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As the enemy approached, the dead and broken were heaped up in front of the wall’s foot, like shingle in a storm; the hideous mounds rose higher and higher as the battle continued. The author, J.R.R. Tolkien
Peter Jackson has always had a natural talent for translation. He took the Lord of the Rings saga, which was as dense as a phone book, and made it not only understandable, but also elegant and substantial. In “Heavenly Creatures,” he transformed the raging ids of two teenage girls into a fantasy world that was completely tactile and believable at the same time. He created a silent film director’s canon in order to research and archive films from the era’s all-but-forgotten “Forgotten Silver.” The fact that he had a personal connection to the First World War may have contributed to his desire to condense something massive into something digestible. It ends with a dedication to the family that he and his wife, co-writer, co-producer, and co-everything Fran Walsh, lost during World War II in their most recent film, the astonishing and peculiar documentary “They Shall Not Grow Old.” Everything from the piles of guts in his zombie film “Dead Alive” to the walking ghosts in his horror film “The Frighteners” suddenly becomes clear: his movies have been stuck on battlefields that his audience has never seen.
Beginning with black and white footage of soldiers preparing to leave for battle, “They Shall Not Grow Old” progresses into a haunting 4:3 square of arrested motion, with a small dot in the center of the frame, as men march to what was most likely their deaths. “I devoted every ounce of my youth to the accomplishment of a goal,” says the first phantom voice. The film is filled with voices, all of which are credited at the end of the film, that speak over images of people whose identities we will never learn. The anonymity is an important aspect of the story. The governments in charge of orchestrating the conflict viewed them as chess pieces in a game of chess. “It was like a really big game,” says another voice a few moments after the previous one. This is exactly how Kaiser Wilhelm, his cousin Tsar Nicholas II, French president Raymond Poincaré, British prime minister David Lloyd George, and President Woodrow Wilson saw it, dumping hordes of young men into the meat grinders on the German front lines and making millions, in Wilson’s case, by playing the war powers against each other and remaining out of the conflict until it made financial sense to get involved.
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It’s easy to lose sight of the enormity of World War I’s scope, which is why it makes sense that a New Zealander would want to make a film about the men who fought in it. When the war began, New Zealand’s population was slightly more than a million people, with approximately ten percent of that number serving in the military (mostly nurses and fighting men of various ethnic backgrounds). It is estimated that approximately 17,000 men from that massive fighting force died, with another 41,000 wounded. In a smaller community, the deaths are more difficult to overlook, and it’s clear that the scars of the war have made their way down to Jackson and Walsh.
They Shall Not Grow Old Quiz
The project was prompted by the 100th anniversary of the armistice that brought the war to a close, as well as technological advancements in digital manipulation of vintage footage. They’ve done something special by bringing all of this old footage to life again, complete with newly looped voice recordings to fill in the gaps between the action, booming sound effects to match cannon fire, and other special effects to make it more visually appealing. Once again, he has transformed something that is becoming increasingly archaic into a series of images and ideas that a modern audience will be able to comprehend and appreciate. As well as understanding the image, we should be able to comprehend the horror that it forebodes as a result.
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The narrative begins on a slightly absurdist note, as some of the British are participating in a football match against a German team when the news of the war is brought to their attention. He and his teammates decide to finish up their post-match festivities before returning home and planning to kill each other. Given that the voices are British, we can assume that we are being presented with their point of view. One version of the war had already been given to us by Jackson when he made the “Lord of the Rings” films, and especially when he filmed the battle of Helm’s Deep, which depicted his version of the slaughter on the Western Front and/or the Gallipoli campaign. Instead of focusing on the mindless nature of combat and murder, “They Shall Not Grow Old” is about the identities that have been lost and forged by gunfire, and the many thousands of selves that have been sacrificed to the god of war.
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Immediately after the combat begins, the footage changes from black and white to color, and a strange phenomenon occurs. The digitally altered images of combat appear skewed, as if they were created from a faulty memory, but this ultimately serves the film’s purpose by making it more engaging. It immediately brings to mind early digital cinema classics such as Eric Rohmer’s “The Lady and the Duke” and Lech Majewski’s “The Mill and the Cross,” in which the past is conjured up through computer-generated recreations of antique paintings; this is an early version of the conjuring act Jackson performed in his “Hobbit” films, which recreate the texture of silent films such as Fritz Lang’s “Das Rheingold” and Abel Gance’s “Napoleon” on There’s a good reason for the strangeness of the updated footage.
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Really, the sky is the key to understanding everything. In the popular imagination, World War I is depicted as a mudslide of ash and smoke, or as a perpetually gray nightmare that never ends. Men were drowning in mud and living in puddles of their own waste, and this was the case. When Jackson’s footage expands and transitions to color, the scene is extremely bright. Almost every image has lush, vibrant greenery in the background; the uniforms are a variety of colors; and the sky is luminescent, if not downright blue, at times. Simple as that, but if it isn’t the first film to depict World War I taking place under a blanket of brilliant blue skies, it certainly appears to be the first in terms of visual impact. Jackson and Walsh have given these men a terrible, but absolutely necessary, gift in the form of a strange clarity. Their smiles bring such life to their faces that the sky almost appears to be smiling at them from above, yet they continue to march to their deaths. In broad daylight, they shaved their faces with tea bags, drank water from gasoline cans, and died as a result.
The unnatural, digitally augmented movement of long-dead faces has a strange, uncanny quality to it, but the film’s goal is to make us question our own perceptions. When the living veterans’ disembodied voices are played back, they sound like a darkly comic parade of bodily fluids, moldy food, corpse-eating rats, and lice. The voices of the living veterans were recorded many years ago and stored in an archive. When the explosions and gunfire begin, it’s like being trapped in hell on Earth. One of the many terrifying images created by Jackson, Walsh, and their massive post-production team is that of decaying corpses and bullet-riddled men covered in flies, as well as horses lying in the dirt, red with blood, their unblinking eyes fixed forever on the lens of the camera that captured their image. The men appear to be strangely alive, but then again, so does the unending torment they endured. A shot of men running into a cloud of yellow gas is more horrific because of its crudeness, and it leaves a more lasting impression on your mind than any description.
“We were just going about our business, and if it came, it came,” recalls a soldier of the moments before German bombs shattered their defensive line. These men are countless voices and faces that have been lost to time, rendered anonymous by a higher power, serving as a constant reminder of how battle dehumanizes everyone who comes into contact with it. We may continue to develop innovative ways to pay tribute to the men and women who have died in combat, but we will never be able to bring them back.
For more personality quizzes check this: If Beale Street Could Talk Quiz.
