Peter Jackson (2018)
Peter Jackson’s documentary premiered at this year’s London Film Festival (and simultaneously in selected cinemas nationwide) prior to broadcast on BBC2 on 11 November, to mark the centenary of the World War I armistice. A collaboration between Jackson and the Imperial War Museums (IWM), the film comprises footage of World War I from IWM archives, accompanied by audio recordings of IWM and BBC interviews of British servicemen who fought in the Great War. The most striking feature of They Shall Not Grow Old (the title transposes, as usual, the third and fourth words of Laurence Binyon’s phrase) is that much of the visual material has been colourised. The director has said that he wanted the film to break out of the ‘black-and-white cliché’ of World War I documentaries.
Jackson reinforces the impact of the colourisation by limiting it to the scenes of life in the trenches, warfare and carnage. The opening part of the film, which describes the prelude to the Great War and the initial training of soldiers, is in black and white; so is the shorter closing section dealing with the troops’ return after the War to ‘a land fit for heroes’. Throughout these monochrome parts, the central image is smaller and surrounded by blank screen, as if to underline that the audience thinks of World War I primarily as images at a safe distance. As soon as the coloured film starts, the blank surrounding disappears. The image expands to occupy the whole screen so as confront viewers more powerfully. The intention is reasonable enough, although it rather implies that Jackson is content for us to continue to view the build-up and aftermath to the War in a relatively traditional way that, according to what he seems to think, distances us from the reality.
They Shall Not Grow Old is a considerable technical achievement. As I understand it, a copy of the film has been sent to every secondary school in the UK: if it educates children about World War I more than previously existing materials would have done then it will have proved worthwhile. I can only say that I didn’t find that the colourisation sharpened my perception of the conflict. There were four reasons for this. First, the ingenious colouring often didn’t look quite natural – it had a slightly artificial tint familiar in the colourisation of still photographs. Second, Jackson occasionally inserts into the narrative contemporary magazine drawings, cartoons and advertisements, which break the ‘immersive’ experience he was after. Third, I don’t want to be shown scenes of the Great War in order to make me feel the soldiers were ‘people just like you and me’: I don’t think they were. There’s a gulf between their terrible experiences and the comfortable life I’ve had. If monochrome images preserve a distance between them and us, that’s as it should be: it helps keep us aware how relatively lucky we are. Fourth, appalling though many of the images are, they’re often a visual supplement to the soundtrack of compelling oral testimony. One of the most startling aspects of this is the battle-hardened matter-of-factness – of which they’re well aware – with which the ex-soldiers describe dreadful things.
13 November 2018
