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They Shall Not Grow Old

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    They Shall Not Grow Old

    AKA Peter Jackson's re-imagining (colourisation, dubbing, interpolation to correct frame rates, etc) of World War I footage for the centennial of the Armistice.

    Kermode interview with some short clips.

    Has anyone seen this?

    Any North American distribution seems to be very much up in the air.

    I am fascinated from both a historical and cinematic perspective.

    #2
    Blimey, that looks and sounds amazing.

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      #3
      Am going with my wife a week on Saturday to celebrate our wedding anniversary.

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        #4
        Woah.


        I go on about this a lot, but I'm always struck by how digital pictures never look old and that has a way of compressing time and memory in a way that I find a bit mind-blowing. I can't quite explain it and maybe I'm being dumb but perhaps somebody smarter than me can expand on this. But I can't help but feel that the quality and, perhaps more importantly, the quantity, of hi-resolution video and images we have of everything happening today is going to change the way we remember things and I'm not sure its all good.* Kids born in the last ten years or later will grow up being able to see an enormous volume of hi-fidelity pictures and video of themselves forever and I suspect that will make it easier for people so-inclined to live in the past or, at least, feel compelled to remember everything more accurately because it will always be easy to check the accuracy of their memories. I'm not sure what the impact of that will be, but I'm sure it's a lot more than zero.

        And I can only vaguely speculate as to what the larger impact on society will be, but I'm sure it will be something. I'd like to believe it will make it harder for professional liars to try to rewrite history. So-far that hasn't proven to be true - we have a lot of media from the 50s showing segregation, etc, and still a lot of people think that's when America was "great" - but maybe it will be eventually.

        Likewise, cleaning-up old film to the point that it looks brand new, as this extraordinary footage shows, will probably change our individual and collective memories of those events. More people will be inclined to actually watch it, but also the clarity and fidelity of it makes it real in a way that black-and-white, grainy, under-cranked movies can't. It can even be more powerful than accounts from people who were there.

        Of course, with WWI, there isn't much film left at all so it might not have a huge impact either way, but for more recent events - the Vietnam War, for example - the impact could be much larger. In the case of wars, people suffering PTSD should be allowed and encouraged to let those memories fade, so video like this could be traumatic for them. But for society at large, I suppose, there's a lot of value in not letting the memory fade and impressing upon people that not only were the people in these videos a lot like us, but that all this tragedy happened not that long ago. 100 years isn't very long in the grand scheme of human history (which itself isn't very long on a geologic scale)






        *What I mean is that Pictures/video/audio created in about the last ten years all look/sound the same as media created this morning and that has a weird way of compressing time and memory. I find that jarring, as I'm sure I've explained that somewhere before. By contrast, most stuff shot or recorded in the predigital era either looks "old"- faded, sepia-toned, grainy, choppy, undercranked, staticky. Even Hollywood films or news footage from the 50s or 60s that's been restored somehow "feels" like it's from that time for reasons that have nothing to do with the content. I think that I, and perhaps others my age and older, got used to seeing faded pictures that match faded memories, for lack of a better expression. And most of us - unless we're the queen or somebody like that - don't really have that many pictures, let alone video, of our lives from way back when.* And, for the most part, that's good. If we remembered everything vividly and with perfect or near-perfect fidelity, we'd have a very hard time living in the present. It's hard enough as it is. My understanding is there are a few people with extraordinary autobiographical memories and it really sucks. I know that some older people with dementia can remember stuff from 50 years ago in detail but can't really put things in time. They think something that happened years ago happened the day before, for example.
        Last edited by Hot Pepsi; 18-10-2018, 15:46.

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          #5
          It’s a fascinating question and one that my brother-in-law, as a therapist with many young adult clients, thinks about a lot.

          He has seen a serious uptick in the number of clients who bring “visual aids” to sessions and isn’t quite sure how to deal with them.

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            #6
            Yes, it's something I discuss with students too. A big part of it is that we don't yet know the limits, or capacity, of our visual memory in the same way as we do text for example. A fast reader can understand and interpret 250–300 words a minute but, so far as I know, we have no reliable data yet that provides a similar outer limit for images. Except it appears to be far, far greater than we assume.

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              #7
              Wow, that footage is incredible. It's so obvious to say, but the smoothing-out of the framerate suddenly makes them move like 'real people', and that – almost more than their removing the film grain and artefacts, or the colourisation – is what really brings these men from a century ago to startling life. I really want to see the whole thing now.


