![]() While World War II - or more properly 1940 -– now dominates British national imagination, World War I has been stripped of significant historic meaning. ![]() This is, in fact, totally appropriate for a contemporary British film about this war. 1917 re-unites the Mendes family - and perhaps all families - across the decades through the war.ġ917 is, then, a saga about the family at war, rather than a narrative about war itself. But rather, through this film, Mendes is able to bring his grandfather back to us after a century after the war ended and pay tribute to him. Mendes thanks him for all the “stories that he shared.” Schofield does not just come back to his family. Mendes, who served in the King’s Rifles during the war. After the final frame, the shot cuts to a dedication to Sam Mendes’ grandfather, Alfred H. Yet Schofield has saved not only his own fictional family in this film. Schofield turns over the photograph of his mother to reveal the words “Come back to us.” Leaning against the trunk of what, in a slightly clumsy visual pun, has become a ‘family’ tree, it is apparent he will now return to them. It contains a photograph of his mother and two sisters. Having delivered the order to the commander and Blake’s last possessions to his brother, Schofield finally sits down by a strange Bruegel-esque tree, with a long trunk and many dense branches, and opens the small, tin box that he has carried next to his heart for his entire journey. Yet, in the ultimate scene of the film, it is in fact Schofield’s own family that he has preserved. ![]() Schofield promises to save him when Blake is mortally wounded on the way. Overtly, the film records Schofield’s race against time to rescue an officer in the 2 Devons, who is the brother of his friend and comrade on the mission, Lance Corporal Blake. Only having passed all these elemental tests can he achieve his quest.īut what is the quest that unites this film? This is revealed only in the very last scene. He is buried in earth, attacked from the air, surrounded by fire, and almost drowned in water. Schofield’s pilgrimage involves a series of symbolic ordeals. Although apparently realistic, 1917 is allegorical, like Bunyan’s poem. In fact, the film may be closer to John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress it is story of trial, sacrifice, and redemption. Like that great poem, 1917 depicts a descent into hell. Reviewers have noted the connection between 1917 and Dante’s Inferno. However, the film most resembles a tour through an art gallery, passing the works of Paul Nash, Henry Tonks, Gilbert Rogers, John Singer Sargent, and Otto Dix. There are references to Paths of Glory - walking through trenches - and All Quiet on the Western Front - body-parts on the wire. In place of a plot, the film is consequently comprised of a sequence of tableaus that connote famous images. ![]() 1917 is similarly comprised of a sequence of such scenes. In his famous work on World War I, The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell argued that post-war literature did not represent the war as it actually was, but reproduced a series of “recognition scenes”, which became established as metonyms in the collective imagination. Concentrating on an individual, the film may be better appreciated, then, not as a genuine war film, but rather as a pilgrimage to and through a war. Indeed, in the climax of the film, he runs across the line of a battalion as they charge across No Man’s Land, bumping into soldiers along the way. Rather than fighting in a battle, Schofield only traverses the battlefield. The film traces Schofield’s journey from bucolic meadows behind the lines, through the front, and beyond. ![]()
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