Regarding those great things, I will stop here.
[The Birth of a Nation] The North and South families representing the bourgeoisie and plantation owners are used as the narrative objects. The sorrows and joys of the two families in the Civil War reflect the situation of the American Civil War and the fate of ordinary families at that time. Sid Field said that 10 minutes can determine whether the audience likes a movie, which is basically the first ten pages of the script. I have to say that the first ten minutes of the movie are still very flat, it is difficult to make people feel not boring, maybe this is to show the simple and slow life in the south before the war.
The war scenes in the movie are classics, so let’s put aside the "last minute rescue". Real-time shooting was rare in the United States at the time, especially after the Hollywood system took shape and matured, they were all changed to studio shooting. Therefore, in the real scene, the smoke of gunfire between the two sides is very realistic and has a visual impact. It’s just that the time is not well grasped. There are too many big scenes and the time is too long, so that after a long time there will be a feeling of static and unchanging, and it will be easy to be bored by looking at it. Standing in 2008, I can have lust, and it would be more interesting if I add some close-ups.
The music when the two armies confronted was actually a bit out of tune, so I don't know why it was so cheerful. In fact, the music in the whole movie is a bit inexplicable in some chapters. When the protagonist appears, the background music is always those songs, in fact, the performance of the character's inner heart is reduced.
The silent black-and-white movies almost a hundred years ago still seem to be quite difficult. After all, I still have to remind myself to go back to the time when I stand today and watch the infancy movies. As a foreigner, the biggest difficulty in watching American movies at the time was trying to distinguish their looks. It is estimated that in the first hour of the movie, I could hardly distinguish between the sisters and brothers in Stoneman's family and the children in Cameron's family. The protagonist, the Little Colonel, was also lost by me...it was so cruel. In fact, to put it bluntly, the appearance of the movie characters is too small. This is also a technical problem. If the main characters on the screen can be divided into brown-haired women, blonde women, mustaches, glasses men, etc., this will speed up the audience's acceptance of the plot. I think this is the most empathetic for foreigners watching Chinese movies.
Apart from the unexpected success of the film's screenwriting and shooting techniques, the ideological propaganda of this film is really too successful. This is definitely what the main theme film crew of our country should learn. After the positive propaganda of the KKK in Griffith movies, it was shaped into a great group that overthrew the black gangster government established after the Civil War. It was this movie that became the main factor in the second political frenzy of the KKK in the United States.
We certainly can't just say how sinister Griffith is or how incorrect his thinking is because of this. It was only decades before the end of the Civil War in the United States in 1915 and Lincoln's assassination. In the movie, Lincoln was not assassinated by conservative assassins in the south, but had a lot of connections with the extreme bourgeois organizations in the north. In their eyes, Lincoln's policy toward the south was too moderate. After Lincoln's death, the extremist Austin Stoneman came to power and promoted his equality policy in the South. As a result, blacks had the right to vote and black senators came to power. In the later period, the blacks organized their own armed forces to suppress the whites and deprived them of their right to vote. The blacks robbed the white slave owners and became the new nobles, while the whites wore coarse cloth. The successful shaping of these upstarts makes people feel that a moral society is so degraded.
Cameron, who promoted the equality policy, also tasted bitter results. The black leaders he cultivated forced his daughter to marry him and kidnapped Cameron. This was the retribution of those who promoted the equality policy, and they would regret it. The ending of the movie is that the KKK organized by the Little Colonel rescued the whites from the brutal black rule, ended the blacks’ arming, and deprived them of their right to vote... So peace came back to the South...
In the movie, they just turned over. The black master is brutal, rough, uncivilized, and ugly. For example, they would eat in court, take off their shoes, and even force white women to marry them and establish a black kingdom. One of the negro characters forced the Little Colonel's sister to jump off the cliff and die. The white woman became a symbol of steadfastness here. At the same time, the white society was civilized, peaceful, happy, and elegant, and organized resistance after being persecuted, continuing the myth of an "undefeated nation". Even after I watched the movie, I hurriedly checked the information online, wondering if the KKK was a justice organization in the early days of its establishment.
Griffith is so genius. It is so convincing to talk about the views of white conservatism and their superiority at the time. It is no wonder that the KKK could organize large-scale demonstrations a few years after the film was broadcast, and the support rate was extremely high. And use this movie as a promotional film. The foundation of the "birth of a country" mentioned in the movie is also freedom, and there is no mention of equality in fraternity and the like. In contrast, watching the failure of domestically produced movies with the main theme, I can’t help but consider whether this has something to do with people’s intelligence quotient in addition to the problem of the system. To say immature, how mature can a 15-year film be?
Let’s not talk about the great thing about [the birth of a country]. Various limitations can't make the movie perfect. However, after studying this film for so many years in China, how can I still learn so much?
12.03.08
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