https://vimeo.com/198306286
Originally they meant to go out to have an adventure. They interviewed an individual about how the glacier’s rate of retreat has been increasing over the years. “I used to come here with a snow plow. Now I need a lawnmower”. Global warming is visible around the world. Rockfalls have made hiking dangerous. There have been rockfalls at “Les Cosmiques” as well as along one of the routes I walked last year near Zermatt.
Yesterday D-Day Film Archives were shared on Facebook. These film archives were of landing crafts landing troops on the beaches, of battleships firing rocket salvos at the coast, of gliders being pulled by planes, of paratroopers getting and more. Over the years films have been preserved by transferring the footage from one film stock to another and then transferred from film to tapes. The problem with film and tape is that they are stored in a physical location that only archivists have access to.
I went to watch Dirty Gold War at the Graduate Institute at lunch time today. The film is interesting because it makes you think about the environmental impact of gold mining. We’re familiar with the stories of gold mines in South Africa. We’re familiar with the stories of the gold rush. We don’t often think of the environmental impact of Gold mining in rain forests in Latin America. This documentary introduces the topic well.
The Great Wide Open is a different climbing video than I am used to because it discusses history, culture and American identity. It speaks about the American Independence day and watching fireworks from “Devils tower”, a laccolithic butte. This is an interesting rock formation. The rock has vertical cracks that are impressive to see. There are many aspects that I like and enjoy about this video. I like the visuals and I like the discussion of history and opportunism and passion.
Squadron Scramble is an interesting book to read in post-BREXIT England because it highlights aspects of the Second World War that BREXITers forget about. It looks at how the main character had to flee France via Dunkirk as well as the situation that Polish airmen had found themselves in. First they lost their homes, then they had to flee France when it was invaded and finally they went to England via North Africa.
When Gordon Buchanan was following bears in the United States we watched the resulting documentaries on television. We have seen him a number of times in episodes of countryfile as well. Now he is working on getting footage of wolves in the wild. For this project he is staying out in the wild and following a pack of wolves day after day for weeks. As part of this project he is filming with a broadcast camera and gopro cameras which he fixed on to a “rock crawler”.
Flowing Water - A visual experiment is a simple one minute video. The first images were filmed at the Arboretum in the Jura and the timelapses show clouds playing above the Jura near La Dôle. La Dôle is where the doppler radar is located. That radar shows rainfall and precipitation so that air traffic controllers can advise pilots of weather conditions. With the amount of rain that has fallen over the last six or more weeks every river is full of water.
Sharkwater - A documentary worth watching. If you have one and a half hours of free time I recommend watching this documentary. It discusses the anti-whaling work by the Sea Shepherd, the work it did to combat long lining around the Galapagos and it touches on the shark finning mafia and corruption. The documentary also looks at the public perception of sharks. It shows that they are not the dangerous animal that they were thought to be until recent history.
Spy-cam wildlife filmmaking is an interesting discipline. It builds upon the decades of innovation that the documentary film genre has built upon. From the earliest images by the Lumière brothers of the workers at a factory to the development of film editing by Eisenstein and Dziva Vertov demonstrated by “The Man With the Movie Camera to sync sound with the Crystal sound system used by Jean Rouch for Chronique d’un été.
“If you were young and healthy and if they needed labour then you were selected as slave labour. You would have suffered a slow death rather than a fast one”. This soundbite is 13 minutes in. In this documentary a concentration camp survivor takes two girls who are the age she was when she arrived through the camp and tells them about her experiences. We owe it to future generations to keep re-sharing these accounts and documentaries to prevent such actions from ever happening again.