Click to view film
This is the page for information about my short documentary film Star Wars: Its Cultural Context.
The ideas in the film began as the sidebar on my blog post “The Exegesis Strikes Back” and were further informed by Steven Hart's reporting in the Salon.com article “Galactic Gasbag.”
In late 2014 I got my hands on a copy of the “despecialized” edition of Star Wars. It's a high-quality copy of Star Wars that has been painstakingly restored (by some serious nerds after my own purist's heart) to the form it had in its original theatrical release in 1977, minus all the changes big and small that George Lucas made to it over the years. Coincidentally I learned that a friend's wife had never seen Star Wars. We made a date to screen the movie at our house (on the day that my son Archer was the same age, in days, that I was when I first saw Star Wars… because I too am a nerd), but for me it wasn't enough merely to show her the movie as it was meant to be seen. I needed to transport everyone to the cultural context of 1977, the better to appreciate the enormous impact that the film's release had. At the same time I wanted to accumulate some hands-on experience using video-editing tools like iMovie on a non-trivial project, the better to inform my work on the YouTube Video Editor team. So I put together my documentary, which you can see by clicking the image to the right. As a documentary filmmaker I'm no Ken Burns (and as a narrator I'm no Tom Hanks). Please excuse the amateurishness of my effort.
The film incorporates clips from a number of YouTube videos:
The first draft of Star Wars: Its Cultural Context was completed and shown to friends on 23 January 2015.
- Bob Glickstein