They Shall Not Grow Old

With his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson showcased how new digital effects could expand the arc of narrative filmmaking; with this 2018 collaboration with Britain’s Imperial War Museum (done for the one hundredth anniversary of World War I), he effectively does the same with the archival newsreel. Jackson and team took hours of silent war footage, digitally restored and retimed it, researched existing museum collections for correct colors, and added foley effects or veteran’s oral histories to create a contemporary epic of a century-old war and a snapshot of a society—and countless lives—now gone. “Jackson has done something quite remarkable: using 21st-century technology to put the humanity back into old movie stock. The result is utterly breathtaking” (Mark Kermode, The Observer).