CRITICAL
STUDIES
LECTURE:
MARK SWEENY
DATE:
22/05/13
New
Zealands oldest surviving film is The Departure of the 2nd
Contingent to the Boer War. (which isn't available on Youtube but is
essentially a small clip of horses going through past the camera.
It
has been painstakingly restored over hundreds of hours. [1]
The
Lumiere Brothers:
The makers of the earliest films to be projected
for a live audience. Given that these films were called actualities.
Since the titles were very literally “workers leaving the factory”
it can be said that these short movies are the first documentaries.
[2]
Of
note is the one of the train coming into the station that had people
rushing out of their seats in terror and leading to the posting of a
sign assuring people that the train wasn't real.
Editing:
Editing
transforms a story. Sometimes this ability can be abused and you get
films that are heavily skewed to one point of view [3].
At
other times however:
You can't look away
1920's:
The
cost of equipment means that filmakers are forced to be innovators of
technology [4]
Neuremburg
Rally – Nazi Propaganda film which extolls the glorious virtures of
the Nazis [5]. It's worth referencing the German news reels shown
towards the end of the war in which they, understandably, removed the
fact that the allies were actually winning and led to statements like
“We had a brilliant action in which we allowed the Americans to
think that they had captured the town of Generic-german-name-von-burg
which is all part of a cunning plan that will lull them into a false
sense of security and allow us to beat them up when our
reinforcements arrive” [6]
NOTES:
- Which means I'm not going to make fun of it because rule 1 is that you don't make fun of the guys with heavy artillery.
- The first porn film I hear you ask? It's “After the Ball” which was released in 1897
- and yet still have their fans claiming that it's totally objective
- This isn't suprising as this sort of thing happens in every field sooner or later. But since we're talking about kiwi filmakers I'm going to go ahead and claim that we invented everything! You must agree with this if you want to see another Hobbit film.
- Those wacky Germans!
- Not an actual quote
No comments:
Post a Comment