Congratulations to Ster-Kinekor for
distributing this innovative, moving and sometimes shattering Peter Jackson
documentary about the experiences of British soldiers on the Western Front.
(Review by Patrick Compton. 10/10)
New Zealand director Peter Jackson, best
known for his Lord of the Rings
trilogy, has made an enduring cinematic contribution to the centenary
commemoration of the end of World War 1.
Working with the visual and oral archives
of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) and the BBC, Jackson has used state-of-the-art
technological wizardry to bring to wondrous and often disturbing life old black
and white footage of life in the trenches.
Not only has he restored (subtly realistic)
colour to the images, something we have already seen done more crudely on
various TV doccies, but he has also slowed the jerky, speeded-up Charlie
Chaplinesque footage we are used to seeing from that period, creating an
impression of reality for the viewer who suddenly feels himself a true witness
to the terrible events that took place in the French and Belgian mud from
1914-18.
The moment when this technique is first
used, after the soldiers have arrived in Belgium, gives the audience a powerful
jolt as it thrusts us into their lives. The sense is that no longer is there a
barrier between those seemingly distant soldiers and our contemporary eyeballs.
Increasing this sense of reality, Jackson has also used lip-readers to
occasionally identify the speech of soldiers at the front (with actors speaking
their lines). This, too, adds to our sense of being witnesses rather than
distant onlookers.
There is no traditional narrator, with
Jackson using the voices of soldiers interviewed by the BBC and the IWM to
describe their experiences, ranging from their food and drink, sanitation
(including lice, rats and primitive toilets) and, of course, their emotions
when confronted by shot and shell. The director’s uncanny ability to sync these
voices with the images he chooses is remarkable.
They
Shall Not Grow Old has an intentionally limited
focus, starting with British civilians volunteering for military service in
August 1914. We follow their six-week training period before they are
transported to the front. After this, most of this 89-minute film is about what
happens to them in the trenches, before a coda that offers a sardonic
assessment of what happened to the survivors when they returned to an uncaring
civvie street.
Because of Jackson’s decision to eschew a
traditional narrator, the film doesn’t fit an ideological straitjacket and is
all the better for it. We don’t get a vision of the meaninglessness of the war,
or the bloody buffoonery of the generals, associated with the likes of
Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen ... or Black Adder, nor do we get the
revisionist “it was worth it after all” associated with some modern war
historians.
Instead, we get the muscular, unvarnished
reflections of the ordinary soldiers who were there; who explain why they went,
what they felt and how they handled the dreadful pressures of trench warfare.
Along the way we get a fair amount of humour, a lot of English sangfroid and
typical understatement. We also, it must be said, get an eye-popping insight
into the poor health of the English working class at the time, judging by the
dreadful state of their teeth.
Having said all that, we are never shielded
from the horrors of war. One of the most dramatic sequences is the buildup to a
major offensive, and Jackson has chosen footage of clusters of men waiting to
go “over the top”. We see absurdly young faces, fixed in the rictus of terror,
gazing at the camera in what must have been minutes before the whistles blew to
send them, in all likelihood, to their violent deaths.
Fortunately, perhaps, there is virtually no
genuine footage of real battle scenes in WW1 and Jackson handles this blackout
cleverly, relying on sound effects to convey the sounds of the guns and then
shifting his camera from real shots of soldiers in waiting to equally real
shots of dead soldiers after the fighting has taken place.
Time and again throughout the film, we find
Jackson returning to those soldiers’ faces, creating an increasingly haunting
impression.
As already mentioned, the film doesn’t use
a traditional narrator, but it also doesn’t narrate the war. There is hardly a
mention of a town or city or a particular battle. This is a movie about the
soldiers’ experience of the conflict, and Jackson’s considerable achievement is
to bring us closer to these ordinary men than I thought possible.
It was disappointing to note that, on a
cut-price Tuesday morning, my partner and I were the only people in the cinema.
Those who wish to see this remarkable film should get themselves to Gateway as
soon as possible.
They
Shall Not Grow Old opened at Gateway on November
16. - Patrick Compton
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