Tommies in their true colours
In vivid colour that truly captures the human face of the Great War, how original footage of WWI heroes was brought back to life by Lord Of The Rings director Peter Jackson
LARKING about with enemy helmets on the Western Front. Putting their all into a tug-ofwar during training. Suddenly, a century after the end of World War I, that terrible conflict comes flickering to life — in full colour.
Away from the trenches, you see the gleaming mess tins amid a poignant touch of red and yellow: the buds of flowers in old shell cases used as vases on a wooden table.
Peter Jackson, the director of The Lord Of The Rings series, has painstakingly coloured up 80 hours of black-and-white footage of the war.
His 90-minute film, They Shall Not Grow Old, will be shown in British cinemas and schools ahead of the 100th anniversary on November 11.
Its title is an amended line from the war poem For The Fallen, by Laurence Binyon: ‘ They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.’
As you watch Jackson’s colourised footage — taken from the archives of the Imperial War Museum, which commissioned the film — you see those heroes as never before. The sharpness of the film makes everything visible.
And, while Jackson does not shy away from the horror — the hellish, black-brown mud; the bare, ruined branches of blackened trees shattered by shellfire; the light-purple skin of dead bodies — it’s not all doom and gloom.
The soldiers smile and smoke, their bad teeth clenched around a pipe or cigarette.
In one scene, two soldiers play wind instruments —probably fifes — while a third beats time on an empty bottle.
Another scene is shot in glorious summer sunlight, the trees in full leaf, as a gun team gallop through a stream near the Front. And in another, a field kitchen steams busily while troops, including a mounted soldier, are silhouetted against a brilliant sunset.
During battle, massive tanks manoeuvre over the yawning gaps of the trenches below.
Away from the Front, 20 grinning squaddies gratefully hitch a lift on one of these leviathans.
There were two stages to restoring the film: first, improving the original footage and slowing down the lurches that come with hand-cranked cameras, and then digitally colourising it.
Peter Jackson, who owns seven World War I planes, says: ‘To get from bad black-and-white to good black-and-white is where most of the work is: sharpening, getting rid of scratches, getting rid of grain, changing the speed, getting rid of splices.’
The film is being screened at 24 frames per second, but the original footage was shot at speeds as low as 10 frames per second.
‘You’re asking the computer to create the extra frames in between the ones that are there,’ he says. Jackson — whose grandfather fought at Gallipoli and on the Western Front — got in lip-readers to look at the original silent footage to see what the soldiers were saying, before actors dubbed the original lines.
Recordings of real soldiers from the landmark 1964 BBC documentary series, The Great War, were also used.
And then came the colourisation of the original frames and the new ones.
‘There’s nothing difficult about the colourisation,’ says Jackson. ‘It’s just very labour-intensive.
‘The war was a colour war. You’re listening to the people who were there, you’re seeing it as they saw it, and they saw it in colour . . .’
THEY Shall Not Grow Old will premiere at the BFI London Film Festival next Tuesday and screen simultaneously in nearly 250 UK cinemas. For details, visit: theyshallnotgrowold.film