A Hundred Years Later, And Cinema Has Gone Full-Circle

The very first films started popping up in the late nineteenth century. They are not really what we would recognise as films nowadays, instead of narratives and characters the earliest films were just a minute or so long, and showed something of interest. This could be a shot of a boat leaving a harbour, a procession of ostriches, some teenage girls having a pillow fight, a wall demolished then reversed; there is not really a unifying theme other than something that an audience used to static backgrounds and relatively thin stage of the theatre found appealing. Hence, it has become known as the 'cinema of attractions'.

There are a few notable examples that I'd like to draw on. One of the earliest was 'Repas de Bebe', which showed a baby eating something. However, it was not the baby that grabbed the attention of the audience, but the moving foliage in the background. This was a realism unlike anything they'd seen produced artificially before, and it was fascinating.

The next video is one of a train pulling into a station. Now this is a myth, and did not actually happen, but the story goes that the first audience that watched this film were scared that the train would come through the screen and into the auditorium. They were not that easily duped, but it neatly summaries my point: audiences found shots that contain great depth and movement towards the camera very striking.

Do the above things remind you of anything? A certain megabudget sci-fi spectacular? Yes - Avatar embodies both of these things, and uses them as its primary selling point. The story is crappy; I'm pretty sure the producers knew that. However: CGI! $250m dollars worth! The dialogue might be hammy and the characters thinly conceived, but goddamnit look at those backgrounds! Who cares what those blue dudes are doing - imma look at that floating rock! With a waterfall!

You get the picture.

It's not just the backgrounds that ape the 'cinema of attractions' style appeal. The feeling of something coming towards you, as with the train before, sounds an awful lot like 3D, the other selling point of Avatar. Those people that did not flinch, but might have, have clear parallels with modern audiences who flap their hands in front of their faces or duck when the 3D effect whizzes something uncomfortably close. There has been 3D before, and there has been complex CGI before, but Avatar is the first time when both are united to fill theatres like never before.

There have not been a huge number that have tried to follow in Avatar's footsteps - Transformers 3 is probably the only one that relies solely on 3D and CGI - but Avatar is the biggest grossing film of all time by a long way and so cannot be ignored. Our watching habits are reverting back to how they were before cinemas were even a thing; and when spectacle took precedence over narrative. Narrative films were barely even possible back then, so in this day and age when anyone can shoot a film better than the Lumiere brothers, why are we reverting back to the superficial?



N.B. Yeah, I know, Avatar came out two years ago, but I've only just learned about the cinema of attractions, so excuse my tardiness.

EDIT: minutes after posting this I discover that some French filmmakers have made a genuine black-and-white silent film. It's not quite the same as what I'm getting at in this piece, but weird coincidence or what.

RealTimeWWII - Twitter's first great piece of art.

A while back, when Twitter was but a mysterious platform for posting about life's inanities to a handful of uninterested people, a writer tried to tell a story in posts of 140 characters of less. It was some boring woman, I think she wrote The Exmoor Files, and she then went on to predict that there would one day be a 'Twitter Masterpiece'. I called cried foul immediately: what a poorly thought through way of writing a story. It just smacks of pretentiousness and novelty. And at the moment I'm still right; the best we've got are some of the intelligent fake accounts that parody people, living or dead.

However, I wasn't banking on something like @RealTimeWWII coming along. It's not fiction but it is art, even if that isn't what it set out to do. RealTimeWWII sends tweets as if World War Two is currently on-going. Sample tweet: 

SS have arrested over 1,200 students. All Prague universities permanently closed. 9 "ringleaders", chosen at random, have been shot"

The amount of research that must have gone into the making of this is daunting. Famous events are covered, of course, but it's the minutiae of the war that really put things in perspective. It allows us to compare the many atrocities committed during the war with the daily workings of the 21st Century. Somehow 'Northen Rock Sold To Virgin' (today's headline) has less impact when it's sat under 'Prague: Trucks of SS troops just drove into Karlsplatz; protest broken up with rifle-butt beatings. Germans have arrested dozens of Czechs' in my twitterfeed.  (Can we rename the Twitterfeed the BirdFeed?)


"One person killed is a tragedy, a million killed is a statistic", and we all know the statistics: 25 million soldiers killed, the same number again of civilians killed. It's impossible to really grasp what those numbers mean, and this is the genius of  RealTimeWWII. Currently (minus 72 years!) in WWII, full scale European warfare is still a few months away, so it will be fascinating how it changes once the belligerents fully engage, but this early period is sort of terrifying; I felt a pang of, what, fear or apprehension when I read the tweet 'Berlin has rejected Dutch-Belgian offer to mediate with Allies & threatened to "show the British what it means to be at war with Germany"'. 


RealTimeWWII makes use of the Twitter medium perfectly. The key elements of Twitter are the 140 character rule, the 'timeline' nature of the Twitterfeed, and multimedia opportunities. All of these are harnessed to great effect. The necessity of brevity in composing each post means there is room only for the brutal facts:  '9 "ringleaders", chosen at random, have been shot' is so brutally factual that we instinctively fill in the gaps and re-imagine the scenario; not so hard given that I myself am a student. The day-by-day nature of RealTime WWII means that it is not a 'greatest hits' - as it were - of the events of WWII. To keep it moving the writer has to include some slightly more mundane aspects of life at the time - we get quotes from forgotten politicians, anonymous members of the public and trivialities of life as well as important military events such as the Winter War. One particularly brilliant aspect of RealTimeWWII is that it posts news items and photos from the time. The immediacy these pictures give is striking. No longer just a photo in a textbook, it is instead contextualised beautifully, one detail in a vast canvass. 


