Also John Ellis’s “Eye-Deep in Hell” (his “Social History of the Machine Gun” is also excellent).
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I remember seeing it on cable (possibly PBS) back in the late 80’s. Then again when it became available on DVD.
Funny thing is the writers looked for a “Paul Hogan-type character” and were surprised when they got the genuine article.
You ARE in for a treat. Enjoy!
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Kind of obligatory. Iron Maiden’s Passchendale with footage from the 2008 Canadian film of the same name
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I saw some of these clips online not too long ago, but now I see this is part of a bigger project. I whole-heartedly approve and look forward to this as well.
This is not the first time Jackson has delved into World War I. See also: https://youtu.be/_jbY3HAjFuo
The remarkable qualities of film are not lost even after 100 years. If the cellulose survives, film still possesses remarkably high resolution capabilities. It is the exposure and playback that so often go sideways, but these can be digitally corrected with much greater accuracy now, if you start with a high quality scan.
Add colourization, along with first hand audio interviews, and you have a dynamite formula for storytelling.
I see from their YouTube channel ‘14-18 Now’ have a lot of short teaser/interview clips, but they also have a one hour discussion on a corresponding theatrical production you may also enjoy:
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I’m still shunning colorized pictures. They are bullshit. Colorizing dramatic films is bad enough, but colorizing historical footage is inventing data about the past. I realize I am in a minority with this opinion, but I don’t like falsifying data its creepy to me that people just go along with it. I don’t like Ken Burn’s stupid fake 3D effect he uses on photographs either.
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I kinda sorta sympathize with this position. But I also see that there is a (literally and figuratively), gray-area when it comes to things like contrast adjustment, noise-reduction, inter-frame-interpolation etc. All the sort of techniques it appears that Jackson has used to rather good advantage in these restorations. In particular when it comes to analog encoded media there is no absolutely clear line of distinction between the signal and the noise - (a fact which presents a fascinating set of philosophical problems in it’s own right). We have technological methods now that are up-ending a lot of the old notions about the boundedness of information sets and verging on Esper Machine like capabilities.
Was amazed recently watching the 1935 Call of the Wild as a digital HD print (on a tiny screen on a plane no less) - and being just blown away at how modern it seemed. I’m pretty sure that my reaction was mostly due to having only previously seen fairly poor transfers of films of that era in SD NTSC analog renditions in childhood (and of course on a CRT).
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The First World War proved to be a landmark in cinema history – the first time that the horrors of war could be caught on camera
Mathew Brady is rolling over in his grave.
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I do hope there is some colourized footage rather than just sharpened b&w
Am I missing something? Nothing from the video linked above seems to suggest that Jackson is colorizing this footage. The clips shown seem to indicate that he’s restoring/stabilizing/sharpening the existing film imagery so they look like high-definition black & white footage rather than the grainy sped-up versions we’re used to seeing from the era.
If you go to the 2:30 mark of the video, it shows a split screen, one half black and white, and the other half is colorized. Maybe you’re right, and I jumped to a wrong conclusion.
That doesn’t look like a modern day colorization. It might even be a hand-colored image from the period.
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