The Cold Blue

In 1943 the director William Wyler went to England, climbed into the B-17s of the Eighth Air Force and shot colour film. The documentary that came out of those flights has been known for decades, but the unused footage stayed in cans. Erik Nelson found the raw material, had it restored, and set it against the voices of the men who came home from those missions, recorded now, in old age. What emerges is not a heroic song but a working day that happens to take place somewhere very cold and very high up. The old men talk quietly about hands that would not warm, about the flak clouds opening around them, about watching the aircraft next to theirs go down. Nelson carried the same method into his later film Apocalypse '45: clean up the archive, and leave the telling to the survivors.