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“They shall not grow old” and “Mimesis: African soldier”

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dc.contributor.author Voeltz, Richard A.
dc.date.accessioned 2021-12-20T14:57:52Z
dc.date.available 2021-12-20T14:57:52Z
dc.date.issued 2021
dc.identifier http://www.raco.cat/index.php/Entremons/article/view/392875
dc.identifier 10.31009/entremons.2021.i12.03
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10230/49818
dc.description.abstract This paper will examine and compare two recent visual explorations of the experience of soldiers in World War I. Director Peter Jackson’s documentary They Shall Not Grow Old has been called an immersive, haunting and often transcendent experience that’s unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. By using modern digital film technology, he has restored the visuals and added sounds and speech via Automatic Dialogue Replacement, colorized, changed the speed, and brought 3D depth to the old footage from the Imperial War Museum. Jackson has either, using the terminology of William Guynn (Unspeakable Histories: Film and the Experience of Catastrophe), employed this technology to trigger “moments of heightened awareness in which the reality of the past may be recovered in its material being”. Or, do these computer generated technological affects, “….stand in for the ‘truth’ and obscure just how constructed the ‘history’ Jackson is telling actually is?” John Akomfrah’s video/sound three screen performance/display installation Mimesis: African Soldier uses silent actors, archive film and photographs, ethnographic sound recordings, new filmed footage with and without actors, and a sound track by Trevor Mathison, to document the experience of those, among many, left out of Jackson’s film: colonial subjects as soldiers. Akomfrah “does not put colour back in the cheeks of the dead”, but rather warns the viewer that remembrance can come in many forms, some of them unrealiable. All of this leads to a conclusion, as Avishai Margalit put it in Ethics of Memory, that “memory…is knowledge from the past. It is not necessarily knowledge about the past.”
dc.format application/pdf
dc.publisher Universitat Pompeu Fabra
dc.relation.haspart http://www.raco.cat/index.php/Entremons/article/view/392875/486372
dc.source.uri Entremons: UPF Journal of World History; 2021: Núm. 12; 64-86
dc.source.uri 2014-5217
dc.subject.other World War I, technology, ideology, remembrance, colonial soldiers, Britain.
dc.title “They shall not grow old” and “Mimesis: African soldier”
dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
dc.type ##rt.metadata.pkp.peerReviewed##
dc.date.modified 2021-10-19T10:25:29Z


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