Roughly a century before 2019, when the film, 1917, was made, the Great War, or what would subsequently be renamed, World War I, was raging in Europe. Incredibly, soldiers had to live in dug-out trenches for years. It is no wonder that the war would bring the Spanish Flu to both Europe and America. In 2020, roughly a century after that flu, the coronavirus pandemic was occurring globally, yet without any war to have incubated that virus. By 2020, Europeans and Americans alike could not have imagined what life must have been like in the trenches. The film’s finest contribution, I submit, is in capturing that context, which in effect does a great deal of the story-telling. The film is thus a good illustration of the role that context can play in story-telling in an audio-visual medium such as film.
Sam Mendes, and his cinematographer, Roger Deakins, took advantage of new camera technology, by which I am cameras that are small enough to slither through a narrow trench filled with men and yet with a good picture-quality, and a mile-long trench dug under the supervision of the production engineer to tape shots as long as 5 or 6 minutes as the actors playing Blake and Schofield run through the trenches and then through an abandoned enemy line and on to find a unit in order to relay an order from a general to cancel a planned attack rather than fall into the German trap. The dramatic tension is made real not only because the context is so real—being shot on location—but also because the entire movie is one shot made up of a stitched series of long shots. No cuts within a dialogue to capture two faces. By 2020, that old technique had arguably become stale, and thus possibly disruptive of the suspension of disbelief (e.g., “Oh, that’s right, I’m watching a movie, rather than being fully engaged in the story-world.”).
Incredibly, the grip holding the camera runs ahead of the two protagonists as they (and the cameraman) must carefully navigate between the extras in the trenches, then at a juncture or fork the camera-shot shifts seamlessly to follow the two protagonist. The shifts from holding the camera to connecting it to crane are also seamless. From the perspective of the view, the entire film is one shot.
Although Mendes and Deakins both said after the filming that staying with the two protagonists without interruption through the film allowed the viewer to get to know them better, or more intimately, I contend that getting into the context was an even greater benefit. The film opens with a shot of a beautiful landscape, and as that shot goes on by means of the hand-held camera staying in front of the protagonists as they eventually go into a trench, their world incrementally envelops the view until not even the sky can be scene. Mendes emphasizes the subtle clues that the viewer gets along the way as to the relationship between the two soldiers—they had become friends in spite of coming from different backgrounds—but it is the context itself—the trenches—that really calls out to the viewer’s attention. This is especially so because the camera goes with the soldiers through about a mile of trenches. They way they are laid out, and what the extras are doing in the trenches primarily gives the viewer an authentic view of what life in the trenches was like and even the feeling of experiencing it, albeit as if on tour. For that is what the film really is—an engaging tour at close range and sustained by one continuous shot of 1917 as experienced by soldiers. To the extent that World War I was a war of contending trenches by trench-adapted creatures, then the film is a virtual experiential into 24 hours of that war at close range.
