So actually, your alias has no relation with this gentleman ? I’m surprised ! (for real) 
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I have two feelings about this:
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Great joy that Peter Jackson has spent the time and effort to restore this increasingly rare, volatile and historic film.
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Now I am even more pissed off over our president’s petulant behavior on 11/11/18 for not bothering to even go through the motions to honor the fallen on the centenary of that conflict.
BTW a great old TV series about the conflict that I highly recommend: Anzacs
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A couple of great recent films about World War One I recommend:
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While we’re recommending WWI history resources:
Watching the whole thing is worthwhile but time-consuming. For the impatient, just the half-yearly summary episodes would still provide good coverage of the overall war.
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MCMXIV
Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;
And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day;
And the countryside not caring
The place-names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheats’ restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word–the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
– Philip Larkin
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For example:
All in one day, and just one day after the end of Polygon Wood:
The Australian population at the time was less than five million people. Do the math.
For a proportional comparison, how do you think the USA would respond to losing 650,000 soldiers in a week?
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The first time I was exposed to WW1 was when my family went on vacation to France, driving south you can see lots of cemeteries from Flanders onward right from the highway. I was maybe 8 years old or so, in school the subject hadn’t come up yet, since we were neutral in that one and it was (and is) overshadowed by the second one, where neutrality failed. Once my dad explained it, I started counting them. There are a lot. Too many.
And of course once in France every village no matter how small has a monument with a long list of names.
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I prefer June Tabor’s version. And so does Eric Bogle, who wrote the song. However, Eric also wrote No Man’s Land which is exactly about the Western Front as covered in “They Shall not Grow Old”. Eric performs his own versions as well, search Youtube.
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Among a host of other shit they forced him to do with these movies.
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Hopefully the unhealthy bastard will be long dead by then, though a catastrophic stroke would suffice.
I recently started reading a 1929 edition of Erich Maria Remarque’s work, and it amazes me that (according to Ossietzky) young people in the beginning 1930s didn’t read it as an anti-war novel, but to escape their bleak reality.
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For me, one of the things which first brought home WW1 to me bas Blackadder. After a whole series of a fairly silly comedy, all the cast line up, climb out of the trench and get slaughtered.
It was the abrupt change in tone that really shocks.
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I hope they can go back and fix these. And add the original cameramen to the titles while they’re about it.
There is a difference between ‘laziness’ and a wish to preserve the original record. I have no objection to removing spots and scratches, and altering the tone curve to get closer to the original print; though any cinema historian would insist on keeping the original too. This recreates the experience of the original viewers.
I like what Peter Jackson and his team have done here. They have put in extra frames so the hand-cranked material seems to run smoothly at realistic speeds. The colour has a ‘hand-tinted’ look, which seems to be a nice compromise, We could probably make something that looked liked it was shot yesterday on a digital camera, with full 3D modelling to get the fleshtones just so, but that might end up being a bit creepy.
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e.g. would have been better indeed. Sorry, english is not my native tongue.
(The treaty of) Versailles might not be the only reason why germany slided down into fascism, but it is one of the main reasons. I think it’s quite proper to ‘blame’ Versailles-the-treaty for WWII. It was a very bad treaty and we should learn from it’s mistakes. We (well, the U.S., that is) did, actually. The Marshall plan was more or less the opposite of Versailles, and it had more or less the opposite effect as well.
But I agree, it is an oversimplification to only blame WWII on Versailles, like more or less any argument fitting on a single page would e an oversimplification.
There are lots of reasons why Germany became so very militaristic, but the reason was not that it was somehow inherently german. It can happen everywhere, given the right circumstances. Those circumstances created for a large part by Versailles in the case of germany. (And Bismarck of course, and countless other factors…)
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Have seen “They Shall Not Grow Old” on the BBC iPlayer in London and felt that it was over-hyped. I enjoyed it yet still there were little things that made it feel like it was a rough diamond, rushed to make the deadline … That it needed a little bit more time and love to get it polished and settled. I wanted full colour the whole time too. 
The edit was overly complicated with various voiceovers creating a patchwork tone that was hard to follow and occasionally contradictory. They did take a large number of voices to weave something watchable although I would have preferred more emotional impact by following fewer soldiers. Yes, like other Peter Jackson projects, it could have been shorter with less characters. 
There were occasional stand-in clips that showed rats or fighting that were from recent cameras and that took away from the majesty and horror of the original footage. I remember seeing a few years ago some test shots that Peter Jackson had tried with early HD Digital Red Cameras … that tried to recreate trench warfare. Having a “reconstruction” might have worked in these parts instead. There were some great scans of photos from the battlefield that integrated well and showed rarely seen views of the barb wire no-man’s land.
In a way the structure of the film pivoted on the battle scenes with the build up to, and the aftermath of, the battle clearly shown. And yet having historically printed cartoons of the actual conflict seemed to gloss over the reality of that moment.
And the recreated sound in some parts felt too good and too clear to the point that it felt comical like watching a Monty Python animation. Especially the diegetic talking when faces are turned away from the camera. It took away from the immersion.
To me the faces of the soldiers shown in close up were some of the best shots. Although the reusing of the same “goat team” shot felt repetitive, even if it was with different cropping. Again it took away from immersion.
You could say that all these little decisions made for an experience that felt slightly incomplete and raw … and yet this movie is definitely worth seeing. Am just hoping that there is a tinkered version released with minor adjustments made, including other things mentioned earlier.
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No time for a proper response, but simply put: no. Also, that was the position of revisionists and the Nazis.
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This is free at the moment - some 20 hrs (in 4 or 5 episodes) or so of the most compelling commentary on a monsterous period in European History.
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Thank you for nut fully godwinning me 
. Of course Versailles can never be used as a justification for the Nazi’s being Nazi’s. However, realizing that circumstances can and will drive people into the arms of dangerous ideologists is more important now than ever. Nazis are on the rise everywhere and we need to look hard at the past (and the present) to see what underlying socioeconomics leads people to support them.
Luckily it gets better, but for too long the thinking has been that Nazism was something inherently German. At least in europe that has been a comfortable thought for the general (non-german) population. This is a dangerous thought because it gives a false sense of security.
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I can’t recommend Dan Carlin’s WWI series enough. It’s about 20 hours worth of listening, but it is fantastically done. The stories are brutal, but engaging. Having grown up Jewish in the US, I never learned much about WWI, the focus was always on the horrors of WWII.
I’m really looking forward to this documentary. I don’t see movies in the theatre often, but this looks like one I need to.
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That’s an excellent question, and thank you for bringing up my (possible) ancestor! The honest truth is, I don’t know. My family’s traced our ancestry back to Germany, where records get a little hazy, but I do know that I have immigrant ancestors who come from a village right next to the one where Charles Nungesser was born. So as much as I want the guy who shares my (real life) name to be my great-great-grand-uncle, I can’t prove it!
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