They Will Not Grow Old

The title to Peter Jackson's impressionistic World War One documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old (2018), seems to me to have a double meaning.  First, of course, the film's name is elegiac - there is a whiff of A.E. Housman in the title:  the young men that we see in their robust multitudes in this film will die pointlessly in the mud of the Western Front.  Second, however, the title refers to Jackson's herculean effort to retrieve, restore, and, even, resurrect in color and three dimensions the fading photographic records of the Great War.  Under this interpretation, "they" refers to the images transcribing evidence of World War One, herky-jerk and decomposing nitrate film showing soldiers marching toward the trenches, then, crouched in collapsing and swampy mud-holes on the battlefield or staggering back from the front lines with bloody heads rudely wrapped in gauze, limping along betweem the shoulders of the shell-shocked buddies -- in these fading black and white newreels, we can dimly see smashed caissons and the puffs of earth and black smoke where the shells gouge the horizon and, sometimes, blurry piles of corpses and dead horses.  Jackson's title is a sort of vow:  "these images" shall not grow old -- and, so, with the aid of the most advanced and sophisticated computer equipment, his teams have digitally erased scars and scratches on the film, adjusted movement to the modern standard of 24 frames per second, and, then, colorized the black-and-white pictures so we see the restored footage acted out under blue skies by young men whose wounds bleed red gore.  Apparently, Jackson restored over 100 hours of fading, mutilated footage, imagery in the possession of London's Imperial War Museum -- recreating the pictures on film by adjusting their contrast, eliminating the over-exposed flares created by nitrate decay, and, then, injecting color into them.  Not content with these innovations, Jackson hired teams of stereographers to put the film into a three-dimensional format, brought lip-readers into the studio to speak the words that we see these long-dead mouths forming on screen, and, finally, added a full Foley soundtrack of whizzing bullets, exploding shells, and men's feet enmired in the mud making sucking noises as they trudge forward toward barren horizons.  The result is mesmerizing, although, I have certain reservations about Jackson's project transforming these hundred-year old newsreels into vivid, life-like friezes of ruin and destruction.

The film's form, governed by its soundtrack, is decisive.  Jackson had recourse to thousands of hours of interviews recorded with old soldiers during the sixties and seventies -- apparently, an oral history project involving collaboration between the Imperial War Museum and the BBC. Jackson cuts these voices into a rough narrative, an account purportedly capturing the essential experiences of a British soldier on the Western Front.  This narrative begins with the declaration of war, leads through enlistment and basic training and, then, in a coup de cinema shows us the long lines of troops marching through ruined villages toward the gunfire in full color.  (The first 15 minutes of the film is black-and-white, indeed commencing with shots that only occupy a little murky window in the middle of the huge 70 mm screen; as the film progresses, the aperture imperceptibly grows larger until the black and white images occupy the whole screen -- then, when the troops reach Belgium and begin marching toward the front, the movie signifies that "we're not in Kansas any longer" (to quote a similar effect in the 1939 Wizard of Oz, presenting the giant images in full color.  The effect is startling -- the audience gasps in awe, although, as I will argue, below the gimmick palls a little as the film progresses.  The movie, then, continues the narration by showing us the terrible squalor of the trenches, the horror of shelling, and, then, presents a representative battle, a full, frontal attack on a German position.  The film depicts the gruesome horror of field hospitals, and, concludes with the armistice and the soldiers, indelibly affected by combat, returning to England.  In the film's final five minutes, the images revert to black-and-white and the pictures shrink again to only a small aperture in the huge black screen.  (There is a half-hour coda:  an account by Jackson of how the film was manipulated to discover the colors that he believes were always implicit in the images -- his theory is that the world is in color and that WWI cameramen would have used color if it had been technologically available and so the footage is, in effect, already in color:  the colors are simply hidden, waiting to be resurrected by his teams of technicians.  This is a questionable proposition as I argue below.)       

I have elsewhere decried the use of archival materials in Ken Burns' films -- that is, Burns' tendency to rip an image out of its historical context and, then, use it as a kind of wallpaper for his carefully scripted narration.  In my view, this technique does a disservice to the actual historical event that the image shows -- the picture represents real people in a certain real situation.  Burns doesn't care who the people are, nor is he interested in the context of the image -- that is, who took the picture or why; he is satisfied with only the roughest correlation between image and narrative.  Peter Jackson carries this approach to its logical conclusion.  First, his magisterial narrative is a collage cut together from hundreds and hundreds of different voices -- although the sound-track carries the plot, its stitched together from hundreds of witnesses who were, of course, describing their experiences rooted in specific places and times.  Jackson's soundtrack extracts the specificity of experience from the accounts and blurs all of the soldiers into a single generic "soldier of the great war" -- in this case, not an air man or submariner but an infantryman stationed on the Western Front.  Jackson's insanely synoptic narrative acknowledges it's technique and, so, is a bit more honest than the way Burns' makes his films, but it is, nonetheless, problematic -- these men didn't experience a generic war; their experiences were personal to them.  As I have noted before, the magisterial soundtrack, a major achievement in the art of mosaic, controls the imagery -- the resurrected images of trench warfare are never identified as to location or provenance.  (The technical coda to the film makes it clear that Jackson and his team know exactly what the specifics are:  they can identify the troops by uniform and, sometimes, by the faces of the men; they know the day the pictures were made, or, at least, the month, and the location, including in some cases, the precise camera angle from which movies were made -- it's a little maddening to be denied any access to this information, although, of course, to have this data exposed would clog the film to the point of rendering it inaccessible.)  As in the case with Ken Burns  in his Civil War film, Jackson encounters a crucial lacuna -- there is no compelling footage of the entire raison d'etre of the enterprise, that is, actual combat.  WWI combat was so brutal and deadly that cameramen never got close enough to any actual battles to show much of anything.  There is some ghostly footage of a patrol -- shadowy figures picking their way across a field lethal with barbed wire and flooded shell-holes -- and a few minutes of an attack, filmed by someone lying on his belly, images that show soldiers in long muddy coats walking forward with eerie and grave determination.  These pictures don't gain anything by being colorized and projected in three dimensions -- they are monochrome in any event and, as one might expect, the assault doesn't seem to be really going anywhere:  it's like a procession in a dream.  Jackson covers for this deficit by pan-and-scanning groups of soldiers gathered together before the assault and, then, cutting from close-ups of their faces to show battered, dissolving corpses lying in shallow pits.  This technique is effective but repetitious and creates a certain grim suspense -- sometimes, the close-up shot of the smiling soldier isn't followed by a mutilated corpse but, instead, engravings from a weekly publication issued during the war, black and white pictures filmed at such close range as to spread the image across the screen in a pattern of printer's dots (an effect that bears much resemblance to certain Pop Art paintings) .  The engravings are ludicrously violent and jingoistic -- brave, kilted Scotsmen mowing down ranks of Germans -- but they are full frenzied action and so, partially, convey the chaos and savagery of battle.  It's too much, ultimately, about too little and, I think, Jackson would have been wiser to just acknowledge that actual combat footage from World War One (as from any war) is mostly missing in action.  The lurid cross-cutting is effective but goes on for too long. 

