Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Industrial Britain

GB 1931. Gaumont-British. PC: Empire Marketing Board Film Unit. P: John Grierson, Robert J. Flaherty. 22 min. Print: British Film Institute National Archive. Viewed at Cinema Orion (DocPoint), Helsinki, 27 Jan 2010.

Revisited: a vision of the tradition of skilled labour, traditionally in arts and crafts, now in heavy industry, in Flaherty's opinion. This is about labour as love. The emphasis on quality, the tradition of skill. The vision of unalienated labour must have seemed very strange at the age of Depression. Flaherty blithely ignores the contemporary crisis of industry. His perspective is timeless.

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