They Shall Not Grow Old

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

-Laurence Binyon, "For the Fallen," Fourth Stanza, 1914


The publicity surrounding the BBC broadcast of Peter Jackson's They Shall Not Grow Old last Sunday has been rather unprecedented and unusually emotional for a documentary, more specifically a film made up of century-old documentary footage. Finished in time for the centenary of the end of the Great War on November 11, critics have expressed an overwhelming awe of Jackson's film, which was a "labor of love" that took him four years to complete.

In his review of the film, Peter Bradshaw of The Manchester Guardian writes: "The effect is electrifying. The soldiers are returned to an eerie, hyperreal kind of life in front of our eyes, like ghosts or figures summoned up in a seance. The faces are unforgettable." Over at The Observer Mark Kermode writes, "As we watch a line of soldiers marching through mud towards the front, something extraordinary happens. The film seems almost miraculously to change from silent black-and-white footage to colour film with sound, as though 100 years of film history had been suddenly telescoped into a single moment. Stepping through the looking glass, we find ourselves right there in the trenches, surrounded by young men whose faces are as close and clear as those of people we would pass in the street. I’ve often argued that cinema is a time machine, but rarely has that seemed so true."

Kermode reminds me of a wonderful moment in Le fantôme d'Henri Langlois in which Langlois is standing before a screen on which is projected a film made in 1895, and he says, "My goal was to show shadows of the living coexisting with shadows of the dead. For that's the essence of film. It supercedes time and space. It goes beyond the 4th dimension. Here we see Seville in a fragment of a re-framed Lumière film. It's a procession there in 1895. But that's not what counts. What matters is that these people are like us and as they walk, we walk along. So the audience is right there with them."

I'm not sure what Langlois, who collected 50,000 films for his Cinemathèque Française, would've thought about Peter Jackson's tampering with the sacred shadows of the dead. For tampering is what it is. I have a problem with revisionists. When, in 1952, the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was published, which sought not only to correct mistakes made in the 1611 King James Version, but to produce a text "written in language direct and clear and meaningful to people today,” a Bible as close as possible to “the life and language of the common man in our day,” the result provoked Dwight Macdonald to ask, 

And why this itch for modernizing anyway? Why is it not a good thing to have variety in our language, to have a work whose old-fashioned phrases exist in the living language, to preserve in one area of modern life the old forms of speech, so much more imaginative and moving than our own nervous, pragmatic style? As it enriches us to leave beautiful old buildings standing when they are no longer functional or to perform Shakespeare without watering his poetry down into prose, so with the Bible. The noblest ancient fane must be trussed and propped and renovated now and then, but why do it in the slashing style of the notorious Gothic “restorations” of Viollet-le-Duc? In any event, I think the Revisers exaggerate the difficulty of K.J.V. Almost all of it is perfectly understandable to anyone who will give a little thought and effort to it, plus some of that overvalued modern commodity, time. Those who won’t can hardly claim a serious interest in the Bible as either literature or religion.

Ask Kevin Brownlow, who has devoted most of his life to finding very old - sometimes "lost" - films and restoring them to something close to their original glory, ask him if it's OK to remove these old black-and-white silent films from their context, from their place not in history but as history, and resuscitating them from dead black-and-white to living color. And adding not just actor's voices seamlessly lip-synced to the people in the films, but all of the ambient sounds that couldn't be recorded in 1914-1918. Then there's the creation of additional frames to eliminate the accelerated, jerky motion caused by cameras hand-cranked at anywhere from 16 to 26 frames per second, so that people not only look and sound as good as new, but they move normally, at the standard 24 frames per second. And all this just to make the films more “accessible” to the modern viewer, who probably has never had patience enough to watch an old "grey" movie made before his lifetime - any time prior to 1990, that is.

In the November 14 BBC article, "Viewers were floored by the colour added to WW1 footage in They Shall Not Grow Old," Declan Cashin writes,

Adding colour to black and white historical images has its own kind of intense
emotional power - mostly because it can make an event that seems so far in the
past become instantly more recent and relevant. Think of the work of artist Marina Amaral, whose painstaking colouring of a picture of a young Holocaust victim went viral earlier this year.

“It is much easier to relate to people once we see them in colour," Amaral said of her project. The colourisation of World War One in They Shall Not Grow Old - and the effect of seeing so many young men brought to life in vivid hues - provoked a similarly big reaction from viewers.