Several sequences are shocking in their immediacy.  A scene in which an artillery shell explodes almost on top of a horse-drawn caisson is particularly horrific.  We see the shell burst -- there's no fire in the image just a nasty blast of smoke mingled with flying mud -- and, then, see the caisson overturned and the a mangled horse struggling to get to its feet.  The soldiers ahead in the procession dismount and one of them runs toward the horse.  The narrative describes how the men grew to love their horses and suffered immensely when they were killed.  (The scene reminds me of an episode in All Quiet on the Western Front, in which the novelist Erich Maria Remarque describes a Pomeranian or Silesian soldier, a farm-boy driven insane by the sufferings of the horses.)  Several of the shots of shelling are frightening and there are memorable images of the aftermath of battles, including one shot of a man with a very discernible and uncontrollable tremor in his hands -- a victim of shell-shock.  Images of the horrific earth-volcanoes made when mines were exploded are dauntingly impressive and work very well in three-dimensions.  Curiously, the pictures showing soldiers impassively smoking or fixing their bayonets while waiting to be called up "over the top" are not very dramatic -- the human face is generally not that expressive, particularly in dire circumstances, and most of the men seem to show little overt emotion despite the fact that they are only minutes away from being killed or horribly injured.  (One shot of soldiers in a sunken road waiting for the cue to attack is effective because it shows greenery, some grass and trees in contrast to the generally blurred monochrome of mud and upturned earth.  In his coda commentary, Jackson tells us that almost all the men in the picture were killed a few minutes after the image was recorded -- but, if you weren't told this, nothing really on the faces of the men reveals what is about to happen.  The commentary tells us that the men display panic in their faces -- I saw nothing of the kind.  Generally, they are inexpressive and if a narrator told us that ten minutes later, these men were rewarded for their valor with Christmas pudding, brandy, and a visit to a holiday pantomime, we would be similarly credulous, I think:  of course, we can read that in their faces, we believe, but we're wrong.)  The 3D effects don't add anything to the film (except for a close-up of a tank rolling over our faces and the scenes of the subterranean mines exploding).  In fact, the 3D is mostly a distraction -- we see the array of troops generally organized in tiers, as if the troops are standing on risers at fixed distances from one another.  This is not the way the eye perceives depth and, in my view, the 3D is a bad idea.  Some of the colorization seems wrong.  The textures of grass and field aren't exact and Jackson spills movie gore all over his corpses.  But, of course, blood generally displays itself as black when bursting from the body and, then, very quickly dries to a murky rust-colored brown.  The gore on the corpses, which should be brown, is generally shown in a brilliant scarlet -- it's an impressive impressionistic effect but it's more surrealist than realist.  Finally, Jackson's treatment of the hundred-year-old footage combines a curiously naïve and reverential stance toward "reality" with disrespect for human memory.  No one sees anything naively -- rather, reality is represented to us by being mediated through thought, memory, and our own vantage or interest:  reality isn't just out there -- rather it's created by our perspectives.  Jackson boldly maintains that a newsreel photographer in 1916, given the choice, would have elected to show the War in color -- a photographer friend of mine is skeptical about that assertion.  Black and white is Platonic -- it seems to preserve what is essential in an image while disregarding "accidents" (in this case color).  Our memory of the Great War is black-and-white.  I don't know that it's universally true to say that our memories of past experiences are in color -- in what color do we recall our first car crash or sexual encounter?  I'm not entirely sure that even applying notions of color to memory are accurate or helpful.  Thus, I don't know that injecting color into a black and white picture proves much of anything -- ultimately, it's more a gimmick than any sort of key to a new, or enhanced reality. 

That said, the "gimmick" (or "miracle") involving in the resurrection of these old images is fascinating.  They Will Not Grow Old has been available on only a few screens.  Clearly, the producers of the film didn't appreciate the public interest in this project.  Almost all of the showings of Jackson's film have been sold-out -- and, in fact, Variety notes that the movie has earned more money than many other Christmas releases.  People want to see this picture.  So Jackson's tremendous effort has paid off in one respect -- he's brought more people into a darkened room to peer into the abyss that is the First World War than any other film maker during my life-time.