Walking With Dinosaurs

After Rapunzel, I met some other friends to watch "Walking With Dinosaurs" at the Singapore Indoor Stadium. I don't know about you, but dinosaurs were vaguely, part of my childhood memories. I even played with those dino transformers. I know, it's strange for a girl, but my playmates were people like my brother and ex-neighbour, who's a boy. But I had my dolls.

The show was an off-shoot of the popular documentary series of the same name, and it was amazing how they could bring in these giant-sized reptiles and make them run across the stage. The smaller dinosaurs were manned by humans wearing the dino suits, with robotic controls. And the big ones? Remotely controlled. It was a sight as they were very real and mobile. If only I could touch them.
They also had these rather innovative "plants" that sprouted out from the sets and they could retract them. Cool.

Basically, an explorer was the narrator who brings you through the different generations of dinosaurs and when each species appeared and adapted to the environment. I know it was really bad of us, but we were all prepping ourselves up for a fight between dinosaurs. Well, it did occur, but to a small extent.

An Inconvenient Truth

I went for a screening of this today at the National Library. The show was surprisingly very interesting and in a way compelling to a certain extent. It's a documentary about global warming and was presented by Al Gore as he spoke about the impact and a call for action of mankind to play a part in resolving this. Really, it was him speaking all the way, but somehow, it was quite well put together such that it wasn't boring. I was quite moved at certain parts. 1 of the quotations he gave that really stuck in my mind was 1 of Churchill's:

"The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences."

It is like we are reaping what we had sown. What would become of this earth? Another great flood?

It was a pity he didn't win the elections back then.

Invisible City by Tan Pin Pin

I finally caught Invisible City tonight. Good thing they extended it, or else I would have missed it altogether.

It was an interesting documentary. It's set in current times and shows people talking about the past, from the young local archaelogist to past filmmakers, photographers and curators, and even activists of the past.

It dawned on me, looking from our current modern times, how fast Singapore has changed, that such memories has been lost. Looking at the past footage or pictures, we are so far from the past. The poignant question asked by one interviewee was that if no footage was taken, does it mean it never existed...to me, it translated to possible obliteration from all memories.

Also, some of the interviewees were rather old and you could see that their memories were already fading. Would our heritage/past be lost eventually?

One of the striking part of the film was the portion where Ivan Polunin's footage was shown as a blank footage as he narrated while he was shooting his old films. Ivan was a filmmaker/photographer who captured mainly plants & flowers of Singapore & Malaysia during the late 1950s, especially for medicinal purposes. He also captured some lifestyle of tribes and people in the region. Anyway, he was trying to digitise his films by shooting & recording them onto DV tapes or HD DVDs. The blank footage was impactful as the word "invisible" came clear then (after all it's called "Invisible City" right?). As he narrates, you see nothing and what he describes seems invisible to you and you can only imagine what he was actually talking about.
He had answered earlier that he was of course worried that the films would be lost, that's why he's doing some self-digitisation, and even as his memory is fading, he himself is trying to sort out & record what they are about and archiving them, hence the narration (there was not much speech, if any at all, in the films). Even he has some trouble doing so, so how would others be able to understand if nothing is done? Can you imagine the significance of memories lost? And it also emphasizes if something is deemed non-existent if it is not recorded.

Does invisibility = non-existence? Is there a broken link between the past & present?