motion capture
HOW MENDES’ NON-STOP WAR FILM MOVES IN UNEXPECTED DIRECTIONS…
1917 15 FILM EXTRAS
OUT 4 MAY DIGITAL HD 18 MAY DVD, BD, 4K UHD BD EXTRAS Commentaries, Featurettes
When the news first broke that Sam Mendes’ top-secret World War 1 film 1917 comprised one single, extended shot (it doesn’t, but more on that later), the immediate assumption was that it would be just that: immediate. Perhaps recalling how Alfonso Cuarón used long takes to thrust viewers into the blistering action in Children Of Men, it was easy to imagine a hand-held camera bobbing and weaving through flying shrapnel, with exploding bombs jolting it left and right as mud and blood splattered the lens.
As choreographed by Mendes and ace DoP Roger Deakins, though, the camera that moves through two hours of action and inaction in 1917 is less the seesawing of The Blair Witch Project and more the gliding and pirouetting of Terrence Malick. Yes, in the first act, set in the Allied trenches in Northern France, it frequently hovers over the shoulders of Lance Corporals Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) and Schofield (George MacKay) as they scurry along, evoking the signature
camera position employed in the Dardenne brothers’ urgent socialrealist dramas. But there is also something of the elegant tracking shots in Kubrick’s WW1 drama
Paths Of Glory. What’s more, the camera leaves the viewers-see-whatthe-protagonists-see vantage point to wheel around and track backwards, allowing us to study our young heroes’ faces. Later, when they clamber over the top, it climbs skyward to offer a God’s-eye view.
DEEP CUTS
Set on 6 April 1917, Mendes’ movie – informed by the war stories of his grandfather, Alfred – opens with the German forces having retreated. Two Allied battalions numbering 1,600 men are about to advance to force a surrender, only for an aerial photograph to reveal that it is a trap: the retreating soldiers await with reinforcements. With communications down, the only hope is for Colin Firth’s gruff General Erinmore to send Blake and Schofield into enemy territory to act as messengers.
When Blake, Schofield and the camera emerge from the trenches, we are met with a landscape so alien/ apocalyptic it might be from a sciencefiction film: stunted trees, bomb craters filled with brown water, bloated rats, rotting horses and, of course, human corpses. Our two men, forced to be heroes, brim with fears and tears as they push on, entering the deserted German trenches, then the bombedout French village of Ecoust. They surge on through various other vignettes (including a terrifically suspenseful
set-piece involving a pinwheeling bi-plane) as they head for the battalions at Croisilles Wood.
There are numerous cuts hidden by, say, a duck into darkness or a jarring explosion, and at one point Schofield is knocked unconscious and the screen fades to black; when he comes to, several hours have passed and the clock is ticking all the faster. Presumably this clear cut was ignored by the marketing bods and many critics upon the film’s theatrical release because it took away from the more-compelling ‘one-shot’ narrative. Even so, the format of 1917 means it is naturally a little baggy in places, though the script by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns, performed with conviction by Chapman and MacKay, ensures our attention is held.
Strangely, the gliding camera finds beauty in the horrific, immersing the viewer even as it distances them. It renders parts of 1917 theatrical, parts phantasmagorical, and parts – in particular a sequence where Schofield roams through burning ruins – both at once. The weightlessness it brings to a weighty subject matter makes for discombobulating viewing, providing an almost out-of-body experience. It is fitting, really, given Mendes’ film, like Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, is as much a psychological journey as physical odyssey, with expressionistic flourishes illuminating the far corners of the psyche like flares in the night.
Some viewers might find the movie’s heightened quality distancing, and feel the long-take format is a distraction. But apart from being an astonishing technical achievement that won Roger Deakins a second Oscar in three years, it brings a freshness to Mendes’ World War 1 movie, as surely as Peter Jackson bridged the 100-year gap by colourising archive footage and dubbing in dialogue in his documentary They Shall Not Grow Old. The exhilaration and nausea are amplified, the loss and triumph are deepened, making 1917 one of the great films about the Great War.
MILITARY PRECISION
Extras are led off by individual Mendes/Deakins commentaries – the separation seems ironic, given how intensely production relied on everyone being in sync. Mendes shares stories about his granddad across the disc (listen out for how his height was an advantage in the mists of no man’s land), but the main focus, perhaps inevitably, is on logistics. The importance of matching scene length to set length is stressed, while behind-the-scenes footage captures the relentless assault-course nature of getting something in the can. As Mendes puts it: “Sometimes you have a camera being carried by an operator hooked onto a wire; the wire carries it across more land. It’s unhooked again; that operator runs with it, then steps onto a small jeep which carries him another 400 yards and he steps off it again and goes around a corner…” Phew. Oh, and there’s a gold star for Richard Madden, too: his first take was the one that ended up in the film. Jamie Graham
‘1917 IS ONE OF THE GREAT FILMS ABOUT THE GREAT WAR’