Fang Long's "Tolerance" tells the arduous history of mankind's struggle for tolerance for thousands of years, and Griffith uses a film to give this eternal theme of mankind a unique interpretation and perfect artistic imagination. No wonder Godard claims that "the movie started with Griffith"! Aside from David Walker Griffith's pioneering film technology and his contribution to the film industry (because that's not the purpose of this article), and to influence viewing interest and understanding of the film Closely related editing techniques such as parallel montage, cross montage, contrast montage, metaphor montage and even in-camera montage and other professional issues are also best left to those specialized film critics (this is not the direction I am interested in), I only focus on this. The film expounds on the subject of tolerance to express some of my own shallow opinions. To this end, a rough introduction to the main storyline of the film should be the first and necessary.
The film consists of four stories from different eras and different regions. ——This first emphasizes the universality and representativeness of the problem it intends to expound, and interprets the theme of "human beings from intolerance to mutual tolerance" from different aspects.
The first story and the core story of the film, "Mother and the Law", took place in modern times and was adapted from a famous wrongful case in the United States at that time. In 1914, Mary, the sister of James, a big factory owner in a town in the United States, established a foundation to organize a group of female Puritans from the Moral Promotion Association to reform the ignorant workers. They did not allow the workers to drink alcohol and forbid them to dance "dirty" folk dances. James decided to deduct 10% of the wages of all workers to transform them, causing workers to strike; a large number of workers lost their jobs. Among them are the protagonists of the story, "Dear Girl", "Young Boy" and "Lingding Girl". The young man is forced to do some nasty extortion work for "The Musketeers of the Mean Alley" because he can't find a job. But after he accidentally reunites with his beloved daughter and the two fall in love with each other and plan to get married, he decides to change his life and live a decent life. The Musketeers managed to frame him and put him in jail for theft. While her husband is awaiting trial, the beloved girl will have a child. The female Puritans took the child away on the pretext of her inability to support her. The Musketeer coveted his beloved daughter and pretended to help her find the child. At night, he slipped into his beloved daughter's house and tried to rape her, just as the young man returned from his release to fight with him. At this time, the lonely girl who became the musketeer's mistress because of her unemployment was hiding outside the house. Witnessing the musketeer's shameless behavior, she shot and killed the musketeer, threw the pistol into the house and ran away. Police rushed into the house thinking the lad had shot and killed the musketeer and took him away. The evidence was conclusive, and the young man was convicted of murder and sentenced to hang. The second story is the story of Christ, which is based on three fragments in the "Bible": 1. "Changing water into wine". Wherever Jesus had traveled, he came to Cana and was invited to a grand wedding feast. The wine was emptied during the feast, and Jesus turned the water in the stone jar into fine wine. 2. "Punishment of Prostitutes". Jesus' mortal enemy, the Pharisees, brought an adulteress to Jesus and asked him to condemn him. Jesus said, "Whoever has no sin among you, throw a stone at her first." The Pharisees had to admit defeat. 