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ETA: I've read so many accounts of World War I that start and end with the story of trench warfare, so the fact that Jackson was only addressing a tiny fraction of the possible stories of the war didn't register with me as it should. (shamefaced). Fortunately others were less stupid than I.
Basically, Jackson avoids telling any stories other than those of the white, native British footsoldiers in the trenches. Footage exists of WWI fighter pilots, of sailors, of women - nurses and ambulance drivers - who risked their lives going up to the front lines to drag wounded men out of the trenches and transport them to hospitals, and of troops from Britain's colonies (white and nonwhite) who were quite purposefully used as cannon fodder by the generals in charge, leading to even more hideous casualty rates among the colonial troops than among British born soldiers. But Jackson avoids telling any of their stories.
And this should not be surprising, coming from a director who is so fond of the utterly racist film King Kong, who took the racism of Tolkien's treatment of Orcs and Haradrim and actually made it worse in his adaptations - he's merely sticking to his comfort zone.
I do think it's interesting how so many of the reviews of the film stuck to talking about the technical aspects of Jackson's footage restoration - because apart from that, there's really nothing there to talk about, it's just another retelling of the white-centric, British-centric histories of the war that everyone in the English speaking world has encountered if they've read anything at all about the period. By sticking to fellating Jackson's production for its technological wizardry, the reviewers help Jackson obscure and cover up the glaring omissions and lacunae in his movie, omissions of gender and race and ethnicity.
My original review from a few weeks back, unaltered:
So I watched this and was touched deeply by the voices of veterans, now all long dead, talking about their experiences in the war. The weaving of hundreds of oral history interviews into a single narrative was masterful and well done.
But I was deeply disappointed by the visuals that accompanied those voices, and angered by some blatant omissions in the credits.
The visuals:
The original footage is a century old, and suffers from all the problems of antique black and white film - images that originally were sharp and clear become faded and muddy as the film degrades; at some point before the original negative fell apart, the images got transferred to a non-perishable medium, but the film was not cleaned first, so we get dust specks and hairs burnt into the only existing prints; hand cranked 16fps footage looks jerky if you telecine it with duplicate frames to make it work on a modern 24fps projector, but speeding it up to 24fps makes the people move unnaturally fast.
A lot of those problems can be addressed nowadays with digital restoration techniques - dirt and scratch removal, sharpening, and other restoration techniques have become quite standard in making digital releases of classic films. So I had high hopes for the century old footage. But... Jackson's digital restoration went way too far. Faces that looked like they'd been dusted with pepper, tons of blurring and smudging of hands and faces as they moved. Restoration of degraded originals is very much a matter of knowing when to stop before you make things worse, and I got the impression that Jackson's team were told to keep trying well past that point. I also think they erred too far on the side of trying to make motion look fluid when the original footage just did not have enough FPS to make it look anything other than jerky when projected with modern equipment.
And finally, to add insult to injury, they coloured it and dubbed in a fake soundtrack. The reviewers who were awed by the film seem to me to be too easily impressed by the colouring of old black and white footage. I gather that some people brought up on a diet of colour TV and colour film are unable to look at a black and white original without thinking that something is missing. But that's a defect in their education, not in the original media. I will concede that Jackson's team did not produce anything as blatantly garish as some of the coloured 30's and 40's Hollywood films that I've had the misfortune to see, but colouring is still colouring, and is best left undone.
The credits:
First, Jackson credits each veteran whose voice he used, in alphabetical order. It's a huge list of names, but it completely omits any mention of when the interviews were recorded, or by whom. There was a single line thanking generic "oral historians" for preserving the voices. But nothing about who those historians were or the oral history projects they worked for.
Second, there's an acknowledgement of the archives that preserved the film that Jackson used. But there's no acknowledgement whatsoever of the photographers who originally took that footage - Geoffrey Malins, John McDowell and other early film makers who, tapped by the British army to document the war, risked their lives to record conditions on the Western Front.
Basically, Jackson avoids telling any stories other than those of the white, native British footsoldiers in the trenches. Footage exists of WWI fighter pilots, of sailors, of women - nurses and ambulance drivers - who risked their lives going up to the front lines to drag wounded men out of the trenches and transport them to hospitals, and of troops from Britain's colonies (white and nonwhite) who were quite purposefully used as cannon fodder by the generals in charge, leading to even more hideous casualty rates among the colonial troops than among British born soldiers. But Jackson avoids telling any of their stories.
And this should not be surprising, coming from a director who is so fond of the utterly racist film King Kong, who took the racism of Tolkien's treatment of Orcs and Haradrim and actually made it worse in his adaptations - he's merely sticking to his comfort zone.
I do think it's interesting how so many of the reviews of the film stuck to talking about the technical aspects of Jackson's footage restoration - because apart from that, there's really nothing there to talk about, it's just another retelling of the white-centric, British-centric histories of the war that everyone in the English speaking world has encountered if they've read anything at all about the period. By sticking to fellating Jackson's production for its technological wizardry, the reviewers help Jackson obscure and cover up the glaring omissions and lacunae in his movie, omissions of gender and race and ethnicity.
My original review from a few weeks back, unaltered:
So I watched this and was touched deeply by the voices of veterans, now all long dead, talking about their experiences in the war. The weaving of hundreds of oral history interviews into a single narrative was masterful and well done.
But I was deeply disappointed by the visuals that accompanied those voices, and angered by some blatant omissions in the credits.
The visuals:
The original footage is a century old, and suffers from all the problems of antique black and white film - images that originally were sharp and clear become faded and muddy as the film degrades; at some point before the original negative fell apart, the images got transferred to a non-perishable medium, but the film was not cleaned first, so we get dust specks and hairs burnt into the only existing prints; hand cranked 16fps footage looks jerky if you telecine it with duplicate frames to make it work on a modern 24fps projector, but speeding it up to 24fps makes the people move unnaturally fast.
A lot of those problems can be addressed nowadays with digital restoration techniques - dirt and scratch removal, sharpening, and other restoration techniques have become quite standard in making digital releases of classic films. So I had high hopes for the century old footage. But... Jackson's digital restoration went way too far. Faces that looked like they'd been dusted with pepper, tons of blurring and smudging of hands and faces as they moved. Restoration of degraded originals is very much a matter of knowing when to stop before you make things worse, and I got the impression that Jackson's team were told to keep trying well past that point. I also think they erred too far on the side of trying to make motion look fluid when the original footage just did not have enough FPS to make it look anything other than jerky when projected with modern equipment.
And finally, to add insult to injury, they coloured it and dubbed in a fake soundtrack. The reviewers who were awed by the film seem to me to be too easily impressed by the colouring of old black and white footage. I gather that some people brought up on a diet of colour TV and colour film are unable to look at a black and white original without thinking that something is missing. But that's a defect in their education, not in the original media. I will concede that Jackson's team did not produce anything as blatantly garish as some of the coloured 30's and 40's Hollywood films that I've had the misfortune to see, but colouring is still colouring, and is best left undone.
The credits:
First, Jackson credits each veteran whose voice he used, in alphabetical order. It's a huge list of names, but it completely omits any mention of when the interviews were recorded, or by whom. There was a single line thanking generic "oral historians" for preserving the voices. But nothing about who those historians were or the oral history projects they worked for.
Second, there's an acknowledgement of the archives that preserved the film that Jackson used. But there's no acknowledgement whatsoever of the photographers who originally took that footage - Geoffrey Malins, John McDowell and other early film makers who, tapped by the British army to document the war, risked their lives to record conditions on the Western Front.
