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Well, that's your medal sorted, then
I hope that Sam Mendes' 1917 (2019) is not remembered as a trick of cinematography, no matter how impressively realized its conceit of one near-continuous shot. It plays much weirder tricks with time.
I don't mean the normal hauntology of film, Laura Mulvey's definition of cinema as death twenty-four times a second. From the early survey of no man's land to the explosive kinetics of the finale, 1917 dramatizes something I have seen over and over again in the literature of the First World War, but never so viscerally on film: the way that the war has smashed time, churned it up like the earth itself so that it will never lie clean again without its seeping scars and nightmares, a zone rouge of memory. On April 6, 1917, the war that began on July 28, 1914 has been going for less than three years and the terrain over which Lance Corporal Will Schofield (George MacKay) and Lance Corporal Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) move by the terrifying exposure of daylight looks as though it has been fought over forever, a ruin of floods and craters and the matchsticks of trees where nothing could ever have rooted or flourished or died naturally. Dead horses lie bloating so newly that the flies are still settling on them, but the sentry of the line is a corpse tattered past horror to macabre courtesy, half-dangled in the old barbed wire as if bowing a willkommen, the maître d'enfers. There are tanks half-buried in immovable walls of earth like tholos tombs. The mud is thick with dead men and some of them are staring to the bone and some so fresh that a skidding hand squashes through them like a rotten orange. Where did they come from? Who has ever been out here but the small, scared figures of our two messengers, skirting the tangled spikes of chevaux de frise as if the bright overcast itself might snipe them? It seems not just uninhabited but uninhabitable, and yet a brazier is smoldering in the German trench which unfolds into a chalk-walled complex far huger than the mud-slung sandbags and duckboards of the British dugouts, square-cut and deserted as some forgotten temple and like their myth booby-trapped—beyond the wrecked remains of artillery blown as scorched-earth as a bridge, even in the superficially civilian setting of a farmhouse where a bucket of milk can be drunk still warm, a mutilated doll suggests queasily what might have become of the people whose cow is lowing out in the field, but they come to light no more than the dead of the Hundred Years' War. Isaac Rosenberg wrote in 1916, It is the same old druid Time as ever, and perhaps it literally is, round and round on its ever-devouring self. Life in the trenches is barking enough, but venture beyond them and the camaraderie of other British soldiers encountered on the road to the Hindenburg Line becomes more jarring than the violence offered by the Germans, the hallucinogenically flare-lit night-maze of shelled-out Écoust-Saint-Mein like the previous generation of the underworld of Cocteau's Orphée (1950) looks no stranger than a still, clear river snowed with cherry blossom like a fatal orchard, black as the Styx and as soporific and choked with corpses, the backlog of an overfraught Charon. That it is such a consistently beautiful film makes it a beginning of terror we are barely able to bear. Time presses it on, and us with it, and is running out.
