What makes our civilized world remember war?

Jordyn 2022-03-21 09:03:00

Hand-painted posters and low-frame-rate video footage are displayed on the screen at a slow pace like a moving picture. The silent video needs to be explained with the help of dubbing, so that the audience can understand what kind of picture is recorded in the image that was recorded a hundred years ago. The standard black-and-white documentary-like twenty minutes at the beginning of the film made me feel solemn but boring. I was cultivated under the nourishment of colorful images and realistic sound effects since I was a child. What's more, what unfolded in front of me was a distant war of which I had no experience at all.

But after more than 20 minutes, when the image was enlarged, the tones of the image scattered from the two ends of the color spectrum, and I heard the crunching sound of the soldiers stepping on the ground when the soldiers marched in the formation, my heart was One trembling: The war is alive.

In the past 100 years, the development of science and technology has brought the decency of the civilized world to a new historical height. I can sit on the soft sofa and experience with my eyes the unknown things that the trench soldiers experienced a hundred years ago. But that decency also had the downside that it made war, the savage creation of civilization, so clear that it disgusted me. Recalling the sworn faces of the politicians who created the First World War when they wielded the big stick of national rights and fairness and justice to drive countless young people into inhuman hell, the faith in civilization in my heart was deeply stinged, and I could not for a long time. Let go.

What makes our civilized world remember war? For over 100 years, staggering statistics and textual discourses have done this. Today, images better convince us of the inhumanity and cruelty of war. Thanks to this civilization's creation, it helps us to look back on our mistakes and crimes as we move into the future. But in addition to technology, in the extension of images, there are more contents that we need to remember with our hearts. After all, what we should do is not to give time to civilization, but to give time to civilization.

View more about They Shall Not Grow Old reviews

Extended Reading
  • Jamison 2022-03-27 09:01:18

    Good to be good, but due to the limitation of materials, this anonymous conversation of one person and one sentence can reproduce the perspective of a soldier in a broad sense, but at the same time, it also loses the more powerful effect that one or two specific narrators can bring. Good empathy, and somewhat fragmented.

  • Ara 2022-03-25 09:01:19

    #HKIFF43#Why are they not getting old anymore? On the one hand, their youth was fixed a hundred years ago; on the other hand, the frame changed from narrow to wide, from black and white to color, and the 3D depth of field grew from nothing—a great spiritual conjuration accompanied by a sense of cinematic ritual! The image gives them a chance to be reborn, and another chance to die in the time and space of the movie, where life and death coexist as true and false. But when the camera is close to them, even if it is a fake, the smile is real, and the capture is eternal.

Top cast

They Shall Not Grow Old quotes

  • Soldier: [waving at camera] Hi, mum.

  • Soldier: You don't look, you see. You don't hear, you listen. You taste the top of your mouth. Your nose is filled with fumes and death. But the veneer of civilization has dropped away.