A small question concerning a music video.
December 27, 2011 9:36 PM Subscribe
This video of 'Departure' by Crystal Stilts seems to be comprised completely of documentary footage from the May '68 student uprising in Paris. However, there are a few shots in the video that are almost too 'perfect', specifically shots 4, 5 and 7, and I am wondering if they are in fact taken from a movie made at the time. If so, what film would that be? For some inexplicable reason I really need to know this.
Not sure what you mean by "shots", exactly, so I take it you mean footage between about 0:06 and 0:20 showing running protesters. I don't see what distinguishes this footage, particularly, let alone makes it quote-unquote perfect. The first shot (4, I guess) is taken from a camera on a vehicle. It may seem pretty real to you, but it's probably just because it's a color film camera (probably 16mm, but possibly 8mm), which is how news footage was gathered back then. You can see this in the movie Medium Cool^, which was actually shot during the Chicago protests the same year. In the opening scene, actors Robert Forster and Peter Bonerz play a TV news crew shooting the aftermath of a (fake) car accident; later in the film they interact directly with cops and protesters, with most of the camera work by Haskell Wexler.
I really suspect it's this filmic quality that is distracting you and making you think the footage can't be real.
The Dreamers was written and directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, who himself was present at the '68 protests, so it would have a certain verisimilitude regardless, even re-created events. But absent other evidence, I'd assume the footage was all taken as represented, i.e. news camera.
posted by dhartung at 11:05 PM on December 27, 2011
I really suspect it's this filmic quality that is distracting you and making you think the footage can't be real.
The Dreamers was written and directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, who himself was present at the '68 protests, so it would have a certain verisimilitude regardless, even re-created events. But absent other evidence, I'd assume the footage was all taken as represented, i.e. news camera.
posted by dhartung at 11:05 PM on December 27, 2011
Put a camera on a tripod in the back of a pickup truck, and that's what it'll look like. If you're a news gatherer trying to film a moving crowd on the fly, that'd be the way to do it.
Seems perfectly authentic to me.
posted by Sys Rq at 4:33 PM on December 28, 2011
Seems perfectly authentic to me.
posted by Sys Rq at 4:33 PM on December 28, 2011
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by intermod at 10:13 PM on December 27, 2011