WAR AND WEAPONRY
The rain's stopped, for the rest of the week at least, and now the
temperature is just about right. Yet I'm still wasting time inside
watching documentaries, what can you do? Well you can waste more
time babbling about them to the internet of course...
Following on from that excelling Irish series, Hands, detailing
traditional craftsmen at work, I discovered that the BBC produced
series called Handmade:
https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Handmade_%28BBC%29
It's not quite the same, more of an artistic thing without any
narration and extremely high quality filming. I think it was
probably part of that "slow TV" fad, but personally I miss learning
about the details and history of the work like one can from Hands.
Not all the work is particularly traditional in its execution
either, leaning heavily on modern tools.
However the BBC later made another series called Handmade in Japan,
which actually not only addresses my concerns about the
traditionality of the techniques being shown, but also put in
interviews with craftsmen and historians. The Japanese culture is
quite a novely too, and this is especially the case in the first,
and I would say best, episode showing the forging of a japanese
Samurai sword. In contrast to the knife maker shown in the first
series, this is really a show of ancient craftwork. A pair of
excellently co-ordinated men gradully belt together folds in a
piece of steel heated in a coal forge connected to a hand-pumped
bellows. The pumping itself being done from a kneeling position
with an almost monastic precision of movement. All while watched
over by the elderly father who had passed on the skills of this
craft to his sons.
https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Handmade_in_Japan:_Series_1
Maybe I'm just too much of a bloke to be equally interested in the
textiles and pottery shown in the other two, nevertheless
facinating, episodes. Or maybe it's because, believe it or not, I
did once get the chance to hold an old japanese sword, although I
didn't have the guts to fully unsheath it. But that episode really
stands out for me.
But then again it could just be that I'm facinated by people
killing each other, because besides that I've been digging into
docos about yet more wars.
Yet another 20th century war that one doesn't often stumble across
is the Algerian War. A general, and accurate assessment, is that it
was just another colonial war typical of the era. The details
though, are rather more unique, with the politics really far more
complicated and influential than the fighting itself, although the
latter was nevertheless brutal. Somehow they went into great detail
about the history of the french revolution in history class at
school, yet I'm sure few students left even knowing about the
Algerian war at all, and I myself only now appreciate the real
influence it had on much more recent French politics. Even coming
close to instigating a military coup back in Paris itself.
https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=The_Algerian_War_1954-1962
Unlike so many British war documentaries, it was made by Channel 4
rather than the BBC. I guess Ch4 must have abandoned these more
high-brow documentary subjects since it was produced back in the
early 1980s.
Finally I've started now on yet another series about the second
world war. However this one is a bit different because it's
actually about the Russian front, produced in the late 1970s, in
collaboration with the Russian film agencies. The originall US
broadcast of The Unknown War's formidable twenty parts was cut off
in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There is a lot
of propoganda-ish footage included from the original Soviet films
that goes through without question, but it does expand greatly on
the less often covered, if not really "unknown" (today, at least),
eastern front of the second world war. I'll be taking my time
getting through it, but already I've been most surprised by the
scale of the manufacturing and population relocation to the east of
Russia that happened after Germany's initial invasion captured or
threatoned much of Soviet Russia's industrial heartland. In a few
years, 2000 factories were built and 10 million people relocated
away from Hitler's reach into the stark lands of Siberia and
surrounds. I'm sure there were more troubles with that than the
documentary shows, but it's a remarkable point of second world war
history which I genuinely didn't know.
https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=The_Unknown_War:_Set_1
https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=The_Unknown_War:_Set_2
- The Free Thinker
