{"id":3440,"date":"2019-03-11T11:24:17","date_gmt":"2019-03-11T15:24:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/?p=3440"},"modified":"2019-04-01T12:39:34","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T16:39:34","slug":"they-who-shall-not-grow-old-response","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/2019\/03\/11\/they-who-shall-not-grow-old-response\/","title":{"rendered":"They Who Shall Not Grow Old Response"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have always preferred movies to books because when done right a movie offers a much more immersive experience especially in approaching history. Peter Jackson\u2019s WWI documentary <em>They Who Shall Not Grow Old<\/em>, offered a truly amazing glance into the chaos that was the First World War. One of the things that struck me the most in watching the movie was how the individual soldier was portrayed. When the movie begins interviewed soldiers describe how they came to enlist the almost ubiquitously answered that they said they were under the legal age to enlist so the officer would tell them to go have a couple birthdays outside. This shows just how much value the British military had for their soldiers they wanted quantity over quality and if that meant sending a pubescent boy to his death on the front lines that was fine. This idea of the soldier as dispensable is reflected through Jackson\u2019s choice to not identify any of the soldier\u2019s voices or images shown in the film because it never mattered who the individual was. One of the other things that really added to the experience for me was the colorized footage and how Jackson utilized it in the documentary. By starting out with all black and white footage the viewer gets a sense of setting as they are immediately cast backwards to when film was only black and white. Then after 20 minutes of the film pass Jackson begins to colorize the film as the soldiers are finally deployed. I thought this had a profound effect on the film especially for people of younger generations who never understood what it was like to only have black and white television. When the soldiers get into battle the wounds and living conditions can be much better understood through colored film. You can actually see the death, injury, and grime they had to live through. One of the things that was extremely pivotal was the artillery used in World War I, it was the beginning of trench warfare and colorizing the film also offered a much more real depiction of that. Often times the whole sky was grey with fog from all of the explosions, had the film been left black and white it would be much harder to see just how ominous the battlefield was. Jackson\u2019s use of the colorized still photos resonated with me a little bit more than the film clips. Some of the ways you would see the dead bodies contorted and covered in blood were honestly very hard to watch but they forced you to face they brutality of the war head on. All of this together left me feeling fairly unsettled but that is most definitely what Jackson sought out to do. World War I was the first time the industrial world had encountered death and destruction on such a large scale and Peter Jackson\u2019s use of media shakes that notion through your entire body.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have always preferred movies to books because when done right a movie offers a much more immersive experience especially in approaching history. Peter Jackson\u2019s WWI documentary They Who Shall Not Grow Old, offered a truly amazing glance into the chaos that was the First World War. One of the things that struck me the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7252,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[402585],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3440"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7252"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3440"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3441,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3440\/revisions\/3441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/st235a\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}