Week 7

The films I was Born, But... and The Great Train Robbery both use classic techniques contributing to the development narrative cinema to tell extremely different stories.

The Great Train Robbery is quite interesting as it does not simply align with typical railway subgenre and "spectator as passenger", rather it exploits it to show more sides to the story. It allows the spectator to indulge in the thrill of identifying with the aggressor and the Vitim simultaneously. So not only is the spectator the passenger, the spectator is also the perpetrator. This dynamic plays into narrative cinema's place in portraying much depper nuances of human life than what cinema had previously accomplished.

The same can be said for I was Born, But..., a film that explores the nuances of domestic life in Japan when it what that meant was at the time in a state of fluidity and change. So while these two films came nearly 20 years apart and from very different backgrounds, I'd argue that they are similar in that they are communicating the same message to spectators--that life is complex and filled with nuance. Their complexity makes sense when we look at the systems from which they came, where narrative cinema was birthing from a shift "inscribed in the film's form: systems of editing, genres, methods of constructing viewing positions, depicting of landscapes" (Charles Musser, Page 89). These films had depth inscribed within them.

Not only were these films documenting the wildness of life in the present, but they were successfully brining out nuances moments from history that wowed audiences. The Great Train Robbery was advertised as a realistic re-telling of a past event. This breaks cinema away from just spectatorship and brings it into reality--fictional narrative cinema then becomes a story that audiences can directly connect with and translate into their own lives, it breaks the barrier between film and life, something that still remains incredibly seductive to viewers.