The Battle of the Somme (1916) and They Shall Not Grow Old (2018): archivists, historians, lies and the archive

ABSTRACT This article takes Peter Jackson’s use of Imperial War Museum footage in They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) and its reception as a starting point for considering the dilemma for film archives over how to enable their work to reach greater audiences without compromising their own reputation or the integrity of the collections they are custodians over. The first part of the article considers some of the issues around the distinction between film restoration and digital enhancement, and some of the pitfalls inherent in a range of well-established archival practices for ‘outreach’. The second half or the essay considers the resistance of military and film historians to the understanding of film footage as evidence, taking the 1916 documentary of The Battle of the Somme as a key case study. Overall the article argues that essay films, and invitations for film-makers and visual artists to offer creative responses to collections should be backed up with a route back to the source material within the collection, and that attention should always be paid to the necessity to explain archival footage to a general audience in the many instances where such footage doesn’t ‘speak for itself’.