Time is the device and the antagonist of 1917. The screenplay co-written by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns runs like folk horror on the back of a techno-thriller: the impetus for this relentless odyssey is the cut wires of the field telephones which leave no other way to call off a doomed attack than to send the order by foot, a shortest line whose traversal will take six to eight hours under the best of circumstances, which no one in their right mind or even out of it would call anything connected to the Western Front. Characterized as it was by the terrible confusions of future and past, mechanization and meat, even the living and the dead, it skins the film down inevitably to its own metaphor in a heart-stopping sprint through a wave of troops already going over the top, asking in the concussions of earth and the shrilling of whistles and the silence of bodies whether anything can move faster than a war. Whether it has taken on its own scale of time, as far beyond the human lives that set it in motion as the drift of continents and the drying of seas, become so vast and self-perpetuating that it is beyond mortal recall. Whether any of those lives can even alter its trajectory or merely feed themselves into its unappeasable advance. "If you do manage to get to Colonel Mackenzie," Schofield is warned by a somber-voiced officer en route to the new line, "make sure there are witnesses . . . Some men just want the fight." We are thus primed to brace for some gung-ho patriotic sadist and instead when we meet the man in command of the sixteen hundred souls of the 2nd Devons, not that old and starred across one eye with a healing-red scar, the most apparent thing about him is the damage radiating as painfully as the captain who was weeping incoherently further down the line, he's as straight as a set bone and desperately wanting the mirage of the big push to be real, for victory to be five hundred yards instead of a year and a half away. There's no eagerness in his claim that the war will end with the last man standing, merely too much exhaustion to imagine anything else. Save your men this week, slaughter them the next. The entropy of the war has sucked him down like the mud in which Tolkien would plant the candle-corpses of the Dead Marshes and if he can't pull himself out of it long enough to read a letter, he's nothing but a human face on the blood-engine that Schofield and Blake have raced against from the second their sergeant booted them awake in a field of nodding white asters and yellow-flowered rapeseed, less than twenty-four hours behind and as far off as Elysium. Then again, we may remember that Schofield himself couldn't stand to be home on leave because he knew it wasn't real, the war was waiting for him and he would have to return. Considering how much of a film he has to carry on comparatively little dialogue, it matters even more that he's not a transparent stand-in, the anchor for the audience's eye; he's as specific as a line of David Jones. But how intolerably bright the morning is where we who are alive and remain, walk lifted up, carried forward by an effective word. Where Blake is supplied more conventionally with letters from home and a brother in the threatened battalion, our first concrete information about Schofield is the wound stripe on his sleeve, later that he's a decorated veteran of the Somme, later still that he got rid of his medal, traded it for a bottle of French wine: "I was thirsty." He's the older soldier carrying bread in his pockets, the more reluctant, more cynical and frightened of the two, making it all the more understated and brave that as they hesitate on the last rung of the ladder that leads out of their trench, Schofield gently sets a hand on Blake's arm, reminds him, "Age before beauty," and goes over the top first. Sometimes the raw planes of his face look so young, it's a wonder he can speak of having a family of his own, sometimes as weathered as an aeon of stone. For a moment in the lullaby rhythms of Edward Lear, we catch, not the man he was in peacetime, but the memory of that man, like an inscription on the back of a photograph it may be finally safe to read. He isn't the writer-director's grandfather to whom the film is dedicated, but if he represents Lance Corporal Alfred H. Mendes of the 1st Battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps, perhaps he too will come home to tell the stories.
1917's awards and nominations were overwhelmingly for its technical achievements, which is understandable in terms of the complexity of creating an illusion of uncut real time out of a succession of long takes whose moving panorama of action was of necessity as choreographed and extensively rehearsed as theater; the structure, the duration, and the pace in fact leave the impression that in the right months of 2019 one could have watched the entire thing staged titanically live in a field somewhere, half installation, half reenactment. I would like to have seen more recognition of the actors, from the relative newcomers of the leads to the rotating small parts played by the ludicrous roster of Colin Firth, Andrew Scott, Mark Strong, Adrian Scarborough, Benedict Cumberbatch, Richard Madden and more. The agile camera of Roger Deakins and the deft cutting of Lee Smith support the fancy that we are borne along in the point of view of our protagonists, but since it isn't some kind of first-person shooter, we observe as much of them, too. From the casual way that Blake talks of his family's cherry trees as they pass through the flowering lumber of a felled orchard, we understand that he isn't as estranged as Schofield from the idea of home. We learn a lot about the latter's shell-shock from how sharply he startles under the unexpected kindness of a touch. And long before he wakes to find his watch splintered on his wrist and no way of telling the hour or even the date of the night that surrounds him, time even as it ticks away second by visible second onscreen is out of joint—forget the legendary fractures of bayonets fixed against phosgene, Blake and Schofield before leaving their own trench have to settle a bet as to the day of the week. "Friday! Well, well, well. None of us was right." The production's knack for the tense and the uncanny does not exclude an often gallows sense of humor and a deliberate eye for the parts of the war that did not set so seamlessly into national myth, like the sepoy played by Nabhaan Rizwan who of all the squaddies crammed into the canvas-flapping back of a truck—"the night bus to fuck knows where"—does the best impersonation of their appalling C.O. It's a solid war movie. It's just that I can think of hardly any others that feel so much like war poetry. For the opening stillness of Schofield and Blake, Siegfried Sassoon: You are too young to fall asleep forever; / And when you sleep you remind me of the dead. For the great ages of apocalypse over no man's land, Wilfred Owen: Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped / Through granites which titanic wars had groined. David Jones, for the absurdity of hell on the clock: Besides which there was the heavy battery operating just beneath the ridge, at a kept interval of minutes, with unnerving inevitability, as a malign chronometer, ticking off with each discharge an exactly measured progress toward a certain and prearranged hour of apocalypse. Edward Thomas for the cherries, or perhaps a pocket edition of Housman. The general quotes Kipling, not jingoistically. Going into this movie, I didn't expect to be reminded more of Derek Jarman's War Requiem (1989) than Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017), but I welcome the experience.