3. The Passion of Christ. In AD 27, Jesus was betrayed and crucified on a stormy night. The third story, "The Massacre on St. Barthelemy's Day," takes place in France. During the French Wars of Religion in 1572, Huguenots and Catholics were often in large-scale conflict. The Protestant "brown-eyed woman" and her family arrive in Paris to fall in love with Prospera Latour and prepare for their wedding. The Queen Mother Catherine de' Medici ordered King Charles IX to take revenge on the pretext of the Huguenot massacre of Catholics in Nimes. On the night of August 24, St. Barthelemy's Day, a religious massacre began. Soldiers hunted and killed Huguenots everywhere, raped and looted; the whole city panicked. Desperate to save his fiancée, Dural finds that the brown-eyed woman has been ravaged and killed. He grievously picked up her corpse and denounced the soldiers' brutality, but was robbed and beaten to death. The fourth story is The Fall of Babylon. In 539 BC, under the rule of enlightened king Nabonidus and prince Belshazzar, the Babylonians lived lavishly. The court poet fell in love with the smart and beautiful "shan girl", but the stubborn girl refused to obey, so she was sent to the marriage market for sale. Fortunately, the prince Belshazzar rescued her and granted her "the freedom to marry or not to marry". The mountain girl developed an admiration for the handsome prince. The prince paid homage to a pagan goddess of love and put her statue on the square to convert the people to this pagan goddess. Fearing that his position would be threatened, the high priest in the palace colluded with the court poet Cyrus, king of Persia, and opened the city gates to welcome the Persian army when the Babylonians were unsuspecting. The court poet inadvertently leaked the news while pestering the mountain girl. Shan girl resolutely drove to the city to report the news, but Belshazzar, who was drunk, did not believe the shocking news. The Persian army then poured into the city to massacre. Shan girl fought bravely to kill the enemy, but died on the battlefield. When Belshazzar saw that the situation was over, he stabbed his beloved wife to death, and killed himself. The ancient civilization of Babylon has since ceased to exist. ... The first story continues: the conscience of a lingding girl finally tells the truth to her beloved daughter. The governor had to pardon to save the lad, but the governor happened to be out by train. They immediately chased the train in a racing car. The young man had been sent to the gallows by this time. The car finally caught up with the train, and when the beloved daughter arrived at the execution ground with a pardon order, the noose was tied around her husband's neck... The couple and their children were finally reunited.
Van Loon divides the signifiers of intolerance into personal intolerance and official intolerance: "Personal intolerance can only be limited to the extent that the majority of citizens of a free country do not mind, and cannot be surpassed. However, official intolerance is not. It can have enormous power. It recognizes no authority other than its own power. Official intolerance can kill innocent people when it loses its temper..." It follows that personal intolerance is only a part of the individual's This kind of judgment, opinion and behavior, or it can also be said to be a manifestation of personality, within the scope of legal regulations, as long as it does not infringe on the freedom of others, it has the right to exist; while official intolerance is expressed as "national, social All kinds of contradictions caused by the logical asymmetry of “collective groups” and “individuals”. In fact, such intolerance fundamentally deprives individuals of the possibility of being tolerant or not. Collective and individual are two completely different categories, although there is a necessary connection between them that complement each other. Reverse from the historical category of the past, official tolerance must be more important than personal tolerance. Political despotism, moral asceticism, and conceptual transcendental values in the theocratic era (the Middle Ages in the West and the feudal era in China are included) all came from the category of official intolerance. Therefore, Einstein pointed out with emotion: "The most important tolerance is the tolerance of the state and society to the individual." [3] Griffith's "Party Dissent" first expounds the state and society's tolerance to individuals within the scope of religion. of intolerance.
