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Clip description
This sequence describes the impact of the 1960s development of the Sydney skyline on the work of labourers building its new skyscrapers.
Curator’s notes
The filmmaker has used mixed forms – animation, interview, archive, location shooting and narration – to tell history in a dynamic and dramatic way. This combination of filmic devices is used throughout the film. The deliberate use of black-and-white graphics and black-and-white film stock to shoot the interviews ties all the elements of the film together. Shot by Martha Ansara, herself a documentary filmmaker, and edited by Stewart Young and Pat Fiske, the battles of the workers take on a heroic quality similar to the newsreels of the 1950s.
The interviews are always with people who were there, not academics or historians. We find out from the workers themselves what they were feeling and planning. As the worker Tommy Hogan says, 'our own destiny was, for the first time, in our hands and ours alone’. The interviews are always shot on location which helps to take the audience into a feeling of the times.
