PRACTICAL DV FILMMAKING

Practical DV FilmMaking

• Overview
• Inside video
• Films and how they work
• Pre-production
• Production tools
• Production aesthetics
• Post-production tools
• Post-production aesthetics
• Careers and distribution
• Mapping the industry
• Glossary of film and video terms

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http://www.iofilm.co.uk/feats/interviews/r/rabbit_proof_fence_2002.shtml Director of Rabbit-Proof Fence, Phillip Noyce, interviewed.

The golden age of all Zeitgeist movies was the 1950s, coincidentally when fear was at its highest in a climate clouded by fear of atomic testing (see Them, The Incredible Shrinking Man et al.), Russian invasion (The War of the Worlds, Byron Haskin, 1953), creeping communism (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Don Siegel, 1956), and world war (The Day the Earth Stood Still, Robert Wise, 1951). Science fiction proves time and again to be the most fertile ground for this kind of movie to flourish, seen again in later Zeitgeists. Does Ripley's discovery of the deadly alien growing inside her in Alien 3 echo the AIDS crisis of the late 1980s? The director David Fincher's further fascination with the body in Seven suggests it was.

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http://www.awdsgn.com/Classes/WebI_Fall02/WebI-Final/JBusser/index.html Brief guide to sci-fi films of the 1950s.

Often blunt, the best of these signs manage to catch the prevailing winds of the Zeitgeist rather than the temporary storms, preferring to ask deep questions that don't go away rather than resort to cheap hits of passing fears.

In all of these layers there is a mix of both interpretation and intent. It is where the audience and the director join forces to inject meaning into a film. But the films with greatest interest are, perhaps, those where the director's intent is aware of the audience's interpretation and yet open to the possibility that a third element will enter the equation - the social and political climate of the era.

Film View

Five films to understand more about films:

The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (Peter Greenaway, 1989). Made at the end of the decade of strife in Thatcher's Britain, nothing else quite presents such a horrific metaphor of a nation.

The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928). Silent masterpiece portraying the life of an immigrant in depression-hit America. The man is everyone, while the eponymous crowd is - what? Capitalism? The tide of human aspiration about to wash away?

Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974). There were lots of films that used paranoia and cor­ruption as their theme in 1970s America, but few have the prescience of this. Is the drought in the film symbolizing our dwindling supplies of oil and the corruption surround­ing the commodity?

Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero, 1979). It's not just highbrow films that can speak volumes about our world. In Romero's first version of the film, there are some of the most anti-consumerist visions ever to be screened.

Uzak (Distant) (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2002). Remarkably detached filmmaking that brings deep dividends. The theme that slowly develops through a series of comic and tragic scenes is one of isolation against a backdrop of Istanbul embracing new technology and rejecting the past.