Dia on 2/1/2012 at 23:21

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(http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/swordmaster-who-played-darth-vader-dies-at-89-2012012/)

Sad day, indeed. The man was a master and I so enjoyed watching his interviews in 'the making of' parts of movies in which he'd been involved. One of those people you kind of thought would live forever.

:(

Beleg Cúthalion on 3/1/2012 at 10:51

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RIP Bob Anderson, he always came across as a really decent and friendly guy.

On the other side, both (his?) blessing and curse was that almost everyone paid him to do the fencing stuff in his movies. His sabre work (e.g. Pirates of the Caribbean) and everything that comes close to 20th century sabre-based stage combat was great. Everything else he handled as if it were sabre fights, making especially the long sword fights in the Lord of the Rings a bit ridiculous (and of course anything but historical, despite the prominent urge by John Howe to present believable fantasy). I've wondered lately if his presence and prominence prevented younger fight choreographers from being employed for movies (although the Troy stuff wasn't overly bad, at least it was no classical big-moves stage combat). But just yesterday I saw one of those guys' crusader melée fight demonstration and it was just as bad. :(

Beleg Cúthalion on 3/1/2012 at 20:44

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Thing is, movies can have a much closer camera.

Plus, you'd be surprised to see how many daring and exotic techniques even show up in the old fencing books (even though they're probably not the usual ones). The choreographer guy I mentioned also replied "[...] obviously we are looking for the story rather than the kill". This is laughable in sight of what you can convey especially with historical techniques...and how is something artificially made up better suited for conveying drama (or gags) in the first place?

This doesn't refer to fencing alone, if they mess up historical clothing, then it's supposed to help shape the characters for the audience. If they mess up historical ways of thinking and replace them with enlightened and tolerant minds, it's supposed to help the audience finding a connection to the guy on the screen. But all of that is void if you have a closer look. The clothes wouldn't confuse anyone, the changes shouldn't be visible to the standard viewer. More historical mindsets didn't unnerve the audience with the Name of the Rose or the HBO Rome series. And the only difference historical fencing would make is that it would stop looking as if sword fighting consisted merely of swinging around weapons in large circles.

That being said, I don't think there is something wrong with (even non-historical) stage combat in general; I did it mysyelf. It just looks silly if you know better and you don't feel well if you know that everyone watching it will consider it realistic. We had a HEMA presentation last year with the usual emphasis on how efficient and non-Hollywood-like the historical techniques were and still people came afterwards and asked whether we would counter a blow from above with an orthogonal strong parry...