing no-man’s land and hand-to-hand fighting
Instead we get shots of soldiers marching, shuffling through the trenches, drinking tea etc, many of which were repeated two or three or even more times, or drawings straight out of the pages of boyhood comics like The Tiger.
To be honest I have obtained far more insights into what actually life was like in those dreadful, horrible times by reading books written by the likes of Tuchman and Barthas than a film which, at least to the Wrongness family, relied far too much on modern technology.
Far, far more relevant were those amazing beach-paintings orchestrated by the mighty Danny Boyle – art at its best, profoundly moving and oh so fittingly transient.
A Jackson interview states that there simply isn’t any contemporary front line footage in existence – large, hand-cranked cameras would have made easy targets. Such images you may have seen of Tommies going over the top were staged or training films.
Sounds like a pretty good reason.
I take your point, Lodes, but I actually found that the drawings did the job. They were very graphic. And to be honest I didn’t watch the film so I could see hand-to-hand combat. I wanted to see the faces, wondering all the while if one of them was my grandfather.
Not the least moving part of the film was when it reverted to small screen and black and white at the end.