Lest We Forget: A Rough Look at History

Is it worth your time?

If you have any interest in how we used to look at the First World War just a few years after it ended, then yes. It is a strange, flickering time capsule. If you want a slick, modern documentary with fancy CGI maps and polished voiceovers, you will probably hate it. This is not a blockbuster; it is a scrap-book.

The whole thing feels a bit like watching a flickering ghost story. The film quality jumps around a lot. One minute you are looking at sharp, crisp footage of troops marching, and the next you are squinting at a grainy, washed-out mess that might be a battle or might be just dust on the lens. It doesn't matter much. You get the point anyway.

There is this one sequence near the middle where the footage is so blurry I thought my screen had died. But then the sound of the narration keeps going, steady and serious. It’s almost hypnotic. You start to realize that nobody back then was trying to make it look 'cinematic' like they do now. They just wanted to show you what happened.

It makes me think of The Squatter's Daughter, which came out around the same time. Not because they are similar, but because they both feel like they belong to a world that was just starting to figure out what a camera could actually do with real life. Everything here is so much more grounded than the fiction stuff like Thanks a Million.

The Rhythm of the War

The pacing is a bit of a mess, honestly. It doesn't really have a 'hook' or a climax in the way we expect today. It just kind of marches forward, year by year. Sometimes it lingers on a face for too long. You see a soldier smiling at the camera, and he has no idea what’s coming in the next hour of the film or the next year of his life.

It feels personal, in a way. Even without a character to follow, you are watching real people who are long gone. It’s a bit eerie.

• The narrator has that old-school, clipped way of speaking. It sounds like he’s reading a textbook, but you can hear the weight in his voice.
• Some of the editing is surprisingly abrupt. It just cuts, and suddenly you are in a trench.
• The silence is used really well, even if it was probably just a lack of sound equipment back then.

I found myself wondering if anyone in the audience in 1934 was sitting there recognizing people in the background. That's the kind of movie this is. It is a record, not a story. It’s not trying to win awards or impress you. It’s just trying to say, 'look, this happened.' 🪖

Is it perfect? No. But it isn't trying to be. It’s just an old, tired, and honest look at a time that changed everything. I liked it better than I expected, mostly because it didn't try to lecture me. It just showed me the mess.