The Forgotten Faces

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Actors: John Lawrence , Frances Mercer , Alan Pope , Irene Cooper , Stan Mercer , Geraldine Roy , Michael Roy , Roger Caltham , Angela Williams , Irene Mallaid , Joan Tilke , John Newing , Nick Evans , Frank Hickey , Eve Hopper

Director: Peter Watkins

IMDB Rate: 7 out of 10 (118 votes)

Plot Summary:The Forgotten Faces (1961), a film reconstruction of the Hungarian revolution of 1956, won Watkins another amateur Oscar, and to this day, the film is praised in England as one of the most memorable amateur films ever made. The Forgotten Faces advanced the methods of realistic reconstruction that he initiated in The Diary of an Unknown Soldier. Surely Kevin Brownlow must have supplied some encouragement in this direction, since, like Watkins, he also worked at World Wide in part to fund his own film project about what would have happened in England had the Nazis taken over It Happened Here. Watkins also found some inspiration in Truffauts Les Quatre Cents Coups and in the work of the Italian neo-realist directors who, if they did not attempt to capture a newsreel effect, at least frequently used non-professionals in location sequences filmed with available lighting. The films of Rossellini, de Sica, Olmi, and early Visconti, however, had little direct influence on Watkins dismissal of traditional cinematic artifice in his attempts to realistically recreate events.