I'm not a huge film buff. I don't make a point of seeing all the new releases, and I only see two or three movies a year in the theater. I am, however, extremely interested the medium from an artistic and literary perspective, and I love Old Movies. I'm fascinated by the history of movies and movie-making, so last Thursday's class was of great interest to me.
I think the most surprising part of the class to me was George Melias and his film "The Conjurer". The special effects were far more effective than I would have expected in that old a film. They weren't Avatar quality, of course, but they weren't anything to turn up your nose at either. They would have looked especially effective, I suspect, to an audience that didn't know much about film-making, stop-motion, and the like. But just because you know how the trick is done doesn't mean you shouldn't be impressed by the skill with which it was performed.
I'm going to go against the current here and say that I was also intrigued by the Lumiere brothers and their films like "train arriving at a station" (I suspect I have the title wrong). "What!" I hear you saying. "How could you possibly find that interesting?" Sure ,it had no plot, no cool effects, no real artistic value. I'll concede that. By conventional standards it was boring. I'm interested in history though, especially the Victorian period. The most frustrating thing to me about researching the period is how few visual references there are as far as normal, everyday life is concerned. Photographs were for the most part taken only of significant events, since they were still relatively expensive to develop. So the existance of a visual record of everyday life in the period that I had never heard of before was very exciting to me. but then, I'm easily excitable. I was also surprised by how smoothly the picture moved in all these old films. The stereotype of old movies is that they seem to flicker, like the subject was lit only by a strobe light.
I think the most astounding thing I realized, though, was just how much things like camera angle and movement affect the feel of a film. Watching the early films like "The Conjurer" and "Life of an American Fireman", which had no camera movement at all within a scene, and then seeing "By a Waterfall" and "Suits: The Musical", it was amazing what a difference there was. The camera movement adds a sense of immediacy and liveliness that was missing from the earlier films. I'm really looking forward to finding out what else I'm overlooking and taking for granted when I watch movies.
