... whereas Woody Allen's comparable "Zelig" was ingenious. And hilarious. "Forgotten Silver" is only fitfully amusing, in my opinion. The faked archive footage certainly does capture the feel of the period however.
It's really hard to see anyone taking this documentary at face value. The Great Egg Robbery at the beginning, if nothing else, should surely give that away.
The version of the Salome story in Colin McKenzie's magnum opus is, of course, Oscar Wilde's, not the unsensationalized accounts of SS. Matthew (xiv) and Mark (vi), in spite of all that talk about "Biblical". Yeah, Biblical like Cecil B. DeMille is Biblical. That is just another one of Peter Jackson's jokes.
I took a stab at deciphering the signs we see in Russian, but not much luck there. One does say "Fokusnik", meaning "Conjuror". Need to buy a better dictionary, I guess.
McKenzie's death scene seems to me anyway to allude very obliquely to the famous footage of the anthropologists in South America who filmed their own deaths when they encountered some non-pacified tribesmen. The unplanned look is similar, the distance from the camera about the same, and the camera also ends up on the ground in that shocking film when the cameraman is murdered, if I remember it all correctly. (Some of these details may be wrong. It's been a while since I saw it.) If you haven't seen that particular film, you haven't in fact missed very much. It's a lot like McKenzie's death, not sensational, just unexpected and "real", and therefore shocking, more in its implications than its actuality.
It's really hard to see anyone taking this documentary at face value. The Great Egg Robbery at the beginning, if nothing else, should surely give that away.
The version of the Salome story in Colin McKenzie's magnum opus is, of course, Oscar Wilde's, not the unsensationalized accounts of SS. Matthew (xiv) and Mark (vi), in spite of all that talk about "Biblical". Yeah, Biblical like Cecil B. DeMille is Biblical. That is just another one of Peter Jackson's jokes.
I took a stab at deciphering the signs we see in Russian, but not much luck there. One does say "Fokusnik", meaning "Conjuror". Need to buy a better dictionary, I guess.
McKenzie's death scene seems to me anyway to allude very obliquely to the famous footage of the anthropologists in South America who filmed their own deaths when they encountered some non-pacified tribesmen. The unplanned look is similar, the distance from the camera about the same, and the camera also ends up on the ground in that shocking film when the cameraman is murdered, if I remember it all correctly. (Some of these details may be wrong. It's been a while since I saw it.) If you haven't seen that particular film, you haven't in fact missed very much. It's a lot like McKenzie's death, not sensational, just unexpected and "real", and therefore shocking, more in its implications than its actuality.