What makes this art is that it allows us to re-imagine a period in history that we though we knew so well, and contrasts it with the frankly comfortable society of today, recession and all. It is outstanding.

The 'We Deserved To Win' Fallacy

"We deserved to win" just about sums up the attitude in the Spanish press to England's unexpected 1-0 win against the World and European Champions Spain at Wembley last Saturday. England barely touched the ball, they whined. They parked the bus, they sneered. Boring. cynical. An unjust result. Spain play beautiful, expansive, skillful football, and win every time, did no one tell you, England? 


The Spanish are not the only nation/team guilty of such breathtaking arrogance. Granted, there is a definite sore-loser streak that's developed in Iberia since they came to world dominance, but I imagine that every fan of football in the whole world has uttered that awful phrase, "We deserved to win".

Spain did not deserve to win, no matter how much the precious Spanish press complain. There is merit in defending. There is merit in organisation. And above all, there's merit in putting the ball in the back of the bloody net. A goal has exactly the same worth whether it is scored by a player accidentally scoring with his face after the goalie punched the ball into it or by the most wondrous passing move you've ever seen (Spain again).

Football is all about taking the chances you are given. If a team creates some excellent scoring opportunities but fails to put them away, then they've failed to put them away. It's as simple as that. Bizarrely, it seems to be the final touch, the one that actually scores the goal, that has become undervalued. Once you've reached this mysteriously ill-defined point of basically a goal then by some twisted logic it should be a goal. Fabregas had a great chance. Villa hit the post. But neither were goals. If anything, the dominant amount of possession and territory that a team gains that still results in a defeat or draw makes said defeat or draw even more glaring. It's like a racing driver losing a race despite having a superior vehicle.

The only excuse is when there are some really obvious, pivotal refereeing decisions, like that stupid Chelsea-Barcelona match that made poor Tom Henning Ovrebo a wanted man. Fair play, Chelsea deserved to win.

Football is unforgiving. Hit the post ten times but don't score, and you haven't scored; all or nothing.

It Is Wrong To Deify The Armed Forces

It seems to me, in recent years - or at least I've only just begun to notice it - that our boys in Afghanistan and elsewhere have been deified as faultless, self-sacrificing heroes. I feel this is a fallacy. Before I continue I must assert that I do genuinely have great respect for those that choose to put their lives on the line to try and secure the safety of others, and what I am going to write next should not been taken to be dismissal of those who don't make it back to these shores alive. I know people in the army, and I know people who have been affected by the death of friends on duty.

"We believe that anyone who volunteers to serve in time of war, knowing that they may risk all, is a hero. These are ordinary people doing extraordinary things and some of them are living with the consequences of their service for life. We may not be able to prevent our soldiers from being wounded, but together we can help them get better."

Help for Heroes

These sentiments are all in the best possible faith but it is disingenuous to describe Britain as being 'in a time of war'. We are at war, but the war in Afghanistan is not a total war like the World Wars; the safety of Britain isn't under threat. Those guys that fought in WWI and its sequel are heroes because the safety of Britain and her allies were under serious threat. Iraq and Afghanistan are wars of foreign policy, closer to imperialism than defence of the realm. Because of this, a modern-day soldier does not have the same chime of heroism. A role in the army in 2011 is a job in the most mundane sense of the word, rather than a duty or an act of 'volunteer[ing]' that the Help for Heroes blur speaks of. Strictly speaking, if HfH were to help just the volunteers, then it would have a very minor task indeed. The position of army serviceman is a job that may require self-sacrifice, but it is in pursuit of money rather than as the sole defenders of a nation.

This is not an attack on Help for Heroes; those guys that come back from a warzone infirm of mind and/or body do need the extra help, and I've read various articles outlining the poor treatment they received from whichever branch of the Armed Forces they fought under. No, rather this written against the 'hero' assumption, the assumption that putting one's life on the line makes one worthy of the tag of  'hero'. I haven't got the statistics for the British Armed forces, but the American Armed Forces suffers a casualty rate of 27 per 10 000, in comparison with the American logging industry that suffers 11.7 per 10 000. The death rate in the army is just 2.3 times higher than in the lumberjacking business. Does anyone claim lumberjacks to be heroes just because there is worryingly high mortality-rate? No, because chopping down trees is not romanticised in the same way that 'fighting for one's country' is, whatever that means.

Adorning soldiers with the ‘hero’ tag has further implications than just creating a false sense of valour. By creating such a romanticised view of the army, more young men are encouraged to join despite the very real threat of serious bodily harm, or even death. A more realistic outlook needs to be taken. Like the men of the middle ages that journeyed to far-flung climes in search of fabled treasure, our modern day perspective of the army is similarly distorted, if not to the same extent. The horrors that a soldier is likely to experience is overruled by the heroic image that the armed forces still carry.

It’s also interesting that the ‘hero’ tag has survived the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, despite the various documented abuses carried out by British and American soldiers. None of these seem to dent its image. I think the hero defence wilts when it goes up against hard evidence with the soldiers in question disgraced, but since these abusive acts are far from the norm, the hero tag absolved the army as a whole.