              HP also makes some very interesting points above. I've mentioned on these boards before now how my pointless superpower is being able to see almost any TV footage and identify when it was made more or less to the year: it's a combination of gauging the appearance of familiar faces, fashions and technology, of course, but the actual 'look' of the footage – the sharpness, colours, ratio, etc – is a definite key part of it. And I've been wondering on and off for a while now whether the universal takeover of pin-sharp HD will stop this 'ability' in its tracks in the next few years. Things filmed in high resolution five years ago or today or in five years' time will all look razor-sharp in 20 or 50 years' time, and digital images won't ever degrade in any way in the manner of old film or videotape, so there's surely going to be a perceptible ironing-out of all those little differences that signify time periods until it becomes almost impossible – in the absence, at least, of cues from fashion, technology, etc. – to tell them apart.

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                #8
                That’s true of audio too. Narration on
                old newsreels usually sounds a bit faster and higher pitched than it was in real life. So, for example, the famous “oh, the humanity” report of the Hindenburg disaster really sounded like this.

                https://youtu.be/pUVDmXvXcbk

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                  #9
                  Wow, that footage is incredible. It's so obvious to say, but the smoothing-out of the framerate suddenly makes them move like 'real people', and that – almost more than their removing the film grain and artefacts, or the colourisation – is what really brings these men from a century ago to startling life. I really want to see the whole thing now.

                  That's the thing that struck me as well. They look like people, not characters in a charlie chaplin movie. I'm definitely going to try and see this. It looks amazing.

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                    #10
                    Someone I work with was able to go to one of the simulcast screenings followed by the Q&A with Peter Jackson, and she was completely blown away by it.

                    Good posts by HP and others upthread. As someone whose visual memory isn't as sharp as I'd like it to be, I've always wished that the few video and photo images I've got of happy times and sporting occasions during my childhood and teenage years were better than they are (better as in sharper, clearer, more numerous) to make up for my patchy, blurry memory - but I'd never considered things from that angle before.

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                      #11
                      I admit to being in two minds about this project. Like everyone else I'm stunned by the quality, They do look as if they were filmed yesterday, literally. But that's also the problem because they weren't. Amazing as the technological overhaul is, it also strips away much of the historical context. Movies were in their infancy in 1914. No sound, no colour. If all our historical documents look as if they were created 'right now' then they're being fundamentally dishonest, and we lose the sense and texture of a period. As a novelty this is brilliant, I just hope it doesn't become more than that.

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                        #12
                        Originally posted by Amor de Cosmos View Post
                        I admit to being in two minds about this project. Like everyone else I'm stunned by the quality, They do look as if they were filmed yesterday, literally. But that's also the problem because they weren't. Amazing as the technological overhaul is, it also strips away much of the historical context. Movies were in their infancy in 1914. No sound, no colour. If all our historical documents look as if they were created 'right now' then they're being fundamentally dishonest, and we lose the sense and texture of a period. As a novelty this is brilliant, I just hope it doesn't become more than that.
                        That's kind of my point, put more succinctly.

                        It is pulling it out of it's historical context, but in the case of WWI, making it feel more recent than it really was - though that's relative, of course - serves a valuable purpose. It's absolutely appropriate for these cleaned-up images to feel jarring or violent.

                        But that's really an artistic, rather than an historic, purpose and the two can exist side-by-side. I certainly wouldn't want redone images and video to replace the original, but I wouldn't prejudge the value of doing this to any footage without seeing the filmmaker's final product first.

                        But I can't see the value of punching-up Buster Keaton films, for example. Those filmmakers were making their films fully aware of the limitations of their technology. Or maybe they didn't think of them as limitations, but either way, when they were making it they had an idea of what it would look like as a final product. So if we mess with that, we're changing their art. Maybe the result will actually be a better thing, but it won't be theirs anymore.

                        Not that the filmmaker's "intention" is absolutely sacred - I'm sure Andy Warhol or somebody like that experimented with "editing" art and I'm sure there's probably a lot of chin-strokey cultural theory about that which I will never read - but my view is that it's usually best to just leave that stuff as it is, for the same reason that films that were clearly made by a committee of people who didn't communicate very well always turn out badly. A cohesive vision just works better. *

                        So I would guess that this is only valuable for documentary footage where there's good reason to think the people shooting that footage would have wanted it to be more realistic if it could be. I would love to see color, frame-rate-corrected, sound-restored video of baseball from back in the day, for example. Then again, I've seen Eight Men Out, The Natural, and 42 and those did a fantastic job of recreating what that looked and sounded like, so maybe that's enough.




                        * I think it's ok to try to "restore" old movies. Because in that case, the idea is to present it the way the filmmaker intended. I think Metropolis, for example, has been patched back together a few times. That makes sense. But colorizing It's a Wonderful Life, as Ted Turner did in the 80s, was a bad idea. Not just because of some abstract idea of tampering with a classic or some shit, but because it just looked bad.

