{"id":22444,"date":"2018-01-10T19:28:16","date_gmt":"2018-01-10T18:28:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=22444"},"modified":"2018-01-10T19:28:16","modified_gmt":"2018-01-10T18:28:16","slug":"contemporary-cinema-1-detroit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=22444","title":{"rendered":"Contemporary cinema (1): “Detroit”"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week I began another of the many courses that I’ve attended over the years at the City Literary Institute<\/a> in central London. It is called “Contemporary Cinema: The Best Films Of The Year” and the lecturer is the American John Wischmeyer. It is an evening course with one session each week for 10 weeks.<\/p>\n

It seems that the plan is that most weeks we will see and discuss clips from an acclaimed recent film and then compare it to a couple of significant older movies. This first week, we focused on last year’s film “Detroit’<\/em> [my review here<\/a>] and compared it with “Medium Co<\/em>ol” (1969) and the French film “The Battle Of Algiers”<\/em> (1966). Fortunately I have seen each of these three works.<\/p>\n

All three films deal with actual events and deploy a documentary style and the course debated how conventional cinema and documentary cinema overlap in look and style. A conventional film using a documentary style tells a story using hand-held cameras and naturalistic dialogue making it look and sound like a documentary. On the other hand, a documentary still has to tell a story and has to be shot and edited with the same tools and choices as a straightforward film.<\/p>\n

“Detroit”, as well as narrating a true story and using some actual dialogue, intercuts with\u00a0contemporary news footage so drawing the viewer into the experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"