At the ceremony, the veterans stand solemnly and remove their hats as The Last Post sounds over them and echoes through rooms of companies stricken with palsy, amputatations, resectioning, and senility. The war footage blurs in time between 19, in people between German and Allied forces, and battlefieds, between Passchendaele, Tobruk, Ypres, Normandy, and St. The film is a taut synthesis of sound and images threatening to explode onscreen. Shebib lashes out at a society which casts aside its war veterans like so much embarrassing refuse, only to make limp, appreciative gestures each Nov. "and then, the grim shaky records of the next campaigns-artillery barrage, automatic-weapons fire cutting down the distant running figures, and a final sweep of slumped corpses, obscene, rotting, flies unaffected by the presence of the camera." The last corpse dissolves into a still of a laughing teenaged private and then the photograph itself dissolves into a veteran in the pub. The war scenes include "some particularly brutal footage" of the Normandy landings, rest areas, WAACs dancing in slow motion with combat soldiers. Nobody wants to remember the bad things.Ī Canadian veteran of the First World War, Good Times, Bad Times (as quoted by The Ottawa Citizen) Ĭombat footage and old photographs from extant BBC documentary footage from the First and Second World Wars is intercut with contemporary footage of First World War veterans recalling their experiences at Royal Canadian Legion halls, memorial day commemorations and veterans' hospitals. War's so terrible we can only remember the good things, and there weren't many of them.