Angelica Mesiti: A hundred years
The film A hundred years is a meditation on the scars and trauma war leaves on the landscape – in particular, the Somme battlefields. Footage of the damaged landscape is combined with music and sounds from nature. Beginning in the dead of winter, the camera follows the return of life in spring, before moving to high summer, with the work climaxing in a musical performance. The penny whistle – one of the few instruments to be played in the trenches of the First World War – is played by a young man who walks in endless circles at the bottom of Lochnagar crater. The crater resulted from a huge mine unleashed by the British on the German front lines on the morning of 1 July 1916, the start of one of the bloodiest days in history. The crater is now preserved to “honour the fallen of the Great War and of all wars”.
The Western Front is perhaps second only to Gallipoli as a site in Australian public memory of the First World War.
The Australian War Memorial invited acclaimed Paris-based Australian artist Angelica Mesiti to create this work of art in response to the centenary of the First World War. Head of Art at the Memorial, Laura Webster, explained why new works of art are commissioned:
The First World War was such a major event in global history, there were so many impacts and consequences. During its centenary the Memorial art curators really wanted to share artists’ perspective on these legacies internationally. Along with commissions from Turkish and New Zealander artists, we wanted a work about the Western Front to broaden our collection and better contextualise the Australian experience, traditionally the focus of our collection. Contemporary art is a way to share new perspectives. Our understanding of history changes, it’s never static and it’s important to acknowledge and commemorate these events and deepen our understanding over time. Looking back from the present day, we bring new and nuanced ideas to these events and that changes how we can commemorate, especially the shared legacies internationally.
Webster was drawn to Mesiti’s work for this commission after seeing her “beautiful, mesmerizing films where she uses cinematic qualities to create connection and empathy”. Renowned for using film in innovative, often nonverbal ways to share stories and explore cultural heritage, Mesiti’s approach was shaped by research at the Australian War Memorial and then on the ground on the former battle sites, now the locations of memorials and agricultural land in northern France. Mesiti deliberately avoided filming the architectural memorials and cemeteries dotted throughout the Somme, instead focusing on where damage to the landscape itself was preserved: tracing the paths of the former trenches; the scale of the Lochnagar Crater; and the human limb-like branches of the Last Tree in Delville Wood. What were scenes of devastation have returned to a bucolic landscape, known as the breadbasket of France. For Mesiti:
“What was apparent when I was there was that those landscapes of wheatfields and rolling hills, what you’re actually looking at are mass graves – you’re looking at landscapes where not everyone was recovered. It is impregnated with the fallen. In that environment, that fact is present in your mind and I wanted to transmit it through the work. That’s why music became integral, to give that tone and feeling that you have while you’re there, with that knowledge.”
Mesiti often features music in her work for its powerful evocation of emotion or atmosphere. The winter scenes are accompanied with a sense of foreboding, evoked by music alluding to the machines of war. The camera focuses our gaze on the Last Tree in Delville Wood. Now regrown, Delville Wood is the South African national memorial, the site of its most devastating losses during the war. The soldiers rest where they fell, with saplings replanted around the only survivor, a hornbeam known as the Last Tree. For Mesiti, it is a powerful symbol, the only living witness of the war.
“A hundred years is a very human timescale, it sits just outside human memory, but if we think about the timescale of a tree it’s a very different scope, it shifts human perspective. When you stand there it’s hard to imagine the obliteration of a forest in a matter of hours but this tree has somehow survived. So it’s a living monument and somehow a living witness to those events.”
Filming the tree during the temporary death of winter, and then returning in spring and at the height of summer captures a sense of progression, from the darkest days of the war to recovery and change, expressing the human will to survive.
Seeing a small penny whistle on display in a museum collection brought to Mesiti’s mind,
“the idea of young men in the trenches with a moment of reprieve, and using music and playing music for each other, as a way of removing themselves from the experience we can’t even imagine. I wanted to create a performance using the penny whistle that would be a way of speaking of that reprieve, of humanity that was mixed among what we normally see of the horror.”
This inspiration was the starting point for the composition Mesiti commissioned for the film. Mesiti collaborated with musician and composer Julian Desailly and sound recorder and arranger Jan Vysocky to interweave music with sounds from nature (insects, bird calls, wind) to create a soundtrack that seems to have emerged from the landscape. This culminates in Desailly, the only human performer in the film, playing the penny whistle in Lochnagar Crater, as though channeling the spirit of the site.
The film concludes with footage cycling through different seasons and times of day, alluding to nature’s cycles and time passing, acknowledging the ongoing consequences of war while emphasizing the potential for renewal and hope. The film provides a complex engagement with the experience and legacy of the Western Front, placing the Australian experience within a global context.