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                          #13
                          If all our historical documents look as if they were created 'right now' then they're being fundamentally dishonest, and we lose the sense and texture of a period. As a novelty this is brilliant, I just hope it doesn't become more than that.

                          I get where you're coming from, but I don't see the problem with making a film of people in a trench look like people in a trench, rather than the documentary film equivalent of the Money for nothing video.

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                            #14
                            Sorry, TAB I don't understand your point...

                            I think it's ok to try to "restore" old movies. Because in that case, the idea is to present it the way the filmmaker intended. I think Metropolis, for example, has been patched back together a few times. That makes sense. But colorizing It's a Wonderful Life, as Ted Turner did in the 80s, was a bad idea. Not just because of some abstract idea of tampering with a classic or some shit, but because it just looked bad.
                            I'm not sure that's quite correct, but I'd have to check. If memory serves the original intention of Turner Classics was to upgrade movies' appearance to meet the expectations of network TV audiences. As it turned out they weren't any more, or less, interested than they were when the films were in b&w. TCM found it's present market with the advent of cable, with a smaller, but devoted, audience of cinematic purists who wanted films that that were as close in quality to the first print as possible.

                            That, BTW, is not something I'm particularly advocating for the WW1 footage. In fact the aspect of that that excites me most about this project is the fact that they've been able to interpret what people in the films were saying. That's something that, for me, expands the historical context. Not that I believe a soundtrack should be added, but sub-titles or title-cards wouldn't be out of the question.

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                              #15
                              That was Reed’s comment.

                              The colourisation history of the film is complicated and doesn’t directly involve Turner

                              Director Capra met with Wilson Markle about having Colorization, Inc., colorize It's a Wonderful Life based on an enthusiastic response to the colorization of Topper from actor Cary Grant. The company's art director Brian Holmes prepared 10 minutes of colorized footage from It's a Wonderful Life for Capra to view, which resulted in Capra signing a contract with Colorization, Inc., and his "enthusiastic agree[ment] to pay half the $260,000 cost of colorizing the movie and to share any profits" and giving "preliminary approval to making similar color versions of two of his other black-and-white films, Meet John Doe (1941) and Lady for a Day (1933)". However, the film was believed to be in the public domain at the time, and as a result, Markle and Holmes responded by returning Capra's initial investment, eliminating his financial participation, and refusing outright to allow the director to exercise artistic control over the colorization of his films, leading Capra to join in the campaign against the process.

                              Three colorized versions have been produced. The first was released by Hal Roach Studios in 1986. The second was authorized and produced by the film's permanent owner, Republic Pictures, in 1989. Both Capra and Stewart took a critical stand on the colorized editions. The Hal Roach color version was re-released in 1989 to VHS through the cooperation of Video Treasures. A third colorized version was produced by Legend Films and released on DVD in 2007 with the approval of Capra's estate.

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                                #16
                                True, but in it's early days TCM was responsible for colorizing a number of vintage films.

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                                  #17
                                  Ted was massively wrong about a host of subjects.

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                                    #18
                                    A de C, My point was that the shittiness of the old footage may be an accurate representation of what technology was like during WWI, but its Shittiness gets in the way of giving an accurate representation of what things in general were like in WWI. The primitive state of the technology gets in the way of the sense and the texture of the period. In that it makes the people involve look ridiculous with the speeded up jerky movement, but also that it was in colour. Watching that footage played at the proper speed, and smoothed out made the soldiers look like actual real people, in a way that footage of World War II is easier to identify with.

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                                      #19
                                      First off I disagree that the original footage is shitty because it's "primitive." That's rather like saying Durer's engraving's are shitty because he couldn't use colour and was limited to a clumsy burin rather than a fluid pencil or brush. People use the media of their day to record and communicate their lives, that deserves respect not dismissal. Second. We rarely, if ever, experience these films as audiences saw them at the time. They viewed them collectively and in silence, and I imagine when these were run in cinemas for the first time the collective silence was palpable, probably punctuated only by quiet sobs. Third. Then they weren't jerky, but projected at the correct speed. It's succeeding generations that came to know them that way because they were copied incorrectly. You can easily see the difference if you experience reprints of classics like Metropolis or Abel Gance's Napoleon. For more details on this I recommend reading, or watching, Kevin Brownlow's Hollywood. Finally, to repeat what I said above. These films are primary historical sources. They need to be preserved as they are, in their entirety for that reason if no other. As I said, I've no issue with the colourised versions per se. The potential problem is that they will be seen as more "accurate," or "real" merely because they're more visually accessible, so consequently replace the originals in the minds' of succeeding generations.
                                      Last edited by Amor de Cosmos; 22-10-2018, 16:34.

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                                        #20
                                        Amor, I agree with everything you say there, but am not terribly concerned that historians and those with genuine interest will ever see the colourised versions as preferable, any more than art aficionados prefer reproductions to the originals. As with reproductions, the colourised versions can make the work more accessible for a broader public, though (which I see as a good thing).

