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New Journalism - - Observe...

New Journalism was a style of writing that came about in the 1960's and 1970's. It tend to throw the conventional rules of being fast accurate a fair.... because this was simply boring and boring hides the truth. The main two leaders of this writing style were that of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson...who were both on drugs!

One of the techniques in which Wolfe used was that of observation, where he would simply observe and show what he was seeing though his eyes.

Does this still happen today ? Of crouse it does especially in documentaries but not so much in news. If you look at journalists such as Louis Theroux, in all his documentaries he appears on camera a lot, everything we see is what Louis sees and therefore being Louis opinion. Says it how it is.

I too like to adopt this New journalism writing style except I do not really write. I like to people watch, observe peoples lives. I like to call this people watching. Is that really new journalism ? Probably not and probably unrelated but hey ho, it filled another couple of lines!

Wings of Desire...A City of Angels

I have to say, I struggled to watch this film. I found myself sitting there in the lecture room with my eyes closing every other line, after all it was about angles. I blame the floating angle camera like movements! Despite this I did still manage to watch it and understand it.

Wings of Desire is about an angel (Damiel) who wishes for mortality after falling in love with a human. The change over from angel to becoming mortal is emphasised though the use of colour change. Going from black and white into colour. This is to help show that Damiel now has a completely different way of experiencing life.

This reminded me very much of another film I had seen many years ago called City of Angels starring Nicolas Cage. This is a film again in which an angel wishes to become mortal in order to feel, touch and love a woman he has fallen in love with. However becoming mortal doesn't come cheap. Once mortal there is no going back. Unlike Wings of Desire this film has no happy ending. Once seth (the angel) finally becomes mortal to share his life with the woman he is in love with she dies in a car crash only hours after experiencing life with Seth.