I browsed through this posts and at first I would like to wish you a quick and total recovery from these severe health issues again, Dave. That actually sounds bad and I am sure I wouldn’t have had the nerves to go on moderating this forum at all if I were in your situation. My deep respect for that.
Nevertheless I stumbled over this post:
Masterkamera
In response to your remarks, i deleted the thread rather than the individual posts because that was the quickest and easiest way for me to resolve this issue.
(…)
If the original OP wants to repost the screen grabs from the 1938 movie I would be happy to see them here as reference images.
Dave Wilson
Gold Coast
Australia
I am feeling addressed here, because I wrote many of these individual posts, so I would like to take the opportunity to clarify some things (before getting back to modelling, Sorry Willem
). There are not that many movies about WW1 aviation out there, but there are some. Each one has it’s own historical background and its reason for existence. There are mainly these movies done purely for entertainment like the most famous ‚Blue Max‘ or ‚Flyboys‘ which come to my mind. Some of these have also as a subtext a pacifist message like ‚The Red Baron‘ tries to give. And there are movies like Pour le Merite“ which is a product of pure Nazi propaganda. Not just subtext, but main focus.
Of course, and also from my side, scenes or stills from that movie could and even should be used as historical reference. Might even be the only actual reason for existence of such movies: Becoming historical sources. But that includes definitely full awareness of its true nature!
‚Pour le Mérite‘ was referred here without mentioning its problematic essence. Even more, it was phraised here as a „Classic“ that should be watched on full screen on a rainy day. And that shocked me. This was the reason for my moaning. Now I know the reason, as many members watched the action scenes without paying attention to the dialogues and its political program. (I can completely understand this: Transferring this to another comparable and not too dissimilar context, may be a Japanese movie that shows original Vals, Zeros and Kates, I am sure I would probably have done the same. I neither understand Japanese nor do I follow subtitles on Youtube too carefully, especially if my attention would be traced away by Vals, Zeros and Kates…).
However in my opinion reposting the screen grabs from the 1938 movie to see them here as reference images
without mentioning the highly problematic essence of the movie, especially if the movie is phraised as a „classic“ in the same context, like it happened here, is highly problematic, too (at least for me a „classic“ is something of value that I would watch on a rainy day full screen with my kids).
Generally speaking, we all deal with killing machines here which were used to bring human beings to death. Building them as scale models is big fun, but my conviction is we shouldn’t forget that there is a historical background — and a very sad one — behind all those airplanes. This is true for WW1 aircraft and much more so for WW2 stuff given what happened in these days. But I am aware that talking about these background should not overwhelm the modeling content.
Happy new year to you all,
Andreas
