Colors of the Past: Archive, Art, and Amnesia in a Digital Age

2019 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1771-1781
Author(s):  
Santanu Das
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Gains And Losses

Abstract This roundtable offers four diverse perspectives on Peter Jackson’s innovative and controversial World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). Jackson’s film breaks the mold of the documentary genre in its manipulation and montage of the visual and audio archives held at the Imperial War Museum in London. Yet he puts his technical virtuosity and resources at the service of a very traditional interpretation of the war, focusing almost entirely on the experience of young Englishmen on the Western Front. Scholars Santanu Das, Susan R. Grayzel, Jessica Meyer, and Catherine Robson offer their reflections on both the gains and losses of Jackson’s paradoxical original use of historical documents and old-fashioned rendering of the war’s experiential elements. They consider, respectively, the experience of colonial troops, the place of women in the war, and Jackson’s creative, if controversial, interpretation of the visual and aural archive.

Who Gets to Be in the War Story? Absences and Silences in They Shall Not Grow Old

2019 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1782-1788
Author(s):  
Susan R. Grayzel
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
World War ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Gains And Losses

Abstract This roundtable offers four diverse perspectives on Peter Jackson’s innovative and controversial World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). Jackson’s film breaks the mold of the documentary genre in its manipulation and montage of the visual and audio archives held at the Imperial War Museum in London. Yet he puts his technical virtuosity and resources at the service of a very traditional interpretation of the war, focusing almost entirely on the experience of young Englishmen on the Western Front. Scholars Santanu Das, Susan R. Grayzel, Jessica Meyer, and Catherine Robson offer their reflections on both the gains and losses of Jackson’s paradoxical original use of historical documents and old-fashioned rendering of the war’s experiential elements. They consider, respectively, the experience of colonial troops, the place of women in the war, and Jackson’s creative, if controversial, interpretation of the visual and aural archive.

Sound and Silence in Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old

2019 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1789-1792
Author(s):  
Jessica Meyer
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
World War ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Gains And Losses

Abstract This roundtable offers four diverse perspectives on Peter Jackson’s innovative and controversial World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). Jackson’s film breaks the mold of the documentary genre in its manipulation and montage of the visual and audio archives held at the Imperial War Museum in London. Yet he puts his technical virtuosity and resources at the service of a very traditional interpretation of the war, focusing almost entirely on the experience of young Englishmen on the Western Front. Scholars Santanu Das, Susan R. Grayzel, Jessica Meyer, and Catherine Robson offer their reflections on both the gains and losses of Jackson’s paradoxical original use of historical documents and old-fashioned rendering of the war’s experiential elements. They consider, respectively, the experience of colonial troops, the place of women in the war, and Jackson’s creative, if controversial, interpretation of the visual and aural archive.

Age and Youth, Sound and Vision

2019 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1793-1797
Author(s):  
Catherine Robson
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
World War ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Gains And Losses

Abstract This roundtable offers four diverse perspectives on Peter Jackson’s innovative and controversial World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). Jackson’s film breaks the mold of the documentary genre in its manipulation and montage of the visual and audio archives held at the Imperial War Museum in London. Yet he puts his technical virtuosity and resources at the service of a very traditional interpretation of the war, focusing almost entirely on the experience of young Englishmen on the Western Front. Scholars Santanu Das, Susan R. Grayzel, Jessica Meyer, and Catherine Robson offer their reflections on both the gains and losses of Jackson’s paradoxical original use of historical documents and old-fashioned rendering of the war’s experiential elements. They consider, respectively, the experience of colonial troops, the place of women in the war, and Jackson’s creative, if controversial, interpretation of the visual and aural archive.

Art and Death in French Photographs of Ruins, 1914-1918

2016 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 51-70
Author(s):  
Nicole Hudgins
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Human Suffering ◽  
Aesthetic Response ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Western Front ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
Human Losses

The avalanche of ruin photography in the archives, albums, publications, and propaganda of World War I France challenges us to understand what functions such images fulfilled beyond their use as visual documentation. Did wartime images of ruin continue the European tradition of ruiniste art that went back hundreds of years? Or did their violence represent a break from the past? This article explores how ruin photography of the period fits into a larger aesthetic heritage in France, and how the depiction of ruins (religious, industrial, residential, etc.) on the French side of the Western Front provided means of expressing the shock and grief resulting from the unprecedented human losses of the war. Using official and commercial photographs of the period, the article resituates ruin photography as an aesthetic response to war, a symbol of human suffering, and a repository of rage.

Searching for a Storyteller, Remediating the Archive: Philip Scheffner’s Halfmoon Files

2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 103-124
Author(s):  
Olivia Landry
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
New Media ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
German History ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

Abstract Spurred by the search for the identity of a colonial soldier captured in Germany during World War I, who left his trace in the form of a story in the sound archive in Berlin, Philip Scheffner’s documentary film The Halfmoon Files (2007) is an excavation of an obscured moment in early twentieth-century German history. By way of the figure of the storyteller, read intertextually with Walter Benjamin, this article explores Scheffner’s film as the site of the collision of history and media, where materials of the past come alive in the present through remediation, through which new media revisit the old. The article asserts that the ghost of the storyteller, which haunts this film, returns not in the form of a person but as a hypermedial experience.

