Have you seen this documentary?

) September 22nd, 2015

In 2001–2002 (judging by how small I remember being) when I was 5–6, when I lived in England, I remember watching this documentary on T.V. It was something that my parents or at least my mother was watching. All I saw is the following, which was all black-and-white except for the end.

The narrator was describing a boy in the jungle (there was a shot of him for a few seconds in the foreground moving), who came across a pig’s head on a stick. In retrospect, it was a black or dark-haired boar’s head, judging by the hair. The narrator said the pig head spoke to him, and when he was saying that, the pig’s mouth was moving and it was speaking in the grunts of a pig.

As I, being a small child, had not heard of pig’s grunts before, and thought they only oinked, it was disturbing, along with the fact the mouth moved, the mouth moved when the animal’s head was on the stick, and the pig talked.

Judging by all of this, it was not at the beginning. The part when the animal spoke was a shot lasting several seconds with the pig’s head in the foreground.

The narrator said the boy ran off, which was accompanied by a shot of the boy running out in the near background with the grey sky at the top, but when he met his companions again (I did not know before that he had companions, having not seen the beginning of the documentary of course, and I remember the recognition of this fact in my memory), but the narrator said “but he had discovered that they had become savages”, which was accompanied by a shot of the bare feet and lower legs from behind, with the grey sky in the background.

The narrator said the boy ran off, accompanied (I am sorry for sounding monotonous) by a shot of him running off, but then the narrator said the other boys moved a boulder, there was a shot of them on a cliff moving the boulder with a long stick at the top of the background, and then he said “and killed him.”, as the shot moved to the boulder falling on the boy.

It then cut to a shot with an old man with a bald head and no facial hair wearing a yellow or tan suit surrounded by green grass, with trees in the distance. He said “Now, children killing children” in an English accent, but I can’t remember the rest of what he said although I heard it because I walked away – he might have said “was a” – for I disliked the story, since it didn’t have a happy ending.

I often thought of that documentary over the following years, and whenever I did, I disliked it and was haunted by it.

Upon reading the Wikipedia entry for “Lord of the Flies”, I realised it must have talking about the same subject which was in the documentary that I saw, but I must have misremembered it.

However, I cannot locate the documentary anywhere. All of the documentaries on William Golding and Lord of the Flies were not the same documentary that I saw – the black-and-white scenes from the original film were not what I saw.

I checked all possible word choices in Google Search Engine, but it didn’t find me what I was looking for.

Can any of you tell me if you have seen this documentary too, please?

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2 Answers

You were watching the movie version of Lord of the Flies and thinking it was a documentary. Because you were young at the time, you conflated the movie with a documentary in your mind.

What you’re describing are scenes directly from the movie. This was a work of fiction. There were no real-life cases of events like that happening.

William Golding was an excellent writer with a great imagination. But what he wrote (upon which the movie was based) was totally a work of fiction predicated upon what would happen if all societal constraints and rules were removed from a group of children in an isolated environment. His FICTIONAL conclusion was that they would revert to savagery.

But there is no documented case of this happening in real life. You thought you were watching a documentary when, in reality, it was the movie.

Childhood memories are not exactly known for accuracy :)

Buttonstc (27605

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I understand, and I know that “Lord of the Flies” is just a fiction novel, and I am grateful. But you don’t understand. I watched clips from the film on the Internet like I said, and they weren’t the same clips. They were just re-enactments of the scenes from the novel. It was from a documentary about “Lord of the Flies” or about William Golding, as evidenced by the narrator (who was an adult male with an English accent) and the fact that at the end there was the man who was commenting on the “children killing children”.

He must have been talking about how controversial it must have been at the time it was published. I know, according to two of the documentaries I watched (most of them were short, including these two) that the original film was shot in a documentary style, much to the liking of the critics, but it wasn’t what I saw.

As a note, I haven’t read the book or watched the films, although I intend to one day. (I didn’t read the book because in the school district where I went people only read it in Grade 10 Academic English, and not in Grade 10 Applied English, where I was – I read “Of Mice and Men” instead, which was a pretty good book.)

RikhardRavindraTanskanen (76

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