English Assessment Task: Analytical Essay

English Assessment Task: Analytical Essay
By Emilly Smith
“Discoveries are often evoked by curiosity and wonder, offering up new understandings of ourselves and the world we live”
Curiosity and wonder merge together to create the endless opportunity for discovery that enables one to gain an understanding of one’s self. The documentary ‘Frank Hurley: The Man Who Made History’ and Miroslav Holub’s ‘The Door’ demonstrate how discovery needs curiosity and wonder to drive the individual to discover, whether it is by encountering an amount of discoveries that captivated one’s curiosity to discover more or finding small discoveries that lead to a significant final discovery. Both texts show how curiosity and wonder are a necessity in order to discover.
The documentary ‘Frank Hurley: The Man Who Made History’ shows how a mans curiosity and wonder can be the driving force to his discoveries, but the discovery can ultimately end in disappointment and change their perception of themselves and the world they live in. Throughout the documentary Frank Hurley is seen as a man keen to discover and when war breaks out his curiosity develops and pushes him to discover the nature of warfare and the diminish of humanity. In World War 1 Hurley was assigned to the ‘western front as a cameraman’. At first, Hurley was curious about the concept of it all and this drove him to discover more. His wonder and curiosity lead Hurley see the atrocity that is war and how it turns man into mindless soldiers who kill and lose their humanity as a consequence. Throughout Hurley’s images of this battle he uses the ‘fog of war’ as a metaphor within the pictures to show his initial ‘blindness’ towards the inhumanity of man. This discovery conclusively changed Frank Hurley’s perception of himself and the world’s inhumanity during conflict. This would not have been discovered if it wasn’t for his initial curiosity and wonder about war.
The Frank Hurley documentary also shows how one’s curiosity and...