A Cinematic Portrayal of Loss

I have been thinking a lot about World War I recently. Last year was the centenary anniversary of the conflict (which was marked by several official events in the UK) and this year was the 100^th anniversary of the founding of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF - http://www.wilpf.org.uk/) which was started in 1915 to try and bring an end to the war in Europe. I volunteered for WILPF last year and this year I have been blogging for them and doing oral history. They produced a short documentary about the origins of their organisation (you can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a2xYvXwGiw).

My experiences with World War I have been purely academic. I do not know of any family ancestors who fought in the conflict and I have little personal connection to the British patriotism of Remembrance Day. My husband supposedly had relatives who fought in the trenches and he is far more British than I am. Most of my ancestors come from all over the world and the only British blood I have in my veins comes from the Welsh coal mines where a set of great grandparents lived and worked until they decided to leave for America. But I do know a lot about the First World War and I have my English education to thank for this knowledge. I am not sure what children learn in school nowadays, but back when I attended Secondary School, we studied World War I religiously. Year after year we studied it. I was still writing essays about the conflict in my final year exams when I was 18. The First World War seems to be such a part of British consciousness and culture, even more than the Second World War or the Blitz. It permeates our popular culture in literature, museums, art, ceremonies, films, TV, music, ballets, theatre and even musicals. I don’t remember exactly when I first learned of the conflict, I do have a hazy memory of my mother trying to gently explain to me what the concept of war was when I was little and perhaps too inquisitive for my age. I remember thinking that this idea was terrible and sad and that it was sitting on the horizon of my knowledge somewhere in the future. That someday I would learn about upsetting and scary things that I couldn't quite understand right at that moment in time. Of course I was extremely lucky not to experience conflict first hand as a child. I have had a charmed and peaceful life and I am very grateful for that fact.

The history education I received at school was first rate. History was and still is one of my favourite subjects. When I was 13 or 14 years old, after reading countless books, eye-witness accounts, war poetry and writing essays, I was taken on a school trip to the World War I battlefields in northern France. We all bundled into a coach and drove the long and boring journey to Dover, took a ferry and then crossed the border into France. Boys misbehaved at the back of the coach, someone got carsick and threw up into a plastic shopping bag, girls gossiped and the long suffering teachers tried to snooze. Once we were let out of the coach, we were little wild for having been cooped up so long in stiff coach seats and there was a lot of excitable running around and shouting. No one really quietened down until we were all reprimanded and gathered to observe a minute of respectful silence in front of a large stone war memorial. It was then when I began to think and reflect on my surroundings. I remember being angry. I was surprised at my anger. I had thought how exciting it would be to see all the places I had learned about during the year in my history classes. I thought I would feel sad. Perhaps a little tearful. But all I felt was anger, rolling around hot and hard in my stomach. Perhaps it was seeing all the rows upon rows of names carved into the stone memorial in front of me. Perhaps it was how small No Man’s Land looked. So much smaller than how I had imagined it. All that fighting each day for that little sliver of land! All the men who lay dying on this miserable length of grass and soil that took me no longer than 5 to 10 minutes to cross from one trench to another! What a waste, I thought. What a colossal waste of life! My instinct as a young teenager was to feel furious at how stupid war was. I wanted to write in every school essay how wasteful the war was, how we should remember that first and foremost every Remembrance Day. I remember that angry and startled version of myself with fondness because now I am so different. After years of reading the news of international conflicts throughout the world, of studying history at University and of witnessing the rise of global terrorism, I have graduated into a more worldly and cynical individual. Now my reaction to World War I is to feel very very sad, not rebellious and furious.

This change in my outlook was something I was reflecting on recently, as I have just finished reading Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain for the second time. I read it when I was younger, but reading it a second time has been a much more moving experience for me, partly because I now have a deeper experience of romantic love and life than I did when I read it first time around. For those of you who have never heard of the book, Testament of Youth is a memoir of Vera Brittain’s experiences during the First World War as a nurse, a feminist and her burgeoning interest in pacifism. It is a heart-breaking story, partly because all four of the young men that Vera was close to, her brother, her fiancée and two male friends perished in the war. One by one they left and never returned. Reading it now, I can see that writing the book was a cathartic process for her, a way of trying to deal with the grief that she felt at the loss of these beloved young men and the devastation that the young women of her generation experienced by being left behind.

