We were viewing a documentary on the different types of film in the 90's, at the end of celluloid. The 90's heralded in the beginning of the digital age for film, and this lost the more organic style of filming that has dominated from the beginning of film history.
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| Through the Olive Trees |
The story began with an Iranian director who was trying to create the most organic, realistic film experience by eliminating such things as lighting, and most interestingly, the director. In his first film, he was filming the life of a young boy. A while after the movie was filmed there was a natural disaster in the area. He went back to find the little boy and instead encountered a man who interested him and filmed him. During the shooting of this film, the director fell in love with an actress in the film but was rejected. His next film was about that experience, and during the filming he encountered the young boy from the first film all grown up. This strange coincidence literally brings around the cycle of the films. The Iranian films I have seen have always been very quiet and take a lot from real life experiences. Little or no music is used, only natural sounds are heard. It seems that the Iranian culture supports less of a 'story' and more of a look into life.
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| The Ring |
The next category was the Japanese film makers who in the 90's were busy making horror films that capitalizes on their fear of technology and women (haha). The director of The Ring was heavily influenced by an old Japanese film from the 30's about a female ghost. I cannot find the name of this film ANYWHERE, but I know it had Monogatari in it and it was in black and white.
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| La Haine |
The most interesting part by far was the French film portion. The film stated at the beginning that France was one of the original origins of film. They discussed a few films, L'Haine and Beau Travail. L'Haine is the story of three ethnically diverse boy living in the French projects. It was filmed without music and in black and white to represent the bleakness of city life and the quietness of the story of the three seemingly faceless boys who were the protagonists of the story.
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| Beau Travail |
It reminded me of the grey imagery through The Road and how it represented a dying road. In L'Haine, it was the opposite. The grey was ironic to the amount of life in the city, demonstrating the degradation people outside the inner city see versus the life within it. Beau Travail was a reimagining of Billy Bud by Herman Mellville set in Djibouti in a French Foreign Legion outpost. A new recruit enters and immediately makes the head officer jeleous. In the end of the film there is a beautiful scene implying impending suicide. The last shot of the scene was a close up of a pulsating vein in the man's arm representing how precious life is. The last scene of the movie was a metaphorical dance of the man's last dreams before he died. The whole documentary was very interesting and captured perfectly the bittersweet ending of celluloid, the living camera, and the beginning of the digital age of camera.
Below are clips from the movies, tried to upload them but oddly enough they would not come up when I tried uploading them from youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okQJPUTQMqA (La Haine)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKDWk3dgjDs (Beau Travail)
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