Jackson’s salute to WWI powerful
Film-maker Sir Peter Jackson’s interest in the Great War has resulted in a magnificent personal collection of World War I artefacts that have been the basis of an absorbing public exhibition in Wellington throughout the centenary of the war.
Now as Armistice Day approaches, Jackson has produced a documentary that could be his finest contribution to the four-year commemoration. They Shall Not
Grow Old premiered in London this week to very good reviews. Its conception was as simple as it was brilliant. Jackson wanted to see the war in realistic colour and he knew how to turn black-and-white footage into images more like those we would have seen were we alive at the time.
Reviewers are talking about how much more immediate the war seems, unlike the fading grey tones of archive film which make events seem so long ago. The other thing they notice is the youth of the soldiers. With faces flesh-toned rather than grey, they say, audiences will be moved by the realisation that those who went, fought and died for their country were so very young.
The Daily Telegraph called it “an historical portrait of matchless immediacy and power, in which young souls lost in a century-old war stare out across the years and meet our gaze”. The reviewer said, “The carnage is depicted with total fearlessness and frankness: flies swarm on corpses, flesh is thrown up like rags, soldiers are seen trembling with shell shock, while the shells themselves explode with terrifying fury and speed.”
It sounds like a fitting climax to the centenary, a thundering and tender reminder of how terrible and tragic that war was.
New Zealand made much of the Gallipoli centenary in 2015 and duly recalled the Somme in 2016 and Passchendaele a year ago. But it becomes hard to sustain interest in events of mind-numbing horror. How much harder it must have been for those alive at the time, not knowing when it would end.
The centenary of its end, Armistice Day, is on November 11. Historians tell us the armistice was not greeted with the scenes of public jubilation familiar from newsreels from the conclusion of World War II. Families and communities were too depleted, too many young men were maimed for life, too many were not coming back.
And an armistice did not sound conclusive. Indeed it lasted only 20 years.
However, Jackson is giving World War I’s centenary a fitting and memorable conclusion that might never fade.