They Shall Not Grow Old
D521 .T44 2018
New Arrivals Island, 2nd Floor
They Shall Not Grow Old is the result of years of restoration work led by Peter Jackson’s Wingnut Films. The work involved using digital restoration techniques to modernize 100 year old footage from the first world war. The project also colorized the footage by looking at countless examples of soldier’s uniforms, weapons, and the landscape. The final part was using lip readers and artillery audio to provide sound to footage that never had it originally.The focus of the film is on English forces in the western front, and while the film was never meant to be a comprehensive documentary of the Great War, the work done here allows World War I to be seen in a way it’s never even been imagined before.
Perhaps, the most spectacular work in this film was the work done in a scene featuring a general giving a speech to rally his troops before battle. In the making of feature, Jackson relates how the original speech was discovering after digging through archives in Great Britain. Using a voice actor, dialogue of the speech was added to the footage for the first time. The footage is of course a reminder of the all that is horrible when we go to war, but it is a good reminder that for many of us we had relatives from the 60 million people who fought in the war and the film makers encourage us to look into our own family histories to discover these relatives.
