Good Times, Bad Times (1969)

Combat footage and old photographs from extant BBC documentary footage from the First and Second World Wars is intercut with contemporary footage of First World War veterans recalling their experiences at Royal Canadian Legion halls, memorial day commemorations and veterans' hospitals.

Date of release
1969-05-04
TMDB
9.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
40m
Genres
War, Documentary
Director
Donald Shebib

Casting

Interesting facts

Good Times, Bad Times is a 1969 Canadian short television documentary film created by Donald Shebib with narration by Jon Granik featuring interviews with veterans intercut by wartime footage. Shebib's presentation of war and the social status of Canada's veterans is blunt and "non-romanticized". The film was well-received and is Shebib's most distinguished short film. It won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Feature Length Documentary.

Production

Good Times, Bad Times was made for the CBC Television documentary series The Way It Is. Its working title was The Veterans.

Shot on black and white 16 mm film and intercut with documentary footage from many films made decades earlier, Shebib's film makes use of what Mark McCarty refers to as "double-frame printing", which makes the veterans' pace in half-step appear "out of sync" with the viewer.

Shebib's musical selections for the film ranged from classical to contemporary rock. Mark McCarty describes John Granik's narration as "sometimes laconic, only reminiscent names of half-forgotten battlegrounds," and at other times, "consciously poetic" in the vein of Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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