The article includes a reproduction of the image mentioned above (someone attached it to a tweet!). It does indeed have an almost supernatural power. But am I alone in finding this digital fixing up of the past, especially the image (a "registration" photo taken by the Germans) of a helpless victim of the Holocaust, disturbing? Is that poor little girl more "alive" merely because a computer has colorized the obvious look of terror on her face? I thought about reproducing it here, but thought better of it. I'd rather not participate in the trivialization of tragedy. I feel sorry for a generation that cannot make the human connection with people now dead because photographs of them have heretofore been black-and-white.

It is true that the technology of the motion picture has gone through several developments - what some people might call "improvements", the most important of which are the transition from silent film to film with synchronized sound, and the much slower transition from black-and-white film to various color processes like Technicolor and Eastmancolor. But as technology was advancing, artists were doing what they always have done by making a virtue out of necessity and developing an aesthetics of film with or without sound and color. Just as black-and-white photography is distinguished by much more than simply the absence of color, a silent film is a great deal more than simply a film deprived the dimension of synchronized sound. Great films were made during the silent era, and their greatness is separable from anything like historical or cultural importance. Charlie Chaplin's Tramp was not deprived of the power of speech. In every one of his silent films he talks like everyone else. We simply couldn't hear his voice until the end of Modern Times when he sings a nonsense song. But the essence of Chaplin's art was silence. Later film clowns like Tati and Étaix used the pretense of silence, as an homage, perhaps, to Chaplin and Keaton. But it isolated them from the world in their films, in which everyone else spoke in voices we could hear. Chaplin's and Keaton's world was silent, but they were substantial parts of that world.

I can't escape the feeling that Jackson's film, however scrupulously well-intended, is in the service of the same philistinism that led Ted Turner to colorize classic American films, misguided tamperings, trying to put old wine into new skins, that were universally condemned at the time. Jackson's palette of colors is far more presentable - not as "tutti frutti" - as Turner's, but they are equally deplorable. The people who were "floored" by the images in Jackson's film should examine their emotional reactions more closely and ask themselves why they were so unmoved by the images when they were black-and-white.

If filmgoers today can't sit through a feature length silent film, it's only because they're not up to the level of concentration that a film like Abel Gance's Napoleon or Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin requires of them. It's the difference between the poetry of silent film that relies exclusively on images and the prose of contemporary film that is closer to nature, with all of the colors and sounds of nature that is ubiquitous today. Knowledge of the technical limitations of films housed in the Imperial War Museum, not to mention a generation of people captured in those films whose lives and understanding of the world and of history have set them far apart from us and from our time, requires an adjustment from the viewer that is tantamount to an act of the imagination. The direct connection between now and then, us and them, has long since been broken. Like a break in an electrical connection, an increase in the current can cause the electricity to "jump" or arc across the broken connection, and an act of concentrated imagination can re-establish contact with the past.

The title of Jackson's film, which is a line from the Laurence Binyon poem written on the occasion of the first great battles, and first great losses, of the war for the British Expeditionary Force, the battles of Mons and of the Marne, is beautiful but it is also double-edged. They shall not grow old ... because they were all killed when they were young. We grow old, which is one of the prices of being alive. Being revisited by them in Jackson's film may bring them closer to us as human beings, but it's a disservice, I think, to them as individuals, even when every face is given a name.

I was reminded of John Donne's famous Ode, "Death Be Not Proud," which assures us that death's victory is, at best, only temporary, since, in killing us, Death sends us to our immortal afterlife.

why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Written in 1609, but published posthumously in 1633, Donne was a member of that last generation of English poets, like Herrick, who, according to George Saintsbury, "have relished this life heartily, while heartily believing in another." But who believes in personal immortality any more? Only religious hysterics, perhaps, whose faith is not impaired by knowledge when knowledge is thoroughly lacking. A better view is presented by Drummond Allison (1921-1943), a British war poet (of the Second World War), in "Come, Let Us Pity Not the Dead But Death":

Come, let us pity not the dead but Death
For He can only come when we are leaving,
He cannot stay for tea or share our sherry.
He makes the old man vomit on the hearthrug
But never knew his heart before it failed him.
He shoves the shopgirl under the curt lorry
But could not watch her body undivided.
Swerving the cannon-shell to smash the airman
He had no time to hear my brother laughing.
He sees us when, a boring day bent double,
We take the breaking-point for new beginning
Prepared for dreamless sleep or dreams or waking
For breakfast but now sleep past denying.
He has no life, no exercise but cutting;
While we can hope a houri, fear a phantom.
Look forward to No Thoughts. For Him no dying
Nor any jolt to colour His drab action,
Only the plop of heads into the basket,
Only the bags of breath, the dried-up bleeding.
We, who can build and change our clothes and moulder,
Come, let us pity Death but not the dead.

Alas, Drummond himself was a casualty of war. Unlike him, Death cannot live on through poetry.