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Kitty Calash

~ Confessions of a Known Bonnet-Wearer

Kitty Calash

Category Archives: Movie Review

The Past Never Grows Old

18 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by kittycalash in Living History, Movie Review, Philosophy, Reenacting, Research

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

movie reviews, movies, public history, Research, They Shall Not Grow Old, world war I

It’s obvious that the people I know and associate with understand the genius of They Shall Not Grow Old, and the importance– necessity– of seeing it. This is a brilliant public history project in the most public sense of all– and not only because it’s a movie made by Peter Jackson, which one hopes will attract a wide audience– but because the mini-documentary after the feature lays bare the bones of the making. Jackson’s explication feels at times as if he is speaking to you through his laptop camera on the best Skype connection you’ve ever had. Despite the occasional weirdness of that, it’s worth staying for, because it makes clear what makes the film powerful: research and meticulous attention to detail (plus phenomenal computing power and the genius of WingNut productions).

Royal Irish Rifles, Battle of the Somme

This film rests on research: 100 hours of footage from the Imperial War Museum, 600 hours of oral history audio. Jackson and his team immersed themselves in the media, and it shows. Their intention was to create a generic experience of the common soldier (I may well have teared up at that), so the description of the assault is generic– is it the Somme? Vimy Ridge? Ypres? It is all of them and none of them.

Now the magic of that choice is not that we hear anything about how a Lee-Enfield works, but rather about the minutiae of getting ready to go over the top. We are in the soldiers’ world, and that world is made up of mud, bread and jam, and tea. Yes, there’s talk of the packs and what they carry, but the descriptions of what the waiting was like, how the officers behaved and gave their orders, are what make the moments so immersive. The words match the abject terror on one private’s face, caught in a grimace more rictus than smile. At the same time, we do get descriptions of the logic of the shelling, what the shells contain, and how the mines work. Matched to footage showing what the veterans describe, we come to understand how terrifying those moments were– and then we hear how, once you go over the top, fear disappears as you walk towards the German lines. (The walking always astonishes me: but that’s how they did it, lines of soldiers walked towards the machine gun nests.)

But it’s the details of the getting ready and the tension of the waiting that make the assault so much more intense, as contrast always will. The assault itself, for which there is no footage because it was too dangerous to send cameramen over the top, is depicted with halftones from The War Illustrated, selected for their realism and lack of heroics. (Published in Britain, it was as much a propaganda tool as a documentary publication, though accuracy improved over time.)

We don’t get the “glory” of a battle. We don’t get heroics. We get descriptions of the most terrifying and dehumanizing “job of work” people (mostly men) are ever asked to do. And we get the aftermath, rendered small. In detail. The descriptions of wounds and deaths are moving, and the tireless work of the doctors, but then there is the desire for a cup of tea. Tea threads through the film, seeping into every aspect of the war. It is, after all, men living daily lives in the most outrageous conditions, where every banal desire– dry feet, strawberry jam, a safe place to defecate–is thwarted by the conditions that make those desires so achingly large and yet dismissable. You have to enjoy what you have and can achieve and laugh at what you cannot, or you won’t survive. No one can ache endlessly.

What makes this film really work is the hyper-attentive focus on detail, on getting everything as right as possible, from the color of the uniforms to the accents giving the soldiers voice. The point of the research is not detail for details’ sake, but immersion. Only when there is nothing to notice– nothing that seems amiss, an entirely seamless world–can we fully enter the other, another time, place, culture. That is what we are seeing: another culture, with its own language, mores, habits and taboos.

This is what we are trying to recreate when we reenact the past: we are reviving a lost culture. To do that correctly and well, we need to apply the same level of care and understanding and empathy visible in Jackson’s film. We need to make sure that the details are correct not because the public will call us out on errors, but because the oversights are disrupting. The difference between a well-researched, highly detailed impression that does not focus on “Want to know how a musket works?” and one that’s musket-centric and approximates the past with “If they’d had it, they would’ve used it” is not actually of quality or necessarily or care. The difference is that one allows both the enactor and the audience to more fully enter the past. It’s like a bubble of time we can step into, one where we get as close as we can to how the people of the past saw, thought, felt, smelled. The other, often excused with “The public can’t tell the difference,” remains performative and distant, only half-reaching the past.

The public can tell the difference. They can tell when what they are seeing comes closer to the past, engages with the material in detail and in attitude, and creates attitude, worldview, empathy rather than a recitation of facts. To reenact the past, we must inhabit it, from the color of the wool to accent of the speech, to the taste of the food. The moments we recreate are specific in time, and, when they embody everything you can know about that moment, help us reach across time to understand both the past and the moment in which we stand.

Vera Brittain and her brother, Edward, in 1915. Testament of Youth was my gateway drug to World War I.

