Wednesday, December 4, 2013

The Great War (1964)

Narrated By: Micheal Redgrave

The Great War is a 26 part documentary on the first world war and it was produced by BBC in association with the Imperial War Museum, CBC and ABC. Each episode is around 40 minutes long and video consist exclusively of archive footage. I was really surprised to find that this much amount of original footage was available.

The documentary goes into great detail especially about the motivation for all the major actors. The first world war, unlike the second one didn't have an obvious villain like Hitler and it was a case of treaties created upon insecurities leading to a war with a small trigger event, in this case Sarajevo. The turning points in the war, like Americans entering were purely due to economic reasons and the events in middle east were very interesting and not known to me.I really didn't have much idea about the World War One before watching this documentary.

The number of people killed is just staggering and the documentary really gives us a feel of the years of stagnation due to the Trench warfare in the Western front. I felt the documentary was a very non-partial account of the events even if the footage used were largely from the Allies side. 

Rating: 4.5/5

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