Given the importance of the novels and short stories of Alfred Mendes to the history of Caribbean literature, 1917's release would have been a nice opportunity for NYRB or Faber & Faber or somebody to reissue his work as a sort of tie-in, but I understand that 2020 got a little weird. I still don't think time's sorted itself out since then. I don't know how comforting it is to think that it's happened before. I watched the film originally on library DVD, during a suspended time of my own. Down to Gehenna, over Jordan, to sea in a Sieve. This witness brought to you by my right backers at Patreon.
I don't mean the normal hauntology of film, Laura Mulvey's definition of cinema as death twenty-four times a second. From the early survey of no man's land to the explosive kinetics of the finale, 1917 dramatizes something I have seen over and over again in the literature of the First World War, but never so viscerally on film: the way that the war has smashed time, churned it up like the earth itself so that it will never lie clean again without its seeping scars and nightmares, a zone rouge of memory. On April 6, 1917, the war that began on July 28, 1914 has been going for less than three years and the terrain over which Lance Corporal Will Schofield (George MacKay) and Lance Corporal Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) move by the terrifying exposure of daylight looks as though it has been fought over forever, a ruin of floods and craters and the matchsticks of trees where nothing could ever have rooted or flourished or died naturally. Dead horses lie bloating so newly that the flies are still settling on them, but the sentry of the line is a corpse tattered past horror to macabre courtesy, half-dangled in the old barbed wire as if bowing a willkommen, the maître d'enfers. There are tanks half-buried in immovable walls of earth like tholos tombs. The mud is thick with dead men and some of them are staring to the bone and some so fresh that a skidding hand squashes through them like a rotten orange. Where did they come from? Who has ever been out here but the small, scared figures of our two messengers, skirting the tangled spikes of chevaux de frise as if the bright overcast itself might snipe them? It seems not just uninhabited but uninhabitable, and yet a brazier is smoldering in the German trench which unfolds into a chalk-walled complex far huger than the mud-slung sandbags and duckboards of the British dugouts, square-cut and deserted as some forgotten temple and like their myth booby-trapped—beyond the wrecked remains of artillery blown as scorched-earth as a bridge, even in the superficially civilian setting of a farmhouse where a bucket of milk can be drunk still warm, a mutilated doll suggests queasily what might have become of the people whose cow is lowing out in the field, but they come to light no more than the dead of the Hundred Years' War. Isaac Rosenberg wrote in 1916, It is the same old druid Time as ever, and perhaps it literally is, round and round on its ever-devouring self. Life in the trenches is barking enough, but venture beyond them and the camaraderie of other British soldiers encountered on the road to the Hindenburg Line becomes more jarring than the violence offered by the Germans, the hallucinogenically flare-lit night-maze of shelled-out Écoust-Saint-Mein like the previous generation of the underworld of Cocteau's Orphée (1950) looks no stranger than a still, clear river snowed with cherry blossom like a fatal orchard, black as the Styx and as soporific and choked with corpses, the backlog of an overfraught Charon. That it is such a consistently beautiful film makes it a beginning of terror we are barely able to bear. Time presses it on, and us with it, and is running out.
