An unseen aerial historical documentary film of the WW1 Western Front in Flanders, Belgium after the First World War c.1919. Brought to Life, HD colorized in 4K 120fps with added sound. The aftermath of four years of military conflict in Flanders fields, Ypres and Passchendaele. Some footage too of Arras in France.
The star of this enhanced and HD colorized archive educational documentary film is the pilot Jacques Marie Charles Trolley de Prévaux (1888-1944). As a pioneer of the Aéronavale, he earned the prestigious Legion of Honour and the Croix de guerre for his service in World War I.
The original purpose of this remarkable unseen film was to use it to use its evidence of devastation to seek reparations from Germany.
The film was subsequently lost for decades. It was eventually rediscovered in the French military archives in Paris in the late 1990s and shown in a BBC documentary.
The Film
Following the Armistice, in early 1919, Trolley de Prévaux undertook a pivotal flight. In the company of Lucien Le Saint and a motion picture camera, he flew over the Western Front, from the Belgian coastline to the French citadel city of Verdun. They meticulously recorded the war-torn landscape for posterity. This footage, a testament to the unprecedented devastation caused by the First World War, would remain unseen by the public for nearly a century.
In a 2010 BBC documentary presented by Fergal Keane called The First World War From Above, the world finally got to see the footage. Trolley de Prévaux’s daughter, Aude Yung-de Prévaux, who had tragically never known her parents nor even seen an image of them, finally got to see her father in this remarkable film.
Trolley de Prévaux and his wife, Lotka Leitner, were a formidable team in the Resistance. Lotka was actively involved in delivering documents and sheltering individuals, while Jacques operated under the cover of a traveling shopkeeper, ostensibly displaying and selling goods.
Their courageous efforts, however, led to their eventual betrayal and arrest by the Gestapo in Marseille in March 1944.
On August 19, 1944, just as the Allies were liberating Paris, Jacques Trolley de Prévaux and his wife Lotka were executed at Bron. Both were posthumously and jointly recognized as Compagnons in the Ordre de la Libération, a testament to their extraordinary sacrifice for France.
A Daughter’s Discovery
Aude Yung-de Prévaux, the daughter of Jacques Trolley de Prévaux, lived a life profoundly shaped by absence. She was a baby when her parents were arrested by the Gestapo in March 1944 and subsequently executed in August 1944. In a desperate act of protection, her mother, Lotka, had only moments to hand her to a neighbour. This separation meant that Aude grew up never knowing her parents. More poignantly, she had never even seen a photograph of her father – until she finally watched this film. For one brief moment her father turned to the camera.
The Aftermath of the First World War
The profound human cost of total war and ideological conflict is starkly illustrated through Trolley de Prévaux’s life. His journey from documenting the devastation of World War I to actively resisting the tyranny of Nazism in World War II.
How silent footage is HD colorized and brought to Life
I take early fragments of silent 16fps footage and restore them to life by a combination of manual frame by frame colorization as well as the use of deep exemplar-based video colorization techniques. The footage is upscaled and the frames interpolated to a higher frame rate ( in this case 120 frames per second.) Finally I produce a soundtrack which helps build a new immersive experience for the viewer.
Together, these processes revive old fragments of footage, offering audiences a more
vivid and engaging glimpse of lives long since lived in the distant past.
The colorization process used Deep exemplar-based Video colorization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.09909
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Original Footage:
Pas-de-Calais , France Vues prises en dirigeable
Identifier – AI107806
Original BW silent footage
Albert Kahn Musee
License: (CC-00) – Public Domain
https://albert-kahn.hauts-de-seine.fr/
