Since the 1960s and 1970s, with the development of modernist films and a series of avant-garde film movements in various countries and regions around the world, these "waves" have also had a profound and subversive impact on contemporary documentary films. The famous contemporary film theorist Linda Williams published in 1993 the article "The Mirror without Memory-Reality, History and Newly Recorded Film", which made a profound and inspiring systematic interpretation of postmodern film.
In the early days of film, an important task of theorists was to try to prove that film has a strong creative potential as art, rather than just a magic tool to restore material reality. With the development of the film industry and the perfection of theory, facts have proved Movies are not only products of subjective consciousness. Creators can choose materials, angles, and design spaces according to their own expression demands. They can also make images produce convincing narratives through strategic juxtaposition to achieve certain ideological goals. (Including recording movies). People increasingly tend to believe that there is no so-called "real movie". In the post-modern era, the crisis of trust in images has been further strengthened. Images can be changed their original meaning through technical collage, out-of-context interception and enlargement, and text and language guidance and reconstruction, thereby distorting the truth and recording the existence value and discourse of the film. The mechanism faces more severe challenges and dilemmas.
Linda Williams introduced the concept of "new record film" and analyzed several representative works in detail. The remnants of history rediscover or construct a relative but powerful reality.
"They Are No Longer Grow Old" obviously can be classified into the category of postmodernist film recording. Peter Jackson has no intention to show people the historical authenticity of the original material. He uses image restoration technology, coloring technology, and 3D technology. The video from a hundred years ago has been transformed into a format that viewers are more accustomed to accept today. The subjective collage is used to synchronize the video with the narrations of veterans of World War I. Together, the video and sound form a complete linear time. logic. The sense of reality and experience brought about by this continuity of historical time is difficult to obtain from fragmented historical materials.
Peter Jackson's use of historical images caused the film to explode and reveal stronger narrative effects and traces of fiction (montage techniques, cartoon insertion, and emphasis on camera movement) than drama films. The image transitioned from black and white at the beginning to color when the soldiers entered the battlefield, and then returned to black and white after the war. The experience reverts to a historical perspective. In the era of information explosion and extreme proliferation of images, people’s vision has long been accustomed to various horrifying historical images, perception has gradually become numb, "reality" has lost its original warning value, and "memory" is no longer It can be called memory. The only way to arouse perception and memory is through synaesthesia and empathy, reappearing the process from presence to absence. The Holocaust, which Williams focused on in his article, adopted a similar approach, re-intervening in the broken history, scattered fragments evoked by memory, forming an intertextual structure between the past and the present, so that the crimes of the past can be reproduced in the present. .
In "They Are No Longer Growing Old", from the beginning to the end, there are no parties, investigators, or other forms of material other than video data, and the content of these images is only deliberately selected based on the oral content. It is not necessarily the scene experienced by the narrator, but the coincidence of the two media and the continuity of time advancement cover this point well. We don’t know what the veterans are called, what they look like now, or even to the film. It is impossible to distinguish their respective voices at the end. This forms a kind of personal narrative. Multiple narrators actually aggregate into a complete experience of one person, and one person condenses the common destiny of one million young lives in the First World War. In this way, the nihility and symbolization of the grand historical narrative are eliminated.
In the process of interpreting a certain period of history, the ideological state apparatus tends to take a more macroscopic historical perspective, giving it extraordinary general expressions and overall meaning (through education, culture, media, etc.). In order to fit the historical development process of the entire nation. There may not necessarily be distortions and tampering elements. The starting point and key points of the event axis and even the important nodes in the middle are in line with the facts, but the continuity between points is avoided and ignored. On this basis, typical characters are established. With the romantic rendering of turning events and the completion of a panoramic official historical revision, the annihilation of countless individuals in the torrent has been taken for granted.
Under the influence of this ideology, we can understand the influence of the causes and consequences of the First World War, changes in the structure, important battles, and the victory of the Allies on the reconstruction of the new world order. But this kind of discontinuous narrative makes us ignore how soldiers are called up, how individuals live in the trenches, how they eat, how they excrete, the psychological torture they wait for the cannonballs to fall, and the huge body fragmentation of their comrades. Fear, and, after the end of the nightmare war, the individual is marginalized in normal society, falling into another more lasting and eternal nightmare. These fragments, which are also part of history, have been meticulously restored in "They Are No Longer Growing Old". Their authenticity is not worthy of doubt, because these details must be true, but they have never been noticed. After the war, they endured numbness and trauma, but a hundred years later, we were able to praise and celebrate the victory. . The film is not dedicated to demonstrating the truth, but to arouse people's correct understanding and perception of the truth, just like "Havoc" completely discards the existing evidence and historical facts and recreates the truth in reality, and re-engraves the obliterated stone monument of the original text.
Throughout the history of film, there has never been a shortage of war films. Most of them are seeking to create grand and fierce war scenes to meet the needs of mass entertainment, or to make military fans addicted by careful and meticulous counterpoint of war elements, or to use drama Empathy arouses people's self-immersive false humanistic care. But what war actually means, how it is operated, and what kind of impact it can have on society and individuals, seems to have become increasingly dimmed. What remains is only a great chapter composed of historical symbols, those young people in the First World War. Life, fellow human beings in the Jewish Holocaust, seems to belong only to the past. The narration at the end of the film said: No matter how people can understand us. But fortunately, such works can provide us with a way to understand and help us understand as much as possible.
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