Time is the device and the antagonist of 1917. The screenplay co-written by Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns runs like folk horror on the back of a techno-thriller: the impetus for this relentless odyssey is the cut wires of the field telephones which leave no other way to call off a doomed attack than to send the order by foot, a shortest line whose traversal will take six to eight hours under the best of circumstances, which no one in their right mind or even out of it would call anything connected to the Western Front. Characterized as it was by the terrible confusions of future and past, mechanization and meat, even the living and the dead, it skins the film down inevitably to its own metaphor in a heart-stopping sprint through a wave of troops already going over the top, asking in the concussions of earth and the shrilling of whistles and the silence of bodies whether anything can move faster than a war. Whether it has taken on its own scale of time, as far beyond the human lives that set it in motion as the drift of continents and the drying of seas, become so vast and self-perpetuating that it is beyond mortal recall. Whether any of those lives can even alter its trajectory or merely feed themselves into its unappeasable advance. "If you do manage to get to Colonel Mackenzie," Schofield is warned by a somber-voiced officer en route to the new line, "make sure there are witnesses . . . Some men just want the fight." We are thus primed to brace for some gung-ho patriotic sadist and instead when we meet the man in command of the sixteen hundred souls of the 2nd Devons, not that old and starred across one eye with a healing-red scar, the most apparent thing about him is the damage radiating as painfully as the captain who was weeping incoherently further down the line, he's as straight as a set bone and desperately wanting the mirage of the big push to be real, for victory to be five hundred yards instead of a year and a half away. There's no eagerness in his claim that the war will end with the last man standing, merely too much exhaustion to imagine anything else. Save your men this week, slaughter them the next. The entropy of the war has sucked him down like the mud in which Tolkien would plant the candle-corpses of the Dead Marshes and if he can't pull himself out of it long enough to read a letter, he's nothing but a human face on the blood-engine that Schofield and Blake have raced against from the second their sergeant booted them awake in a field of nodding white asters and yellow-flowered rapeseed, less than twenty-four hours behind and as far off as Elysium. Then again, we may remember that Schofield himself couldn't stand to be home on leave because he knew it wasn't real, the war was waiting for him and he would have to return. Considering how much of a film he has to carry on comparatively little dialogue, it matters even more that he's not a transparent stand-in, the anchor for the audience's eye; he's as specific as a line of David Jones. But how intolerably bright the morning is where we who are alive and remain, walk lifted up, carried forward by an effective word. Where Blake is supplied more conventionally with letters from home and a brother in the threatened battalion, our first concrete information about Schofield is the wound stripe on his sleeve, later that he's a decorated veteran of the Somme, later still that he got rid of his medal, traded it for a bottle of French wine: "I was thirsty." He's the older soldier carrying bread in his pockets, the more reluctant, more cynical and frightened of the two, making it all the more understated and brave that as they hesitate on the last rung of the ladder that leads out of their trench, Schofield gently sets a hand on Blake's arm, reminds him, "Age before beauty," and goes over the top first. Sometimes the raw planes of his face look so young, it's a wonder he can speak of having a family of his own, sometimes as weathered as an aeon of stone. For a moment in the lullaby rhythms of Edward Lear, we catch, not the man he was in peacetime, but the memory of that man, like an inscription on the back of a photograph it may be finally safe to read. He isn't the writer-director's grandfather to whom the film is dedicated, but if he represents Lance Corporal Alfred H. Mendes of the 1st Battalion of the King's Royal Rifle Corps, perhaps he too will come home to tell the stories.
