From last week's screenings, I think I most liked Jack's Dream. It was short and had a childish feel to it, especially with the lullaby-esque Claire de Lune playing in the background, but I found all of that charming, even captivating. The story was definitely one of the lighter ones we have seen, entailing mainly a dragon chasing a woman, whose only defense was a barking dog. But, the total aesthetic of the film was a good ending note to the night.

On the other hand, I really disliked the documentary-style Industrial Britain film. Compared to last weeks Man with a Movie Camera, this look at industry in the lives of a country was far less captivating. There was very little creative editing, much unlike Vertov's innovative cutting techniques. That along with the blasé narration made the film even more like a History Channel special rather than a unique exposure of city life.

This film was also extremely romanticized. The entire thing looked simply at hard labor, whether working machines, coal mining, glass blowing; none of the things it featured were at all as positive and great for the people doing them as the cheery English narration portrayed them to be. Sure, they may have made Britain a great industrial powerhouse, but they did little for the workers performing them, considering the terrible labor laws of the time. Had there been no narration, we would simply have seen a rough look at the lives of various laborers, which could very well have been taken as a sort of exposé on the labor laws of industrial Britain. The movie was a sugar-coated by the narration in an attempt to become a layered film like Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera.