As the pioneering work of documentaries, this film is undoubtedly a must-see for those who want to understand and love documentaries.
In fact, it has been a long time since I watched this film, and the film review has been delayed without writing. Procrastination is one thing. But I always feel that my knowledge base is too far behind to understand and analyze this film, and my understanding of the relationship between anthropology, sociology, cinema, etc. is too superficial.
But I still want to say something, and always learn to say something slowly.
At the moment with all kinds of colorful visual impact, such a black and white silent film is obviously very difficult to make people interested in watching it. But when you make up your mind to stop and watch, you will find yourself substituting into it unconsciously, which is pure beauty. Black-and-white images and explanations with white characters on a black background, such a strong black-and-white contrast accentuates the characters' expressions and movements in terms of perception, making the audience's attention more focused on the characters and the events themselves. It is such a pure look and feel that is more powerful than today's colorful picture effects.
Old things have more of a heavy taste that has been precipitated by time, which is incomparable to all the fresh video works at present.
But from a documentary point of view, this documentary, which is known as the opening film, has been very controversial because of its posed shots, because many hunting tools and methods were actually eliminated by the Eskimos at that time. The director asked The posing behavior of the film makes the authenticity of this documentary questioned. But at the same time, "authenticity" is also a problem that the documentary image form has faced from the beginning to the present.
Documentary has always been considered to be the most objective and the least human factor among the three major film forms. Albert Maysles once talked about this artistic tension: "We can see two kinds of realities in documentaries, one in the raw material. in, that is, on film, the truth of that diary literary work: he is direct and unaltered; and the other truth comes from distilling and structuring the raw material into a more meaningful and coherent narrative form, And this form of narrative is considered more than source material. In a sense, the interests of the filmmaker and the editor of the film (even if they are sometimes the same person) are conflicting because the source material is not Willing to be tailored, he is willing to keep his authenticity. One commandment says that if you start putting him in another form it will result in a loss of part of the honesty; another commandment says that if you don't put him in another In this form, no one will see him, and the real elements contained in the original material cannot make any artistic image to the viewer at all. So there are conflicting things and what brings them together, and from both It's a matter of getting the best results. It's almost become a content and form debate."
For those who are just getting started with documentaries like me, I am also faced with the same confusion as to whether what we see as the audience of documentaries is really true, and whether the reality of the documentary reaction is just what the director described for us. A dream, the so-called documentary form that claims to record the truth is just a falsehood.
I don't have an answer or a stand, I have a lot to learn and think about.
Now I still don't have the passion to change the world, what I want is to understand the world better, I want to try to explain the world, maybe it's still false in the end, who knows, but that's probably what got me hooked on documentaries in the first place Cause, I fucking love this crap world so much.
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