I am the last person to tell you I get close to this ideal of detail. I strive for it, and do the best I can to be whatever character I’ve selected. I write this not from the position of someone who has mastered the past, but as someone who has seen technique and principles applied to one medium– film– that are applicable to living history, exhibit design, public programming, and writing. Jackson’s film illustrates the power of knowing details and the power of caring about those details not for trivia’s sake but for the Tommy’s sake. Those specific details serve to create the “everymen” of the War. The research to find which regiments are shown, to get the shoulder badges right, to find how what speech an officer is reading, prove the power of the archives. The past is there, waiting for us, in acid free boxes. We can restore the dignity and humanity of the people of the past by reading their words. Specificity creates archetype.

At the end, Jackson encourages the audience to ask their family members about their history, to find out what stories there are, to find out how the Great War touched them. He reminds us that those memories die with the people who carry them, unless we ask and write them down (or record them). That is perhaps the greatest public history lesson of all: that the past touches us all through the people we know and love, and that by knowing those stories, we can understand not only our family stories, but the history we all share.

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The Devil is in the Details

21 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by kittycalash in History, Living History, Movie Review, Philosophy

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

authenticity, interpretation, living history, progressive reenacting

durer_hare

The Hare. Watercolor on paper by Albrecht Durer, 1502. The Albertina, Vienna.

The Witch. I had to go see it after Mr JS sent me a link to this article, and of course I was captivated. (I also needed a break after what was very nearly the Worst Week Ever, starting Wednesday at 4:30AM.)

“The recreation of farm life in 1630s Massachusetts is so complete it pulls you into the pocket universe that exists inside the characters’ minds. As you experience their fear, you experience your own. The barrier between you and the people on film disappears, and their terror consumes you. And that is how you make a scary movie!”

That pocket universe: that’s what some of us are after when we go about this living history business, creating a world so seamless (or so meticulously hand-seamed) that you, the interpreter, appear to inhabit the past and the present simultaneously.¹

So how does it work? How did it work in The Witch?

Here’s Eggers on authenticity:

“…authenticity for the sake of authenticity doesn’t really matter. To understand why the witch archetype was important and interesting and powerful—and how was I going to make that scary and alive again—we had to go back in time to the early modern period when the witch was a reality. And the only way I was going to do that, I decided, was by having it be insanely accurate.”

Got that? Authenticity for the sake of authenticity doesn’t really matter.

But the only way to make the witch powerful was to be “insanely accurate.”

The only way to make living history powerful is to be <ahem> insanely accurate.² If we’re not, the points where we are not accurate will stand out, the spell will be broken, and the visitor will be lost. The real thing is the right thing for your time and place. Context: It really does matter. 

That means that just because you perfectly replicated a silk gown from a French fashion plate it may be wildly incorrect for the streets of Providence, Boston, or Philadelphia– much less a military camp– even if it’s the same year as the event you’re attending. It means that just because you got every buttonhole perfect on your 1765 frock coat, it won’t be right for an 1803 funeral if you’re only 30.

Don't take an anecdote to a data fight.

Don’t take an anecdote to a data fight.

When you’re wearing and carrying the right clothes and objects for your portrayal, you can focus less of the what and more on the why. As interpreters, re-enactors, enactors, whatever you want to call yourself, we lead the visitor to better questions and a better understanding of not just events but the meaning of the past if we are thoroughly convinced and convincing. And that only happens by questioning ourselves.

The Witch is a horror movie, and while it was tense, the world it portrayed felt pretty close and natural to me and to Mr JS. Maybe that’s because we spend so much time trying to understand that vanished world—it’s Roger Williams, baby—maybe because we engage in living history and material culture. I don’t know if it’s scarier for folks who don’t have that level of context, don’t assume a world where hierarchy, acceptance, succumbing to a higher power, is normal. Where everything is a matter of faith, and belief. It’s a tiny world, that past. We were so immersed in that world that walking out into the mall was a shock: colors, noises, smells. And the world was so immersive because the details were so correct.

Ultimately, what we do with living history is interpretation, and interpretation is provocation.³ But what should be provoked is not a question about what you have, but why you have it, and what you’ll do with it. And that only happens if you have the right thing.

………………….

1 Your mileage may vary. It’s my dream goal. “Man’s reach should extend his grasp” and all that.

2 That is, as accurate as possible, recognizing the limitations of modern materials and access to primary source documents. More on that later.

