Old movie are different. Heck, everything old is different. That’s kind of an unavoidable fact. Cultures change, people change (or stay the same depending on who you ask) and technology changes. In the modern era, or at least the past couple hundreds of years, the most important of those three kinds of changes has been the technology. Things get more complicated at an exponent rate. The primary function of technology has historically been to provide a reduction in either time or labor. The time aspect means that people have more freedom and the labor aspect means that some people have nothing to do at all. To do in the traditional sense of subsistence farming. Unshackled from these necessities, they are free to make themselves useful by developing more technology.

All of this lofty conceptual work is often difficult to associate with real world examples. This theory does nothing to help contextualize things that are happening in this very moment. Still these are the sort of things that come to mind when considering the Grand Illusion. It occupies the space of being a sort of double period piece. It is an older film, considered quintessential of its time, which itself tries to reflect a period only a few years before but culturally and technologically very distinct.

What strikes me first about the Grand Illusion is the subject matter. It is billed as a war movie, but growing up my concept of war movies involves, frankly, more war. Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down and even Rambo are what come to mind immediately. These movies are bloodbaths, especially when compared to the Grand Illusion in which the scene which is the hallmark of the modern WWI movie, the dogfight, occurs off screen and is treated without pomp or circumstance.

Part of me thinks that the culprit is technology. The means to recreate such scenes in a realistic way simply did not exist in that era. The development of CGI has made the impossible a routine spectacle on the silver screen. There are other pieces of technical inaccuracies which stand out in the Grand Illusions more charged scenes. The guns fired are categorically and completely without recoil, for instance, and no attempt at fake blood is made when de Boeldieu is shot. The first of these is exceptionally easy to fudge while the second presents only a little more challenge. And yet they were not done.

Rather than the prime mover for the film’s style being a lack of the capability to perform such cinematic feats, it then seems to be a more conscious, intentional choice on the part of those responsible for film and is then a matter of culture. Indeed, the themes tackled in the Grand Illusion are not the same as, or even similar to, those depicted in major, modern, mainstream movies. Perhaps these things were not shown or attempted because the poor facsimile would be immediately recognized as just that and cheapen the movie. If the intent of the movie was, as I believe it to be, an honest, perhaps honest-ish, portrayal of the experience of war then such things would break the audience’s immersion and empathy and were discarded.

This honesty is not absent from modern works, yet it honestly tells a different story. Saving Private Ryan is often hailed as an uncompromising attempt to depict the horrors of war, fully loaded with a shocking script and top of the line special effects. It plays on the emotions of audience, just as the Grand Illusion does but emotions much different. Is it because they depict different wars? Is the narrative of WWII so different from its predecessor? Was it our ability to create these images that changed us? If the technology had been available Renoir, would his masterpiece have been laced with thrilling explosions? To me it seems more likely that it is the culture that has shifted. Watching films like Ryan now, I cannot help but look at the special effects creating the images of war flashing on the screen before me and think of them as illusions.