Vimy-Ridge
2006 · 2m · Canada
Directed by Damien Hess
Genres: animation, historical, war
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Images of the Vimy Memorial summon fading names and faces from the First World War. The monument becomes a bridge between present viewers and soldiers long gone.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A two-minute monument poem—exactly the kind of reverential war-remembrance exercise that bores me senseless, until you realize Hess is using animation to literally resurrect ghosts from stone. It's a formal conceit that actually earns its sentimentality, which infuriates me slightly.
Hess positions this work squarely within the lineage of memorial cinema and the animated essay, where form becomes elegy; the decision to animate around and through the Vimy Memorial's architecture creates a sophisticated dialogue between permanence and erasure that recalls the best of the NFB's archival-consciousness tradition.
The single choice that unlocks this—animating the names and faces as if they're being drawn *out* of the monument itself rather than projected onto it—transforms a static memorial into an act of retrieval, and in two minutes that handmade gesture does more emotional work than most feature-length war dramas manage.