Maybe my fascination all started with John Lennon evoking his early days in the slums of Liverpool with “Working Class Hero” and how it’s “something to be.” Maybe it’s because I recently saw There Will Be Blood and the amazing cinematography made the oil fields look appealing. Maybe it began after watching October Sky and seeing all the coal workers—but that’s a bit ironic, considering all Jake Gyllenhaal’s character wanted to do was avoid that lifestyle. The irony continues, even more pronounced: I liked the images portrayed in The Jungle. Upton Sinclair intended to paint the whole working-class situation as horrible, and he did, but that still doesn’t stop me from having a romanticized view of the factories. Does this make me weird? Probably, yeah.
Speaking of factories, check out “Factory Girl” by the Stones, haha.
2 comments:
In my silent film class, we've been going over Soviet cinema from the 1920's where brilliant filmmakers, such as Pudovkin and Eisenstein, used the montage (rapid editing) to make their films effective propaganda tools for the Communist cause.
You may want to check out one of Eisenstein's early films called "Strike," which lends a (mostly) romanticized view to the cause of the workers and their inevitable martyrdom at the hands of the oppressive state. Pudovkin's film "Mother," which I actually like a little more, also deals with the workers' struggle for rights against their evil bosses and the czarist regime.
Sweet, thanks for the recommendations.
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