Brzeski and Faden: A look at to documentary styles

The first film, This Unfamiliar Place, directed by Eva Ilona Brzeski, tries to stir the viewers emotions as the narrator tries to get her father to tell his story of growing up as a Jew in Nazi occupied Poland. The narrator has the sudden fascination of her father’s younger days after surviving a disaster of her own, an earthquake. For me that is when the film started to go down hill. Something about the juxtaposition of earthquake footage and wandering through the forest (the narrators place to ponder the happenings of the world) next to the grainy images from the Holocaust and the father’s past did not quite equate and link up in my mind. I understand that the daughter may have felt that she now survived something, though she did not survive anything nearly as vile as the Holocaust. With that said, there was still a lot of time left in the movie at this point and my opinion could have still changed though the father never spoke to the camera about his past. He never actually told his story besides saying he didn’t want to tell his story. There is no reason for this movie to exist, it failed in its mission. Imagine a James Bond movie where Bond never has to go on a mission, he just sits around the office writing a report. While the film had potential and was set up in a way that while I may not agree with had a subject matter that overall that I find interesting though the essence of the subject matter was completely missing.

The second film Eric Faden’s the Tracking Theory – The Synthetic Philosophy of the Glance, is a look back at the relationship of the railroad and cinema. The narrator compares three more modern films about the railroad before playing a retro film that looked at the early evolution of the two technologies. The film points out how the railroad revolutionized the sense of time as trains traveled great distances and needed schedules to operate on. The other sense that a train added was the moving picture. The ability to stare out the window and watch the world go by in a blur. Motion pictures captured both of these aspects. It allowed for time to be spliced and edited and it allowed for that same blurry image from the side of a train as you literally would ride along in the earliest of films. Both of these technologies brought forth a new perspective of the world. They reached out and allowed for cultures to interact and for exploration, forever effecting the culture of the globe. In effect, both the train and cinema created a smaller world where people were able to interact in ways never before possible. Stylistically this film is a strange combination of different forms of documentary style. It uses actually footage from the past at some points though recreation at others. There is not one narrator the whole time though instead several different people in essence conveying the message of the film.