They Shall Not Grow Old Is the Movie of the Year
By Rich Lowry
National Review Online
Peter Jackson lends an astonishing cinematic intimacy to life during the First World War.
The filmmaker Peter Jackson deserves more than an Oscar; he deserves a medal.
What the director of the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies has done with his World War I documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old, is more than restore archival film; he has restored the humanity of men caught up in one of history’s great cataclysms. This is an aesthetic achievement of the highest order, and a great service to history.
World War I has always had more than its share of historiography, novels, poems and feature films. Until now what it lacked was video (at least watchable video), the single most powerful medium of the modern era.
It took Jackson and his team five years to make They Shall Not Grow Old. They had to painstakingly remove scratches and other damage from old film belonging to the Imperial War Museum, and slow down the primitive footage. Then it was colorized, with loving accuracy. Forensic lip readers recovered what soldiers were saying on the film, and actors provided the voices. Finally, it was made 3D.
The effect is to transform the men originally caught on choppy black-and-white film to relatable, individual human beings, just like anyone else we watch on a screen today.
World War I was such an industrial-scale event that it tends to become impersonal, the men who fought it reduced in our minds to cannon fodder.
Jackson’s artistic choices open up a new vista.
Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Film. Show all posts
Tuesday, 8 January 2019
Thursday, 6 December 2012
Salem Lives On
Modern Witch Trials
We have discussed previously the rash of unsafe prosecution and conviction of adults accused of child molestation--falsely and completely unjustly, as it later turns out. In New Zealand we had our own horror trial in Christchurch (the Christchurch Civic Creche case) where adult caregivers were accused (and one convicted) of the most bizarre and horrendous crimes against children on the basis of child testimony. It was all a crock. (For the expose tour d'force, see Lynley Hood's, A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case. Publisher: Longacre Press, 2001. Reviews of the book can be found, here.)
Yet at the time, and to this day, parents and others involved swear black and blue that the children were telling the truth (despite some of those children publicly recanting their testimony as they grew older). This phenomenon was not isolated, but similar cases occurred in the United States, the UK, and in Europe. Researchers have compared the hysteria to that on display in the witch trials of Salem in the seventeenth century.
We have discussed previously the rash of unsafe prosecution and conviction of adults accused of child molestation--falsely and completely unjustly, as it later turns out. In New Zealand we had our own horror trial in Christchurch (the Christchurch Civic Creche case) where adult caregivers were accused (and one convicted) of the most bizarre and horrendous crimes against children on the basis of child testimony. It was all a crock. (For the expose tour d'force, see Lynley Hood's, A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case. Publisher: Longacre Press, 2001. Reviews of the book can be found, here.)
Yet at the time, and to this day, parents and others involved swear black and blue that the children were telling the truth (despite some of those children publicly recanting their testimony as they grew older). This phenomenon was not isolated, but similar cases occurred in the United States, the UK, and in Europe. Researchers have compared the hysteria to that on display in the witch trials of Salem in the seventeenth century.
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