Just to say that we went to watch this at our local cinema on Tuesday night and it was brilliant - much better than I'd expected. The transformation from flickering black and white to what looked like contemporary film was stunning, but the actual content of the film was fascinating as well, and often very moving.
As the original footage obviously had no soundtrack the sound was provided by recordings of soldiers who'd fought in the war talking about their experiences. These were linked to the film being shown at the time, so a section of the film about tanks would be accompanied by reminiscences of the men who had served in them.
Another very clever and effective technique was that occasionally they would lip sync dialogue with the film, so that it would appear as though one of the men shown on film was speaking.
There were lots of fascinating snippets that would never have occurred to me. For example, when a bullet hit a tank it dislodged a flake of metal from the inside, which one soldier likened to being surrounded by flying razor blades.
Some of the footage was hard to watch. Seeing a flickering Charlie Chaplin style film of wounded men is very different from seeing those men as if on a news bulletin. Although we think we know how awful warfare on the Western Front was nothing prepares you for some of the images and the descriptions. If a man tripped and fell off one of the duckboards he would quickly drown in the mud and sludge. There was footage of badly wounded men laid out on stretchers with magpies hopping over them, waiting for them to die, and rats were everywhere, fattened on the corpses of the men and horses that lay all around.
Yet rather prosaically, the one thing we all immediately commented on after leaving the cinema was not the horror of what we'd seen but the horrendous dentistry of the young soldiers! This was in the days when it was not uncommon for a person on reaching adulthood to have all their teeth removed, and looking at these young men one could see why. A very good advert for NHS dental care!
What was also quite counter-intuitive was how many of the soldiers had really enjoyed the war. This seemed incredible to us at the time, but of course we're looking back on it from the comfort and ease of middle class life in the 21st century. We forget that many of these young lads were working in dreadful conditions in heavy industry or mines or textile mills, so that a life in the Army probably did represent a great improvement. And of course there were probably many soldiers who saw little or no serious fighting anyway.
It came as quite a shock to hear the plight of those who returned to civilian life when the war had ended. I hadn't realised that jobs were advertised with the caveat "No ex-servicemen need apply", which struck me as dreadful. Many of the men said that they felt completely alienated from civilian life, as civilians had no comprehension of what they'd been through and even less desire to learn about it.
And at the end of the film (which was being screened live from the London Film Festival) there was a very interesting Q & A with Peter Jackson, which included some fascinating information about the techniques used to transform the film quality.
So a thoroughly excellent film, and I commend it to the House!