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                                          #21
                                          heh, surely Durer is the last person to be bringing up here. His stuff is staggering in its near photo realism. and It's not supposed to be dismissive of the people involved, particularly when you bear in mind how much of this footage is shot by people in no-mans land. I just think it looks odd, because cameras are in their infancy, and that's not meant to be a criticism of camera makers at the time either. They're improving as fast as they possibly. I'm really not that caught up in the authenticity of it being recorded in the style of the time, and to my eye it just makes things look even more distant and alien.

                                          I think this is a comparable discussion to the one that was being had by people in Irish traditional music, when people started to digitally remaster the iconic recordings of the 1920s. Some people didn't like it because it didn't have the crackle and the hiss of the 78's they listened to as a child, but on the other hand, for the first time it sounded like someone playing a violin beside you. You didn't have to make allowances for it being a recording taken from a recording that was decaying every time it was played. These remastered recordings were a poor reproduction of the records that people were buying in the 1920's, but they were a much better reproduction of what the player actually sounded like. It reopened an entire set of music to an entirely new generation who no longer had to make allowances for the techniques of the time, and the difficulties of recording a violin, and suddenly could hear that we were all still trotting after a man who died in 1945. I suppose its the discussion that comes up everytime someone remasters something. This remastered footage looks nothing like footage from the 1914-18 war, but it is a lot more like what the camera man was actually seeing with his own eyes.

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                                            #22
                                            My memory was that Turner wanted to colorize old movies, including It’s A Wonderful Life, because he loved those movies and was putting them on his cable stations, including TBS, and thought that it would get a bigger audience if it were in color.

                                            My recollection is that there may have been some initial interest out of curiosity, but it didn’t work commercially. The people who loved those films preferred to see it the way it was when they first saw it years before and most of the younger people who would have been instantly deterred by black and white were also deterred by other “dated” aspects of the films. So the colorization didn’t increase the audience enough to justify the expense.

                                            But my personal view that the colorization just didn’t really work artistically. It just looked wrong somehow. Not in a “it’s wrong that they’re doing anything to change a classic” sense, but in a “that doesn’t quite look like what it’s supposed to look like” sense.

                                            With It’s a Wonderful Life in particular - I guess that’s the colorized one I remember seeing in the late 80s the most - keeping it in black and white makes it much easier to believe it’s western New York rather than California, where it was shot.

                                            I also find that the color in early color films also often looks weird or false, somehow.

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                                              #23
                                              Originally posted by ursus arctos View Post
                                              Amor, I agree with everything you say there, but am not terribly concerned that historians and those with genuine interest will ever see the colourised versions as preferable, any more than art aficionados prefer reproductions to the originals. As with reproductions, the colourised versions can make the work more accessible for a broader public, though (which I see as a good thing).
                                              The line between historians/aficianados and the broader public is not that clear to me and, I suspect, is often a convenient artifice for those who should know better. How much does a teacher need to entertain in order to engage? How important is understanding the primary frames of reference to a student's knowledge?

                                              heh, surely Durer is the last person to be bringing up here. His stuff is staggering in its near photo realism.
                                              No it's not. It's realistic on its own terms but it's nothing at all like a photographic realism. The fact that "photo-realism" can now be used in such a general way actually illustrates my concerns on this topic.

                                              I just think it looks odd, because cameras are in their infancy, and that's not meant to be a criticism of camera makers at the time either. They're improving as fast as they possibly. I'm really not that caught up in the authenticity of it being recorded in the style of the time, and to my eye it just makes things look even more distant and alien.
                                              Good. Me too. That's exactly what it's supposed to do. Why must WW1 look like WW2? Why, in fact, must everything look like it happened last week when we all know it didn't?

                                              This remastered footage looks nothing like footage from the 1914-18 war, but it is a lot more like what the camera man was actually seeing with his own eyes.
                                              Both versions are exactly what he was seeing with his eyes. But the original also retains his sensory perception, while the colourised version is construct produced a century later by people who weren't born. It's clever, but really that's all it is.
                                              Last edited by Amor de Cosmos; 22-10-2018, 18:03.

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                                                #24
                                                Well, it goes without saying that all afficionados and historians were once members of the general public. And they may well have first developed a deep interest in the subject via a particularly entertaining or charismatic teacher. But that doesn't mean that their "taste" in that respect never changes.

                                                One also needs to take into account the fact that this required an extremely talented director, a host of specialists and a huge budget. It isn't coming soon to iMovies.

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                                                  #25
                                                  It isn't coming soon to iMovies.

                                                  It's not? Damn... I expected to watch it on Netflix next week!

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