3 Freeman Tilden. Interpreting Our Heritage, Chapel Hill: 2007. p. 35

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The Monuments Meh

09 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by kittycalash in Art Rant, History, Movie Review, Museums

≈ Comments Off on The Monuments Meh

Tags

George Clooney, history, Kelly's Heroes, movie reviews, The Monuments Men, The Train, World War II

GI guards works of art stolen by the Nazis

GI guards works of art stolen by the Nazis

Mr S and I went to the movies on Saturday afternoon to see the long-awaited Monuments Men movie. It had been the hotly anticipated film in my set– guns, art, George Clooney: what’s not to like? We knew the history would be bad, we expected inaccurate museum practices, but still. The ingredients were sound, how bad could it be?

Well…not so bad that I’m sorry I went to see it, but sadly lacking in oomph. When a movie has a website that includes lesson plans, maybe you should not be surprised by its leaden, film-strip qualities.

I’d read the Times review, I knew what I was getting into when we bought our tickets, and we bough them anyway. Art, guns, Clooney, remember?

Here’s what I thought, in somewhat random order:

That movie’s not done. The soundtrack is horrible and needs to go. Also, the voice-over. George Clooney can read me the dictionary at bedtime any time, but the kill the heroics. Please.

But that’s just a symptom of the film and director’s insecurity. This movie isn’t brave enough to be convinced of its own mission, not unlike museums today. It keeps trying so hard to sell me on the idea that art is humanity, our collective soul, that must be saved and is, in fact, worth a life. Dude, I bought that program before I was 12. To toss a cliche back, Just believe. Everything else will follow. If the film, the director, and the star keep trying to sell me on the principle idea, there’s something wrong.

A Rembrandt self-portrait recovered at a German salt mine that had been used as a storehouse, with Harry L. Ettlinger, right. Monuments Men Foundation

A Rembrandt self-portrait recovered at a German salt mine that had been used as a storehouse, with Harry L. Ettlinger, right. Monuments Men Foundation

There’s no clear enemy, and that leads to the film’s core flabbiness: no tension. Clooney looks slender as I expect my 1940s-era heroes, but the center doesn’t hold. Narrative, dramatic films need tension. (You know, plot.) “Get the art before something bad happens” doesn’t quite do it. Before Hitler burns it? Before the Soviets scoop it up and haul it back to the USSR? Ultimately, Clooney doesn’t need Nazis or Soviets as enemies: his real enemy here is time.

Surely Mr. Clooney schooled himself in the one of the loopiest but most entertaining WWII caper films, Kelly’s Heroes. Acting out of pure self-interest, a group of American soldiers on 3 days R&R race 30 miles behind enemy lines to steal $16 million in gold. It’s not great art, but this is a good movie. Anachronistic? You bet. Oddball is an unlikely character, a Joseph Heller minor figure crossed with a healthy dose of filthy hippie. Crapgame’s a stereotype and so is Big Joe. But there’s tension in this movie, helped along by a pleasant lack of music, which allows us to experience the crunches, thrums, clicks and booms of war. A few scenes in The Monuments Men refer to Kelly’s Heroes (Goodman and Dujardin’s scene on a road is reminiscent of a road ambush in the Eastwood film), but the places where you might expect to find parallels, I found the Eastwood film better. (Yes, we went home and watched it.)

And then there’s Sam Epstein from Newark via Germany. This Monuments Men character left Germany in 1938, with his parents, but his grandfather stayed behind. By 1944/1945, his grandfather had not been heard from in 4 years, but the family knew he’d been sent to Dachau. Though the family lived in a town with a museum with a Rembrandt self-portrait, Sam has never seen it; they weren’t allowed into the museum, because, as the grandfather said, they were ‘too short.’ Why can’t the film confront the confiscation of Jewish property more directly? Why can’t it do a better job with the Holocaust than Clooney’s scene with the German officer? There’s brief scene with a barrel of gold that is absolutely chilling: and I think the film would have been better served with more upfront recognition of that barrel’s contents, what ‘too short’ really means, and the pervasive anti-Semitism of most of the world in the 1940s. (Gentleman’s Agreement, anyone?)

I don’t know enough about the actual history to quarrel over that, and while I will hunt up the books and read them, I was more taken with what seemed like obvious cinematic, movie-making failings– the “I’m heroic!” soundtrack, the lack of central tension, and the curious blindness to, or oddly tangential portrayal of Nazi racial hatred that fueled confiscation programs.

(For another movie about French resistance to Nazi art theft, there is always The Train: Burt Lancaster, art, and guns.)

I wish Clooney had been more willing to frighten us, to make a Saving Private Ryan about saving (or failing to save all of) the art. Feeling the losses and the failures more might have let us see the greatness, the monumentality, if you will, of what the team did accomplish.

Pluses: Good costuming with uniforms that age over time. Plenty of hardware.
Minuses: Soundtrack, unconvincing replicas of masterpieces. Also, nobody had 2014 Hollywood teeth in the 1940s.
Damn terrifying: The vision of Clooney to come in the final scene.

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