1917's awards and nominations were overwhelmingly for its technical achievements, which is understandable in terms of the complexity of creating an illusion of uncut real time out of a succession of long takes whose moving panorama of action was of necessity as choreographed and extensively rehearsed as theater; the structure, the duration, and the pace in fact leave the impression that in the right months of 2019 one could have watched the entire thing staged titanically live in a field somewhere, half installation, half reenactment. I would like to have seen more recognition of the actors, from the relative newcomers of the leads to the rotating small parts played by the ludicrous roster of Colin Firth, Andrew Scott, Mark Strong, Adrian Scarborough, Benedict Cumberbatch, Richard Madden and more. The agile camera of Roger Deakins and the deft cutting of Lee Smith support the fancy that we are borne along in the point of view of our protagonists, but since it isn't some kind of first-person shooter, we observe as much of them, too. From the casual way that Blake talks of his family's cherry trees as they pass through the flowering lumber of a felled orchard, we understand that he isn't as estranged as Schofield from the idea of home. We learn a lot about the latter's shell-shock from how sharply he startles under the unexpected kindness of a touch. And long before he wakes to find his watch splintered on his wrist and no way of telling the hour or even the date of the night that surrounds him, time even as it ticks away second by visible second onscreen is out of joint—forget the legendary fractures of bayonets fixed against phosgene, Blake and Schofield before leaving their own trench have to settle a bet as to the day of the week. "Friday! Well, well, well. None of us was right." The production's knack for the tense and the uncanny does not exclude an often gallows sense of humor and a deliberate eye for the parts of the war that did not set so seamlessly into national myth, like the sepoy played by Nabhaan Rizwan who of all the squaddies crammed into the canvas-flapping back of a truck—"the night bus to fuck knows where"—does the best impersonation of their appalling C.O. It's a solid war movie. It's just that I can think of hardly any others that feel so much like war poetry. For the opening stillness of Schofield and Blake, Siegfried Sassoon: You are too young to fall asleep forever; / And when you sleep you remind me of the dead. For the great ages of apocalypse over no man's land, Wilfred Owen: Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped / Through granites which titanic wars had groined. David Jones, for the absurdity of hell on the clock: Besides which there was the heavy battery operating just beneath the ridge, at a kept interval of minutes, with unnerving inevitability, as a malign chronometer, ticking off with each discharge an exactly measured progress toward a certain and prearranged hour of apocalypse. Edward Thomas for the cherries, or perhaps a pocket edition of Housman. The general quotes Kipling, not jingoistically. Going into this movie, I didn't expect to be reminded more of Derek Jarman's War Requiem (1989) than Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk (2017), but I welcome the experience.
Given the importance of the novels and short stories of Alfred Mendes to the history of Caribbean literature, 1917's release would have been a nice opportunity for NYRB or Faber & Faber or somebody to reissue his work as a sort of tie-in, but I understand that 2020 got a little weird. I still don't think time's sorted itself out since then. I don't know how comforting it is to think that it's happened before. I watched the film originally on library DVD, during a suspended time of my own. Down to Gehenna, over Jordan, to sea in a Sieve. This witness brought to you by my right backers at Patreon.
no subject
You really give something to think about with the thesis about time: "war has smashed time, churned it up like the earth itself so that it will never lie clean again without its seeping scars and nightmares, a zone rouge of memory." I like how the very way the film was made seems to contribute to the fishing-line effect of dragging up the past and fouling the future. ... Which is making me think how it's weird that time, like light, can be experienced and reported as both discrete happenings, bullet-burst moment-by-moments, and also a long continuous flow, like a long shot.
This would not be a movie I would want to see, but I like the notes you highlighted: the grim ("a mutilated doll suggests queasily what might have become of the people whose cow is lowing out in the field"; "the flowering lumber of a felled orchard"<--talk about time: how long to regrow an orchard?) and the small moments of hope ("For a moment in the lullaby rhythms of Edward Lear, we catch, not the man he was in peacetime, but the memory of that man, like an inscription on the back of a photograph it may be finally safe to read"--okay, maybe that's more **you** that I'm appreciating, for making that simile).
It's a solid war movie. It's just that I can think of hardly any others that feel so much like war poetry. --from this review, I appreciate that.
no subject
It's thematically appropriate!
