1918 Video Art Project The Unimaginable - 04:55
This short film tells a story about a long gone history.
In a apparently untouched landscape.
You need to find the unimaginable there.
And then you come to the opposite, deeply sunk in snow and frozen surfaces.
Almost the reality of then:
“This beauty, has a thin skin. Scratch the land, and imagine, if you can, what lies buried beneath today”.
idea, direction and sound | ferrie = differentieel
lyrics | Jimmy ThePeach (Aron)
camera, titles and editing | Jöran Maaswinkel
composer | Jorge Franganillo
voices | Jimmy ThePeach - Heribert Lindner - Hans Jansen - Pierre Serné - Marc Wielaert - Steve Harlow
translations | Anneke van de Kassteele - Christine Stefan
special thanks to | Marieke Elsenga - Marlies Ottenberg
2013 ferrie = differentieel Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0
The Unimaginable, by Jimmy the Peach
Try to imagine the River Meuse…
A valley aims the river
from France in the south,
through Belgium and the Netherlands,
to the North Sea.
Its people tied together by the Meuse…
connected by riverbeds and rail beds,
deer paths, old trails, country roads,
and highways great and small.
Drive off the beaten path in the tracks
of those who came by yesterday…
Through soft hammocks of summer meadows,
now winter-dusted,
a stark desert with cold dunes of fresh snow.
This beauty, has a thin skin.
Scratch the land, and imagine, if you can,
what lies buried beneath today.
The valley is a border between Empires,
the land itself, a barrier,
where great armies of flesh and bone
came together, were broken and bled.
More than nine million dead,
the earth and wood no protection
from the maelstrom of steel and lead.
Unimaginable, how they died…
blown to bits and maimed by mortars,
bombs and grenades.
Unimaginable…soldiers harvested
too young, by the thousands mowed
down by machine guns.
Unimaginable… the terrible sight and sound of
approaching tanks through the haze.
Unimaginable… the grim horror,
of trenches full of dead soldiers drowned
in their own lungs destroyed
by poison gas.
Unimaginable… the diseases -
typhus, malaria, influenza.
Unimaginable… the madness of men,
when this war ended, to think
it would never come again.
Unimaginable…
the madness of men.
This poem, The Unimaginable by Jimmy the Peach is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
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