Unravelling the Past: World War I in Africa

2021 ◽  
pp. 002190962110549
Author(s):  
Anne Samson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
West Africa ◽  
World War ◽  
French West Africa ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
The Past ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Single Entity ◽  
Conflict In Africa

Africa’s involvement in World War I presents the researcher with challenges that few researchers of the Western Front are likely to encounter. The centenary years of the War have seen a range of publications on the conflict in Africa: from Marike Sherwood who claims little has been written on Africa’s involvement to others who have tended to rely on online articles that are limited in scope and draw on dated publications, thereby perpetuating myths. A handful of researchers are breaking new ground through their accessing of archival material. Authors such as David Killingray and Joe Lunn, writing on West Africa over two World Wars, unwittingly set the scene for how Africa as a whole has been perceived. However, an outcome of the centenary commemorations of the War has been new and varied insights to Africa’s contributions, not least the different approaches taken by Africans and non-Africans, academic and enthusiast, and those interested in the conflicts of French (West) Africa and the rest of Africa. Engagement with the diaspora and people from the across the continent has reinforced the diversity of Africa in contrast to the published narratives and interpretations of the war which have generally been homogeneous in their approach. This study provides an opportunity to explore recent historiographical developments of the war in Africa. In particular, it aims to show that by treating Africa as a single entity (‘Africa is a country’), misconceptions have been perpetuated and experiences of World War II conflated with those of World War I. In addition, the complexities, challenges and rewards of researching Africa’s involvement in World War I are highlighted in the article.

Behind the stage of a literary text. ‘Custom is despot among men’

2020 ◽  
pp. 63-83
Author(s):  
E. N. Tsimbaeva
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Skeletal System ◽  
World War ◽  
Internal Organs ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Past ◽  
Fiction Writers

The article analyzes physical and physiological problems caused by fashionable clothing in the mid-18th to early 20th cc. that shaped people’s appearances and lifestyles in the past. Affecting the skeletal system and the functioning of internal organs and brain in particular and causing various illnesses, these problems went largely unrecognized by contemporaries, including writers, but would inevitably surface in literary works as part and parcel of everyday life. Without understanding their role, one may struggle to comprehend not only plot twists and characters’ motivations but also the mentality of the bygone era as portrayed in fiction. Chronologically, the research covers the period from the mid-18th c. to World War I. The author only focuses on so-called respectable society (a very tentative term that covers members of the aristocracy and other classes with comparable lifestyles), since it was this group which drew the most attention from fiction writers of the period. The scholar chose to concentrate on the kind of daily realia of ‘noble society’ that permeate works by Russian, English, French and, to some extent, German authors, considered most prominent in Europe at the time.

scholarly journals Preface: The Historical Geography of the Hungarian Nation

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-376
Author(s):  
Andrew Ludanyi
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
East European ◽  
The Past ◽  
French And English ◽  
The Subject

The fate of Hungarian minorities in East Central Europe has been one of the most neglected subjects in the Western scholarly world. For the past fifty years the subject—at least prior to the late 1980s—was taboo in the successor states (except Yugoslavia), while in Hungary itself relatively few scholars dared to publish anything about this issue till the early 1980s. In the West, it was just not faddish, since most East European and Russian Area studies centers at American, French and English universities tended to think of the territorial status quo as “politically correct.” The Hungarian minorities, on the other hand, were a frustrating reminder that indeed the Entente after World War I, and the Allies after World War II, made major mistakes and significantly contributed to the pain and anguish of the peoples living in this region of the “shatter zone.”

scholarly journals Mellem to verdener - Krigsrepræsentationer hos Walter Flex, Ernst Jünger og Erich Maria Remarque

2018 ◽  
pp. 65-84
Author(s):  
Adam Paulsen
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Major Shift ◽  
The Difference ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Wanderer

This article compares representations of war in Walter Flex’ The Wanderer between Two Worlds (1916), Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel (1920), and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). It shows the extent to which these representations are shaped by political and ideological convictions. The difference between the romantic idealism of Flex and Jünger’s “soldierly nationalism”,which he proposed as a model for the time to come, reflects a major shift during World War I itself. By contrast, neither past nor future seem to be of any use in Remarque’s famous antiwar novel, in which the war generation surprisingly is described as having nothing else to live for beyond the present, i.e. beyond war. Finally, the article suggests how these different representations of war each, in their own way, contributed to the aesthetics and ideology of fascism.

The Decline and Promise of American Camping

Heading Out ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terence Young
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
World War ◽  
Rapid Urbanization ◽  
The Past

This concluding chapter offers a review of the key notions developed in the earlier chapters and draws upon this enhanced understanding to offer an explanation for why camping's popularity has begun to waver. Despite camping's strong and pervasive popularity today, the zenith of its national appeal occurred in the past. It is impossible to precisely quantify such trends, but camping's cultural significance appears to have peaked with the explosion of auto campers who hit the motor-camping trail during the decade following World War I. This heightened and widespread popularity should be understood as a reflection of the continuing and rapid urbanization that was sweeping through America, transforming it from a largely rural country in 1910 to a distinctly urban one by 1930.

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