Although it is a sad and deeply upsetting book, it is one of my favourites. I love how introspective Vera is and how beautifully she writes. I first read the book at University and I identified with her thirst for knowledge (although I am sure I never studied as hard as she did at university!) and her desire to be taken seriously as an intelligent woman. So I was intrigued when I read that a new film of the book was being released in 2014. I know that a film adaptation of a book is rarely as good as the book itself, but I am no intellectual snob and I actually like varying adaptations of a story. I wrote a few essays at university analysing different adaptations (screen, theatre, poetry) of Greek myths and each different form of media had its own merits. I have been known to read Jane Eyre and then watch three different screen versions of it and then see a play adaptation as well. I think my interest in different versions of the same story has its roots in my love of mythology. After all, what are myths? They are just the same story told orally from one person to another, each time taking on a new element or added embellishment as it is told from one storyteller to another. So while I am sure some people scoffed at the idea of reducing a 688 page book to a 2 hour movie, I was curious to see how the filmmakers were going to pull off adapting this highly emotional memoir on to the screen.

I watched the movie, directed by James Kent and written by Juliette Towhid, last week and I was not disappointed. True, it is an adaptation and not exact, some scenes were invented (although with good reason, which I will explain later) and some of the details of the memoir were omitted just because there is only so much information you can squeeze into 2 hours. What emerges is a beautiful film about grief and loss. In fact I felt the film focussed more on the experience of loss even more than the experience of war. Vera's journey is told entirely from her point of view, Any images of the trenches or of the Front that the audience sees, is entirely from her own mind and her own tortured imagination. Her world is made up of the countryside where she grows up, the family home, her college at Oxford and the hospitals she works in as a nurse. The camera follows her closely, bringing the audience intimately into her heart and mind and the emotions that play across her face. The close camera angles on her face making the story of this war conflict feel tragically intimate. The events of the war are cleverly told as well. At first the outbreak of war is a distant and uninteresting political development, Vera is so engrossed in securing an education at Oxford University and falling in love with her brother's school friend, Roland. She is young and excited and very innocent. The actress Alicia Vikander, who is actually Swedish, but adopts a very good English accent, does a fantastic job in what can only have been a very difficult role to play convincingly. When the War does suddenly rear its ugly head and confront Vera with horrifying and distressing consequences, Alicia portrays all the many conflicting emotions Vera feels so realistically that several scenes reduced me to tears.

Alicia Vikander as Vera Brittain

The cinematography of the film is just gorgeous. The views of the English countryside, the costumes and the music were beautiful. I did feel that it was perhaps a little too beautiful. We don’t want to fall into the trap of making war seem gorgeous through the lens of a camera or lead to a mythologising of war, so it seems more palatable. Or even the pre-war period, which let’s be honest, was not a period of great societal equality in British history. Should we portraying these events with nostalgia or beauty? Could that be a danger when portraying any historical event through the medium of film?

A happy scene portraying the carefree days before the war

Wonderful detail by the costume department

Vera anxiously scans the list of war casualties in the newspaper

Vera as a nurse 

Despite my conflicted feelings on how World War I is portrayed in modern British popular culture, I must admit Testament of Youth was a very moving cinematic experience. As I expressed before, the film is more than just a war film. It is in fact a visual portrait of grief. This is shown in a very effective motif throughout the film: the theme of water. Vera goes for a swim in a local pond with her brother and his friends early in the film and at the end of the film she swims again but this time on her own, a single sad figure in the large empty pool. During the Armistice Day celebrations she takes refuge in a church and stands opposite a painting portraying people drowning in a shipwreck. She stares at the painting and imagines herself underwater, stripping off her coat and floating there in the depths. She is literally drowning in her grief, cut off from the rest of the celebrating crowds in this dark, silent and submerged world of sorrow. It is an incredibly powerful scene. Later in the film when she learns of her fiancé’s death, she stands on a beach and stares out to sea at a blank grey skyline and soft white foamed waves, as if she is reaching across the Channel to the battlefields of France with her very despair. The landscape is bleak and blank and holds no hope or comfort for her.

Vera by the sea

The film is filled with memorable moments and many of the scenes are so well shot they could be mini films or pictures in themselves. Some that I found particularly moving and interesting were Vera's father crying at a train station, while desperately trying to hide his tears from his family and the public milling around him by pretending to stare at the train timetables on a wall. Another powerful scene was Vera washing a soldier in hospital. Shocked by his nakedness, dirty body and smell, she awkwardly washes him until she thinks she hears him whisper her name and then as if realising that this man could be one of the men that she loves, she begins again and cleans him with determination, perseverance and care.  Later on, while stationed as a nurse in France, Vera, who is fluent in German, comforts a dying German officer, offering him the forgiveness he begs for. But perhaps one of the most memorable images from the film is Vera’s memory of the three young men (her brother Edward, fiancé Roland and friend Victor) walking ahead of Vera on a country path in Yorkshire and laughing. She walks behind them and watches them walk away ahead of her, not knowing they are walking straight towards no future at all. This memory is juxtaposed at the end of the film with the same landscape now empty of people, emphasising a whole generation gone, erased from the world. This is really the film's success. Not in being a completely accurate portrayal of Vera Brittain's memoir, but in conveying the absolute loss of life that war can cause.