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George
Orwell: My Life in Pictures
Saturday
14 June 2003 (tbc), 大象传媒
TWO
Room
101, The Thought Police, Big Brother - George Orwell's grip on popular
culture continues to be as strong as ever.
1984
and Animal Farm are still in the top ten bestseller list for English
literary novels.
Yet
a century after his birth, their author is buried beneath a caricature
of a tweedy, eccentric and disillusioned rebel.
George
Orwell: My Life in Pictures uses a bold and original approach
to put Orwell on the screen.
Chris
Langham plays the writer and every word he speaks is as written
by Orwell himself.
But
the pictures are all "invented" - the "archive"
has been specially created because there is not a single frame of
moving footage of Orwell in existence, nor even one word or one
of his trademark hacking coughs on recorded audio.
All
that is left is one oil painting and a couple of hundred photographs.
By
bringing to life his extraordinary treasure trove of writing - nine
books and some 8,000 pages of journalism, essays, diaries and letters
- the film creates a unique dramatised biography of Orwell.
Written
essays become authored documentary films shot in the style of the
day; events described in diaries are "captured" on home
movies; and Movietone footage is manipulated to reveal Orwell in
the trenches of the Spanish Civil War.
From
Eton and Burma to London and Paris, Orwell's writing - poignant
and polemical, scathing and sometimes just funny - is at last caught
on film.
The
legacy of his writing is undeniable, but perhaps Orwell's finest
creation was his own artistic and personal reinvention.
Born
Eric Blair, a classic product of the establishment, growing up in
the Home Counties and attending Eton, he later purged himself of
privilege and re-invented himself as the penniless, crippled and
revolutionary artist George Orwell.
But
as the programme reveals, Orwell was both an expert in self-reinvention
and a crusader after truth.
Orwell
witnessed and wrote about many of the defining movements of the
turbulent first half of the 20th century: colonialism, unemployment,
fascism, Stalinism.
The
momentous events that shaped Orwell have also shaped the world today.
George
Orwell: My Life in Pictures reveals why Orwell's works, so much
a product of their time, still hold such resonance today.
Producer/Director
Chris Durlacher
Executive Producer Emma Willis
A Wall to Wall production for 大象传媒 TWO
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