The first film I watched in 2012 is an obscure 1971 documentary about an English family living away in the woods, choosing to ignore modern society. In The Moon and the Sledgehammer(1971), we see a father and 4 adult children, living and working together, using antiquated tools and steam powered machinery, talking about their lives and the world around them. While you would be right to suspect their knowledge of the then current world was novel, they nevertheless had great insight into the reasons they had chosen to leave it pass them by. A fascinating little film, which now has it's documentary about the making of the film too.
This leads me to the topic of this post, and the series of "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." computer games which are a favorite of mine. One of the mutated creatures in the games is known as a "Snork" and as you can see in the picture is a particularly nasty looking knave who crawls around on his hands and knees and sports a gas mask over his face. It seems clear to me that the makers of the game were influenced by The Moon and The Sledgehammer as it includes a scene where the father crawls around the yard on hands and knees in a similar fashion, wearing a gas mask. You can watch the scene below (he appears to be impersonating an elephant). I am sure this is not a coincidence as the film has a very similar feel to Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker(1979), which the games are largely based upon.Just a little bit of personal observation for you that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere before. Make of it what you will.
2 comments:
The Moon and the Sledgehammer is truly a great film on so many levels. Plenty of blogs to testify to this.
Very interesting what you had to say about Mr Page from the film and Snork.
For anyone who hasn't seen BEHIND The Moon and the Sledgehammer, the director explained that Mr Page was showing him how an elephant's knees bend in the opposite direction to ours.
Just in case you were wondering what was going on... And I can't recommend the film highly enough. You can buy the dvd here : www.themoonandthesledgehammer.com
A magical film for sure. The naive, and yet, inspired opinion expressed by one family member, about the reliance on imported oil over domestic coal was one of my favorite moments of the film.
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