I like how the very way the film was made seems to contribute to the fishing-line effect of dragging up the past and fouling the future.
I love that way of describing it, so grab-bag and tangled. Please keep it for future use.
... Which is making me think how it's weird that time, like light, can be experienced and reported as both discrete happenings, bullet-burst moment-by-moments, and also a long continuous flow, like a long shot.
Yes. We live one-way in it and at the same time our experiences of it are nothing like. I wonder if it's why people are encouraged so much to live in the moment—if it were easy, everyone would be doing it.
--talk about time: how long to regrow an orchard?
They talk about it! Schofield assumes the orchard is done for. Blake assures him it'll grow again from the stones of the fruit of the cut-down trees: "You'll end up with more trees than before." But it will take decades; tree time is not human time. (I'm thinking now of A Canterbury Tale: "You can't hurry an elm.") That orchard was so much older than they were. Everything is, except the technology of the war.
--okay, maybe that's more **you** that I'm appreciating, for making that simile
I drew it from images in the movie, so it's the movie, too. It is important to me to hope that Schofield makes it home.
--from this review, I appreciate that.
Thank you.
no subject
Here's the one about 1917.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-a9HaeQhf7k&pp=ygUPTGFkeWtuaWdodCAxOTE3
no subject
Thanks for the link!
no subject
Was also really taken by the film's ability to also demonstrate the complete ravages and waste of war, not just on a human level but with the very land and resources itself: the mountains of spent artillery shells, the strip-mined emplacements thrown deep into the earth, the gouges and furrows, and then a cherry orchard fighting like hell to blossom in the middle of the expanse of nothing else. And when we do get to watching the ravages on the human scale, it is just as devastating. Schofield (whom you introduced to me as "the taller, younger soldier") suddenly aging ten, fifteen years in the space of one reaction, one turn, one thousand-yard stare. You can watch Blake lose faith in dulce et decorum est as he learns what Schofield did with his medal. I cannot wait to see the ravages of bureaucratic futility in the next half.
no subject
We'll break out the library DVD if we have to! This demonstration of the importance of physical media brought to you by FU Streaming, Ltd.
I think I was most amazed at the fact that everything around the entire No Man's Land sequence manages to tell a story completely unstuck in time and place while following a decidedly linear narrative with a severe timeframe and everything. How d'you like them apples, Nolan?
Oh, mow. And I liked Nolan's film, but the sheer weirdness of time in 1917 is not like anything normally encountered in a war movie without, you're right, breaking any of the rules of its reality. It struck me after the fact that in addition to Jarman's War Requiem, I might pair this film slightly with Stalker (1979).
Was also really taken by the film's ability to also demonstrate the complete ravages and waste of war, not just on a human level but with the very land and resources itself: the mountains of spent artillery shells, the strip-mined emplacements thrown deep into the earth, the gouges and furrows, and then a cherry orchard fighting like hell to blossom in the middle of the expanse of nothing else.
I like it when you write about movies, I observed irrelevantly.
And when we do get to watching the ravages on the human scale, it is just as devastating. Schofield (whom you introduced to me as "the taller, younger soldier") suddenly aging ten, fifteen years in the space of one reaction, one turn, one thousand-yard stare.
I was actually stunned Schofield didn't even get an Oscar nomination for the part. He has to do so much with it and be a real person, not an allegory, not an archetype, not an avatar, all the way through. He stays human-scale. The film wouldn't work if he didn't.
You can watch Blake lose faith in dulce et decorum est as he learns what Schofield did with his medal. I cannot wait to see the ravages of bureaucratic futility in the next half.
It is true that the ravages of bureaucratic futility are not any kind of spoiler for this war.
no subject
This is some of the best, most lyrical critical writing I have ever read -- ekphrasis as argument. I wish I had the energy to say something more thorough and useful, but I've been sitting with this wonder for a week and I had to at least report it.
no subject
Thank you so much, and for telling me also.