Kill or Be Killed | |
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Directed by | Len Lye |
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Release date |
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Running time | 18 minutes |
Country | United Kingdom |
Language | English |
Kill or Be Killed is an 18 minute long, documentary-style film directed in 1942 by experimental New Zealand artist Len Lye during his time working for the British Government's Ministry of Information. [1] [2] [3] The initial purpose of the film was to serve as a military training tool and a piece of post-war propaganda viewable by the general public, but since its release, both critics and filmmakers alike have hailed it as a "masterpiece of filmmaking," [4] claiming that the realistic cinematography is both pleasing in aesthetics and technicality for its time. [4] The film is most notable for its use of subjective viewing.
Kill or Be Killed follows the single event of British sniper, Sergeant Smith, as he crawls about an unidentified, yet generic-looking forest seeking to aim and kill a Nazi enemy ironically named Schmidt. It is actually within the first few minutes of the film that Smith acquires and executes his target, while the second act of the film (totaling in three) is a flashback that compresses the tedious manhunt leading up to the climax. The lengthy sequence shows Smith in gross camouflage blending naturally within his surrounding—each bodily movement abiding the dynamics of obscurity as he slowly ascends to higher ground and optimal surveillance. Once there, Smith progresses the action of the film by reiterating the scoping and sniping of Schmidt, and then uses the corpse as a decoy to lure other Nazi soldiers into a clearing where he systematically picks them off. [4] The film ends with an elicited tone of triumph.
Lye makes "inventive use" of camera close-ups and long, gradual sequences of movement to stimulate suspense that is shared by both the protagonist and the viewer. [5] Much of the sound used throughout the film consists of isolated instances—like the snapping of twigs, footsteps on the forest floor, and the climactic gunshot. The brevity of such audiovisual cues serves to propel the drama but also maintain the principles of camouflage. Another highly discussed element of Kill or Be Killed's artistry involves scenes in which Lye deploys the camera to portray a unique point of view. For example, toward the beginning of the film, a camera strapped to Smith's waist tracks the British soldier's movements as he pursues his enemy through the forest—a technique that would later be termed the "first-person shooter." [5] In another scene, the camera cuts from an image of Smith lifting binoculars to his face, to a subjective view of the scene as he views it through the lenses.[ citation needed ]
Kill or Be Killed managed to reach beyond Britain to audiences and critics on a global scale within its first year of release, and the published reviews yielded many praises.
A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception [that remains] a practice without clear boundaries".
The history of film chronicles the development of a visual art form created using film technologies that began in the late 19th century.
A propaganda film is a film that involves some form of propaganda. Propaganda films spread and promote certain ideas that are usually religious, political, or cultural in nature. A propaganda film is made with the intent that the viewer will adopt the position promoted by the propagator and eventually take action towards making those ideas widely accepted. Propaganda films are popular mediums of propaganda due to their ability to easily reach a large audience in a short amount of time. They are also able to come in a variety of film types such as documentary, non-fiction, and newsreel, making it even easier to provide subjective content that may be deliberately misleading.
Triumph of the Will is a 1935 German Nazi propaganda film directed, produced, edited and co-written by Leni Riefenstahl. Adolf Hitler commissioned the film and served as an unofficial executive producer; his name appears in the opening titles. It chronicles the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, which was attended by more than 700,000 Nazi supporters. The film contains excerpts of speeches given by Nazi leaders at the Congress, including Hitler, Rudolf Hess and Julius Streicher, interspersed with footage of massed Sturmabteilung (SA) and Schutzstaffel (SS) troops and public reaction. Its overriding theme is the return of Germany as a great power with Hitler as its leader. The film was produced after the Night of the Long Knives, and many formerly prominent SA members are absent.
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The Last Laugh is a 1924 German silent film directed by German director F. W. Murnau from a screenplay written by Carl Mayer. The film stars Emil Jannings and Maly Delschaft.
Meshes of the Afternoon is a 1943 American experimental silent short film directed by and starring wife-and-husband team, Maya Deren and Alexandr Hackenschmied.
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Leonard Charles Huia Lye was a New Zealand artist known primarily for his experimental films and kinetic sculpture. His films are held in archives including the New Zealand Film Archive, British Film Institute, Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and the Pacific Film Archive at University of California, Berkeley. Lye's sculptures are found in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and the Berkeley Art Museum. Although he became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1950, much of his work went to New Zealand after his death, where it is housed at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth.
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A dream sequence is a technique used in storytelling, particularly in television and film, to set apart a brief interlude from the main story. The interlude may consist of a flashback, a flashforward, a fantasy, a vision, a dream, or some other element.
Der Sieg des Glaubens is the first Nazi propaganda film directed by Leni Riefenstahl. Her film recounts the Fifth Party Rally of the Nazi Party, which occurred in Nuremberg, Germany, from 30 August to 3 September 1933. The film is of great historic interest because it shows Adolf Hitler and Ernst Röhm on close and intimate terms, before Hitler had Röhm killed during the Night of the Long Knives on 1 July 1934. As he then sought to remove Röhm from German history, Hitler ordered all known copies of the film be destroyed, and it was considered lost until a surviving copy was found in the 1980s in East Germany.
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Dufaycolor is an early British additive colour photographic film process, introduced for motion picture use in 1932 and for still photography in 1935. It was derived from Louis Dufay's Dioptichrome plates, a glass-based product for colour still photography, introduced in France in 1909. Both Dioptichrome and Dufaycolor worked on the same principles as the Autochrome process, but achieved their results using a layer of tiny colour filter elements arrayed in a regular geometric pattern, unlike Autochrome's random array of coloured starch grains. The manufacture of Dufaycolor film ended in the late 1950s.
French impressionist cinema refers to a group of French films and filmmakers of the 1920s.
Yellow Canary is a 1943 British drama film directed by Herbert Wilcox and starring Anna Neagle, Richard Greene and Albert Lieven. Neagle plays a British Nazi sympathizer who travels to Halifax, Canada, trailed by spies from both sides during the Second World War. Neagle and director/producer Wilcox collaborated on a number of previous film projects.
My Life for Ireland is a 1941 Nazi German anti-British propaganda drama film produced in World War II. Directed by Max W. Kimmich, it tells a story of an Irish nationalist family and their involvement in the Irish struggle of independence over two generations. The film's sets were designed by the art directors Wilhelm Depenau and Otto Erdmann.
Stukas is a 1941 Nazi propaganda film, directed by Karl Ritter and starring Carl Raddatz, which follows three squadrons of Luftwaffe dive-bomber (Stuka) flyers.
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