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For decades, memories of the First World War have been preserved only in troubled archive films. The color of the uniforms, the sound of the barrel, the faces of the soldiers are often impenetrable, at the risk of getting lost in time.
"They will not grow old", a film by award-winning filmmaker and producer Peter Jackson breathes life into the Great War – and the soldiers who fought it.
The film restores and transforms century-old images from the Imperial War Museum in London closer to the modern blockbuster Jackson is famous for.
The black and white archival scenes of soldiers at war and in play are complemented by the addition of colors and textures.
Jackson and his production crew also adjusted the speed of the sequence to make the movements more natural, and added sound effects, music and archived audio files to bring the silent sequence to life. No more ubiquitous scratches lurking on old videos.
Four years and 600 hours of footage
The result is a film that restores a sense of humanity to soldiers who have long been held as silent, stiff and black-and-white characters.
"All these clichéd figures, black and white, jerky, which we do not pay much attention … it suddenly turns them into human beings," said Jackson to Neil Curry, CNN.
Jackson said that the restoration of the film helped him get to know the soldiers better.
"That changed my perception of the soldier's life in the war," said Jackson.
The film comes as the world marks a historic event: the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War. On November 11, 1918, Germany accepted the armistice conditions demanded by the Allies: Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy and the United States.
The four-year film project used more than 600 hours of images from the Imperial War Museum and also included interviews with selected soldiers in the BBC's vast audio archive.
"The purpose of the film was to try to use modern technology, not the modern film, we can easily go out and make reconstructions, etc., but we did not do it," he said. Jackson said. "We used strictly century-old sequences, but we used the firepower of a computer to restore them to the maximum."
Although Jackson is professionally known for his big-budget Hollywood fiction films, such as "The Lord of the Rings" and "King Kong", he has always been fascinated by World War I, partly because of his personal connection to the war.
"My grandfather was injured on the first day of the Battle of the Somme," said Jackson.
In his independent research, Jackson discovered that his grandfather had been hit by a German machine gun during the battle. Wounded but alive, he returned to England where he met and married Jackson's grandmother. "Everyone has stories like that," Jackson said.
Educate a new generation
"They will not grow old" was premiered at the London Film Festival in October and is about to hit the world. In addition to creating a feature-length documentary, Jackson and his production crew gave an additional 80 hours of film footage to the Imperial War Museum, with the specific goal of educating and bringing the war to life for the new generation.
Diane Lees, chief executive of the Imperial War Museum, hopes that Jackson's documentary will help young audiences understand an increasingly forgotten war.
"I think for younger generations, the idea that you can assign to history everything that is black and white is not related to your identity was one of the challenges we are facing. "
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