THE INDEPENDENT: They Shall Not Grow Old: Is First World War hyper-restoration historical sacrilege?

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Ana Carden-Coyne, director of the Centre for the Cultural History of War at the University of Manchester, points out the fallacy of this argument. Artists of the time, she says, used similar photo manipulation to Jackson’s to present the war to the public. Examples include Frank Hurley and Paul Castelnau: the first made a single dramatic image from many; the second used auto-chromes to colourise images of the French army. Perhaps we should compare Jackson’s work to that of blockbuster directors such as Steven Spielberg, who helmed Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan. Carden-Coyne draws this comparison, pointing out that the technological advances made by filmmakers – most recently Christopher Nolan with Dunkirk – are driving these films from the entertainment space towards the commemorative. “It’s fair to say,” she adds, “the idea of humanising the past is one of the things that film offers current audiences.”