Post by vindex on Feb 15, 2019 22:55:36 GMT -5
In 2016, the BBC asked Peter Jackson to create a documentary in observance of the centenary of the end of World War I, which had presaged the end of Britain as an imperial power. They gave him access to all the archival footage of the Great War in their possession, as well as hundreds of hours of audio recollections of British WW1 veterans which had been recorded on the occasion of the country's Remembrance Days when the men were in their 60s, 70s and 80s, i.e. the 1960s through the 1980s. The BBC's only request was that he use the materials provided in a creative manner, in which they had not been used before. Jackson then took the footage, selected it down to about 110 minutes of it, adjusted the frame-per-minute rate to create a naturalistic sense of movement, colorized it with the most current technology available based on historical research on the uniforms and the landscape where the original footage was filmed. He added background sound effects of noise from blurred human voices, artillery shells, horses, etc, with a continuous voice-over narration selected from hundreds of hours of the recollections taken from the WW1 veterans; and finally, for footage where the soldiers' speech was discernable from the camera, he employed forensic lip-readers to decipher what they were saying and employed actors with the appropriate regional city or county accents of the veterans' units to give a voice to those who are now long dead. He also reshot the final film in 3D.
It is truly an astonishing achievement, as I saw in the local theatre a week ago. I did watch it in 3D. The first 30 minutes or so are actually in black and white. When the troops arrive at the frontline trenches after getting enlisted and trained, the film turns into color and there was an audible gasp from the audience at the sight. It was like being pushed out of the back of a closed vehicle into this other reality of green and brown and red. The veterans' reminiscences are totally matter-of-fact, which adds even more to the alternate reality that Jackson has recreated. They range from the goofy -
"This German unit across the way from us had put out a sign that said Gott Mit Uns. So we put up OUR sign that said, We Got Mittens, Too!"
- to the appalling: "Dead bodies everywhere, you couldn't even bury all of them...and the rats all over the place, as fat as they were. We all knew how they got so fat too."
This is a real tribute to the endurance and sacrifice and bravery of these men, and by extension the WW1 veterans from America, Germany, France, Austria, Russia and all the other countries who got vacuumed into this horrible and unnecessary war. The British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, who was 2 years older than Winston Churchill, nevertheless enlisted at the age of 43 in the British Army's Medical Corps and spent the war evacuating wounded from the front lines to the hospital stations in the rear. Not so ghastly as what the infantry went through, but very hazardous duty for him and his brothers and sisters nonetheless. In 1922 he composed his Symphony No. 3 as a memorial to the loss of his dead comrades. It is a beautiful piece, readily listenable on youtube, with a very haunting first movement, but I will end here with the fourth and last:
Vindex
Georgia Bulldogs
It is truly an astonishing achievement, as I saw in the local theatre a week ago. I did watch it in 3D. The first 30 minutes or so are actually in black and white. When the troops arrive at the frontline trenches after getting enlisted and trained, the film turns into color and there was an audible gasp from the audience at the sight. It was like being pushed out of the back of a closed vehicle into this other reality of green and brown and red. The veterans' reminiscences are totally matter-of-fact, which adds even more to the alternate reality that Jackson has recreated. They range from the goofy -
"This German unit across the way from us had put out a sign that said Gott Mit Uns. So we put up OUR sign that said, We Got Mittens, Too!"
- to the appalling: "Dead bodies everywhere, you couldn't even bury all of them...and the rats all over the place, as fat as they were. We all knew how they got so fat too."
This is a real tribute to the endurance and sacrifice and bravery of these men, and by extension the WW1 veterans from America, Germany, France, Austria, Russia and all the other countries who got vacuumed into this horrible and unnecessary war. The British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, who was 2 years older than Winston Churchill, nevertheless enlisted at the age of 43 in the British Army's Medical Corps and spent the war evacuating wounded from the front lines to the hospital stations in the rear. Not so ghastly as what the infantry went through, but very hazardous duty for him and his brothers and sisters nonetheless. In 1922 he composed his Symphony No. 3 as a memorial to the loss of his dead comrades. It is a beautiful piece, readily listenable on youtube, with a very haunting first movement, but I will end here with the fourth and last:
Vindex
Georgia Bulldogs
