Deborah Fratz pointed me to this helpful story that explains the basic contours of WWI as a humorous bar fight. Perhaps there are other ways to explain the war through digital storytelling? I could see this as a fake Facebook or iMessage exchange, or even a series of LOLcats. Or maybe something else altogether?
A student, David Lepine, just brought these color photographs of WWI to my attention. They depict French soldiers on the Western Front, and were made using an early color process called Autochrome Lumière, after the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, who invented it in 1904.
The Invercyle Council's McLean Museum, in Greenlock, Scotland, has produced a fascinating gallery of WWI posters. Some of them appeared in our course wanderings and in our exhibit from McFarlin Special Collections, but most of them are new. Selected posters from the gallery can be viewed here:
I just came across a blog post by archivist Andrew Berger about a cache of stereoscopic photos of WWI at the Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University. Stereoscopic photography, like our eyes, uses two lenses in parallax to create a pair of simultanous, side-by-side images of a subject, which are then viewed in a stereograph device to create a single image with a 3D effect. The format dates back to photography's beginnings during the 19th Century. I believe TU has some stereoscopic photos of WWI, if anyone cares to research them.
A recently recovered, early color film of London in 1927 by British cinematographer Claude Frisse-Greene, not long after Eliot wrote The Waste Land. It also makes an interesting companion to Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), which hops around London in time and space.
At 1:00 you can see a mild version of a "crowd flow[ing] over London Bridge, so many" (OK, so maybe you can imagine how it would have looked during rush hour). At 4:15, though, you can see a jostling street that really evokes Eliot's sense of the brown uniformity of modern urban crowds.
I was also struck by the number of horse-drawn carts and the lack of traffic lights; instead, the "all powerful hand" of the police officer maintains order in a metropolis not completely used to motorized traffic.
London in 1927 from Tim Sparke on Vimeo.
The Sun Also Rises reminds me somewhat of the film La Dolce Vita, in which Marcello Mastroianni's character, a journalist with ambitions of being a serious literary writer, drifts through Rome across seven days and nights, drinking, hanging with the rich and famous, trying to sleep with various women, to fill an inner emptiness. In this respect he is rather like Jake Barnes drifting through Pamplona, seeking sensation, although Marcello is somewhat more corrupt than Jake, the product, in Fellini's view, of a decadent, glittering modern lifestyle rather than the victim of a tragic and traumatic war. But the film, which famously opens with a statue of Christ being carried toward the Vatican by a helicopter, and ends (perhaps a touch too obviously) with a grotesquely monstrous fish washing up on a beach, makes us always aware that it is taking place in the so-called Eternal City, and that the glamorously vacant lifestyle it depicts is at odds with the ostensible codes of Roman Catholicism. Instead, it suggests a kinship with the more sexually liberated, bacchanal, pagan, and "decadent" Ancient Rome which perhaps remains hidden in the bones of the city. Something similar is taking place in The Sun Also Rises, I believe. Jake visits the church, but is unable to pray with conviction. Far more potent in the world of the novel are the ritualistic power of wine (present in Catholicism, but of course, but the drinking in The Sun Also Rises always suggests a bacchanal, not a Eucharist) and of the bulls, whose horns are symbols of fertility. Christ seems absent from The Sun Also Rises. Instead, Dionysus and his son Priapus preside over Pamplona. The titular sun, too, is a traditional pagan symbol. But the title can of course be read as a pun on "The son also rises." So part of what the novel, and Jake, are attempting to negotiate is this space between fertility and ressurection, paganism and Catholicism.
Though the war hasn't overtly affected any of the characters in outwardly visible ways, it has affected each one of them by shifting their priorities from the practical to the passionate. This is most exemplified by Jake and Brett's relationship. While before the war, young men and women sought for wives and husbands who would be good with money, temperate with children, and patient as spouses, the war forced young people into a mode of feeling starved for passion. Having lived through the adrenaline-filled years of fighting and having lost so many people in their lives, the war generation began to place supreme importance on living in the moment, leading them to passionate, but unstable, romantic relationships.
These pictorial texts were incredibly confusing. They seem to be designs for various machines, but also at the same time represent various people. This could be a statement on how the war is making people more mechanized. It is dehumanizing the population and likening the population to machines. All the machines that represent the various people have very specific uses and are needed by the population to function, alluding to the fact that after the War, society is going to need its artists to help humanize them again.
The pictorial text also suggests ideas of loss. It could also demonstrate how many people were lost in the War and so the machine of society is broken and needs to be mended. Each individual person makes up a part of a machine that is vital to society and without these people society remains stagnant. After WWI so many people were lost that the giant cogs of society did not have enough people to power it and so society had to change in order to continue. The giant machine had to change form and it ended up making its parts and individuals change with it.
The Metamorphosis was a very interesting piece. It responded to the war in a very different way. One of the ways it did that was by making the main character a bug. It showed that after the war people did not come back as the person they were when they left. The expectations were very high and demanding on the men and most of those expectations changed who they were. The men fought for a purpose, but that was their only purpose. Once their purpose was complete and they came home from the war their lives were changed drastically. Many of the men did not know how to go on with their lives and many of their families did not know how to interact with them. This is a good intertwining with the piece that we read because not only does the bug want to be seen, but how is his family supposed to react to the change that their son has become? This was a very big question during and after the war. Many people did not know how to treat their loved ones and they became lost.
Every time I read "The Waste Land" I delve deeper into the poem and find more understanding into what Eliot is trying to say. Eliot is very good at playing with words. In the first part of the poem hew talks about winter and the dead. In his line "Winter kept us warm" he is referring to the dead. The men that fought in the war part of a lost generation. So many lives were lost in the war and Eliot points out that loss in his poem. In part two of the poem he critiques the war again, "I think we are in rats' alley where the dead men lost their bones". Here Eliot is referring to the trenches. In this part of the poem someone is remembering the war and he is lost in his memories. The war brought so much pain and death and for the men and women that did return, many of them were never the same again. This poem reflects the tragedies that occurred during and because of the war. Eliot shows different aspects of the war and none of them are very good.
