I found these in a book I bought today, what a neat surprise!

This is some amazing restoration of film that is a hundred and ten years old. It better puts into perspective how these were real people, all of which had no idea how horrible the war was going to be. The original black-and-white footage, which was usually shown at too fast a rate of speed, lost the impact that these were actual human beings and not just some old, beat-up footage of random, long-since dead people.

This kind of footage also helps to make real in my mind the reality of what was going on, the little human interactions in the film cements to me that these are actual people. It would have been wonderful if motion cameras had been around for the Civil or Crimean wars, or even farther back to the Napoleonic or Revoutionary wars, because the paintings and drawings of those times gives them a more cartoonish and unrealistic feel as opposed to footage like this.

Saving Private Ryan had the same effect on me, except it had authentic sounds and battle recreation, all of which gave the black-and-white World War II footage that I saw after the film far more of an impact as my brain automatically filled in the lack of color and sound with a new understanding of what was actually happening in front of those black-and-white cameras.

It is a tragedy that people are more interested in overrated celebrities and bad cinema than they are about truly fascinating things like this.