Wednesday, 13 January 2016

Video Update - 13 January 2016

Dickensian – 1x08 - Episode 1.8
Global National News – 20160112
Great British Railway Journeys - 7x07 - Newhaven to Worthing
Schitts Creek - 2x02 - Family Dinner
Tagesschau 2000hrs – 20160112
Ukraine News - TCH(TSN) 1930 – 20160112

Tuesday, 12 January 2016

Video Update - 12 January 2016

Colony - 1x01 - Pilot
Curse of Oak Island - 3x10 - Silence in the Dark
Global National News – 20160111
iZombie - 2x10 - Method Head
Mike Tyson Mysteries - 2x09 - Greece is the Word
Murdoch Mysteries - 09x09 - Raised on Robbery
Shadowhunters - 1x01 - The Mortal Cup
Tagesschau 2000hrs – 20160111
Ukraine News - TCH(TSN) 1930 – 20160111

Video Update - 11 January 2016

Global National News – 20160110
Immortal Egypt With Joann Fletcher – 1x02 - Chaos
Prospectors – 4x04 – Cripple Creek Crystals
Prospectors – 4x05 – Phantom Flourite
Prospectors – 4x06 – Widow Maker
Royal Wives at War
Tagesschau 2000hrs – 20160110
Todd and the Book of Pure Evil - 1x09 - Big Bad Baby
Tracey Ullman's Show - 1x01 – Episode 1
Ukraine News - TCH(TSN) 1930 – 20160110

Sunday, 10 January 2016

Video Update - 10 January 2016

Beowulf Return To The Shieldlands – 1x02 - Episode 1.2
Global National News – 20160109
Great British Railway Journeys – 7x05 - Ashley to Alton
Hogan's Heroes – 1x29 - The Assassin
Hogan's Heroes – 3x06 - Casanova Klink
Margaret Thatcher - Death coverage - 8 Apr 2013
Rawhide - 7x20 - The Violent Land
Tagesschau 2000hrs – 20160109
Trooping Their Colour. The Queen's Diamond Jubilee 2012
Wild Wild West - 2x12 – The Night of the Man-Eating House

Video Update - 9 January 2016

Britains Bloody Crown – 1x01 – The Mad King Henry VI
Expedition Unknown – 2x11 – The Sultans Heart
Global National News – 20160108
Great British Railway Journeys – 7x04 - St Helens to Knutsford
Peter Ackroyd's London - Episode 1 - Fire and Destiny
Peter Ackroyd's London - Episode 2 -- The Crowd
Tagesschau 2000hrs – 20160108
Ukraine News - TCH(TSN) 1930 – 20160108

Saturday, 9 January 2016

Hit silent film, The Birth of a Nation arrives, inspiring rave reviews and protests

   It took almost a year for D.W. Griffith's silent movie classic The Birth of a Nation to reach Vancouver. But finally the Avenue Theatre on Main Street obtained it for a three-week run, starting Christmas Day, 1915, and running to Jan.15,1916.
   The hype was incredible. “Eighth Wonder of the World,” trumpeted the opening ad. “The Greatest Art Conquest Since the Beginning of Civilization!”
   The Avenue could run ads like this without shame, because Griffith had put together a startling, innovative film.
   At three hours long, Birth of a Nation was one of the first feature-length films - previously, most movies were about half an hour, or less. According to the History.com website, Griffith also came up
with many innovations that became standard film making techniques: The close-up, the scenic long shot, the moving-camera shot, and the fade-in and fade-out.”
   The Vancouver World thought Griffith brought film into the realm of art.
   “It has been charged against the screen that it can never be a truly artistic medium, because it leaves nothing to the imagination,” said the World. In order to overcome the absence of speech it must go into every minute detail, and exaggerate every slightest gesture beyond its true proportion.”
   “The criticism has been just as a criticism of fact against about nine-tenths of the film drama to date. But as a prediction it has been destroyed by Mr. D.W. Griffith, the master artist who directed 'The Birth of a Nation.'
   Griffith's mastery of film technique failed to quiet critics who said the film was racist.
   Birth of a Nation was based on the play The Clansman by Thomas Dixon, which depicted the rise of the Ku Klux Klan after the U.S. Civil War. In fact, the movie itself was originally titled The Clansman.
   Today, many people think of the Ku Klux Klan as white thugs in white hoods who terrorized and 'killed black people' in the Deep South. But in Dixon's story, it was a group of courageous patriots who rose up to fight white carpetbaggers (businessmen) from the North and their black allies in the South who oppressed white men and raped their women.
   Defenders of Birth of a Nation argued it was a "historic portrayal" of southern life after the
Civil War.
   But critics like James W. Johnson of the “coloured” newspaper The New York Age thought it was “perverted history!”
   “The majority of the incidents portrayed in Dixon's play that relate to coloured people never happened,” Johnson wrote.
   “When did any Negro lieutenant-governor of a Southern state ever try by force to make a white woman marry him?
   When did Negro troops, led by Northern officers, ever loot and pillage the homes of the Southern whites and maltreat and murder the occupants of these homes?"
   The movie stirred up controversy wherever it went, and was banned in some states (Ohio, Minnesota) and cities (Tacoma, Memphis, Ottawa). In Vancouver, the Negro Christian Alliances sent a protest letter to council arguing the film was “offensive to all the coloured people throughout the earth,” and bred “race antagonism.”
   “Canada does not desire to see her citizens lynched, shot and burned by low-browed, half-witted individuals defying all law and order,” said the protest letter, which was printed in the World.
   “Yet this shameful outrage will become a matter of history in Canadian' national life if the picture-play called The Birth of a Nation is allowed to be exhibited throughout Britain's most promising overseas dominion.”
   But the movie went ahead as scheduled. After the initial controversy, the World chose to focus on the epic elements of the film.
   “Five thousand scenes, 18,000 characters, 3,000 horses, approximate cost of production S500,000,” the World noted. "Cities built up, then destroyed by fire. The biggest battle of the Civil War reenacted. Ford's Theatre, Washington, reproduced to the smallest detail for the Lincoln tragedy. A series of wild 'Klu-Klux' rides that commandeered a county for a day and cost $10,000. Wonderful artillery duels in which real shells -- costing $80 a Piece -- were€ used. Miles of trenches, thousands of fighters --'War as it actually is.'”
   The latter statement seems in poor taste, given that men were being slaughtered at the time.
   During the First World War. Still, The Birth of a Nation was a huge hit, and cemented Griffith's reputation as a movie legend.
From the JOHN MACKIE article in the 9 January 2016 issue of the Vancouver Sun.

Friday, 8 January 2016

Video Update - 8 January 2016

Age Of Loneliness
Global National News – 20160107
Reign - 3x08 – Our Undoing
Tagesschau 2000hrs – 20160107
Ukraine News - TCH(TSN) 1930 – 20160107