Four stories developed in parallel, cross-cut, and all but the first ended in tragedy. What's interesting is that Griffith pioneered the technique of filter dyeing to create a special atmosphere in the film; Zhang Yimou's film art technique of coloring different themed shots in "Hero" is a reference to this film? Closer to home - the occurrence of the four stories is related to religion, and the story of Christ is the general starting point or the source of the theme of the film: "Changing water into wine" shows that Jesus benefits mankind; Condemns the intolerance of the Pharisees; "Passion of Jesus" is a metaphor for Jesus' suffering for human intolerance. The story of the massacre on St. Barthelemy's Day condemned the partisanship among Jesus' followers through religious persecution during the 16th-century Reformation. The fall of Babylon denounced extreme forms of intolerance—war and religious exclusion—a phenomenon of partisanship in pre-Christian civilizations. Obviously, the first story, "Mother and the Law", is the highlight of the film. It is, without exception, the intolerance of religious beliefs, which led to workers' strikes, which in turn led to the tragedy. The Puritan women, the James brothers and sisters, and the Musketeers were all persecutors. But the theme of the film has been sublimated after the young man was wrongly convicted. It was clarified that the young man was framed by the musketeer for theft, which shows that the law attaches great importance to evidence, and the tolerance policy under the official legal system must protect the people, which is a great improvement over the indiscriminate killing of innocents. The lingding female conscience discovery clarifies the fact that the spirit of tolerance as an individual in society progresses. At the end of the film, Griffith further depicts his utopian ideals through imaginative images: a future in which a general duel between good and evil leads to a global war, New York is bombarded, and large numbers of people are thrown into prison. Then an angel appears, and a light of dawn destroys the prison and frees the prisoners. The last tyrants in the world fell. The prison was transformed into a meadow of flowers, where children frolicked happily. The caption reads: Fraternity will bring eternal peace. ——We feel how great Griffith's naive fantasy is: although he chose Asia and Europe to kill, and left a tolerant society to the United States (it was indeed Europe's beacon and the United States at that time, but the United States was peaceful and prosperous) Chauvin ideology has its limitations, although the United States at the time was not necessarily tolerant (racial persecution of blacks, Indians and Chinese immigrants), although the film was a commercial failure (a great failure), although it was obscure and even Some of its contents and forms seem childish and ridiculous today. David Walker Griffith is a dazzling star in the history of world cinema. "Party to Fight Differing" undoubtedly imagines a beautiful and exciting way for human liberation.
Griffith opposed hatred, intolerance, and praised love and kindness. The film uses the image of "cradle and mother" throughout, and is accompanied by the verse of the American poet Whitman: "Today is like yesterday, the cycle goes back and forth. The cradle shakes, bringing the same passion, the same joys and sorrows to mankind. "The four stories also express the continuous development of human history in terms of structure and technique: the passage of time is endless, and the picture of the cradle mother is always full of charity and friendship, which is profound and meaningful, showing that only fraternity and tolerance can bring peace. The eternal theme of beauty and beauty also paved the way for the end of the film.
The intolerance of history has brought huge disasters to mankind. The tragedies caused by religious persecution, political dictatorship, and even the worship of heroes and leaders are appalling. Tracing its origins, intolerance stems from a deep-rooted human sense of fear, instinct for self-defense, and the natural exclusivity of the individual as a social animal. Fang Long believes that fear is the self-protection consciousness of group members who are afraid that dissidents will endanger their own survival, and the intolerance of society is its self-defense instinct to maintain its own safety. This is so because human beings are still too young, and because human existence has so far been shrouded in terror. They are not yet strong enough to enjoy a colorful and inclusive way of being. A person is truly happy only when he feels that he belongs to an exclusive group of people of his kind, whose members are all aligned with his own beliefs, prejudices, fears, hopes, and ideals. This happiness usually comes from the following various appellations and beliefs: God's chosen (as opposed to pagans), national (chauvin)ism, superior class origin (as opposed to landlords, petty bourgeoisie during the Cultural Revolution), superior (vs. Inferior people), urbanites (as opposed to hillbillies, out-of-towners), communism, congruence or even dinks (singleism), homosexuality, and so on. Individuals firmly grasp the source of these happiness with their firm beliefs. If they are excluded from the circle, they will be in a constant state of panic. In order to avoid such an outcome, they are bound to join the intolerance of the group to seek their own sense of security. Tragedy begins. . The Pharisees, Queen Medici, the high priest who colluded with the Persians, Mary and the female Puritans who tried to reform the "ignorant" workers in "Parties and Diversity" belong to this category. It can be seen from this that if an intolerant person occupies an important position in a group, it must be a disaster for the group; fascism, leader worship, cultural revolution, cult organizations, terrorism... There must also be one of the most intolerant core figures.
The ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras said: "Man is the measure of all things." This is the earliest simple humanistic ideology in the West, and in a sense it is equivalent to various humanisms in the pre-Qin era in China. Trends of thought (“Old I am old and people are old”, “Praise oneself and others”, “Universal love and non-offensive”, “The people are precious and the ruler is light”, etc.), but they are only primitive and simple superficial understandings. Since the Renaissance, it has experienced a long era of theism, and the humanistic ideological trend that emphasizes the individual and highlights the individuality of human beings has risen from wave to wave. "God is dead", people's thinking has shifted from "God-based" to "Human-based", and humanism has gradually become a new social ideology. There are two ways for the transformation of the social form from theological to humanistic: one is revolution (heroism, such as France), and the other is reform (populism, such as Britain). China was reform first and then revolution, both. The three spiritual phenomena of human society (things, gods, and human beings) are not only defined in terms of time, but may coexist in the same historical period, in the same region, or even in the ideology of the same person. This defines the generality of the existence of intolerance. In today's peaceful age, personal intolerance caused by humanism has become an increasingly prominent problem. Personal outlook on life, values and even love has undergone major changes in the context of modern society, with obvious "individual color", and some social problems have aggravated the concentration of this color (such as the only child's family education has led to a lonely self. The alienation of the new generation in terms of life values) has caused personal problems such as loneliness, anxiety, fear, escape, depression, and compulsion. Because of fear of losing, people look for something real or even something empty (a sense of security, belonging, hallucination, etc.), so that they can obtain the identity of a group or a certain ideology to confirm their own existence-individual intolerance increased. On a larger scale, social phenomena such as rock music, performance art, gangism, fashion alternatives, DINK families, homosexuality, AIDS, drug addiction, etc. are all groups or ideologies established due to personal intolerance to the outside world; To put it mildly, the quarrels and misunderstandings caused by differences in the standards for weighing interests or opinions or opinions, as well as quarrels and misunderstandings caused by differences in personal positions, are also intolerant of individuals. Performance. Although the difference of personal opinions or concepts is entirely an individual matter, and others have no right to interfere and cannot interfere, but being able to understand and understand others more is a matter of self-interest after all. Einstein said: "Tolerance means respect for whatever beliefs others may have."[4] Beliefs are free, and personal opinions Answers are also completely free, and tolerance will become easier if individuals can empathize with others when dealing with problems. However, it is really difficult to be tolerant of current affairs in practice. There is a saying in China: a daughter-in-law who has been boiled for many years becomes a mother-in-law. The daughter-in-law strives for her mother-in-law's tolerance, but once she becomes a mother-in-law, she doesn't talk about tolerance; when she is a child, she swears that she will never educate her children in the same way that their parents educate themselves. Dutiful son"; scolding corrupt officials when they are not officials, and taking bribes when they are officials, saying that they are involuntarily... This cycle goes on and on and on. As Fang Long said when discussing the transformation of the leaders of the Reformation: "Today's infidels will become the great enemy of all dissidents tomorrow."[5] Which of China's feudal rulers of all dynasties was not like this? Griffith can make a profound analysis of this issue in his film work "Party to Fight Differing" 90 years ago, and make a beautiful imagination and prediction on the theme of tolerance, which cannot but be said to be the pride of the entire film history.
To sum up, "tolerance, in its broadest sense, has always been a luxury, bought only by the very intellectually advanced--people freed from the narrow prejudices of their less enlightened peers. In this way, the road to tolerance is "a long way to go", and in a sense, Griffith and Fang Long are indeed wise men.
Note:
[1] Fang Long: "The Story of Human Liberation", p. 4, Social Science Literature Publishing House, January 1999, 1st edition.
[2] Fang Long: "Tolerance", p. 19, Sanlian Publishing, September 1985, 1st edition.
[3] "Einstein on Life", World Knowledge Publishing House, 1984 edition.
[4] The Collected Works of Einstein, Vol. 3, p. 106.
[5] Fang Long: "Tolerance", p. 184, Sanlian Publishing, September 1985, 1st edition.
[6] Fang Long: Tolerance, p. 396, Sanlian Publishing, September 1985, 1st edition.
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