- Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" film
review
, is also the first moving image work in history with a large storyline. The director used close-up for the first time in the film, and developed the basic montage and the most original superimposition and special effects skills. When you see it with your own eyes, you will find that the three-dimensionality of its shots and the control of complex plots even surpass many of today's films. In addition, it is also the origin of the plot mode that Hollywood movies will make use of in the future (some people call it the "last minute rescue mode", that is, the central plot is introduced through the foreshadowing and expansion of the background, and then advanced layer by layer, reaching a climax at the last moment. ).
Through the understanding of film history, we can see that all this happened like a miracle. Before this, there had never been a film beyond the category of short films. As a new and fragile art form, cinema still remains at the level of experimentation for a few people. The appearance of this film marks that the film has truly entered the field of mass consumption, and it also heralds the proliferation of commercial films as an important commodity culture on a global scale in the future. Many of its technological innovations are more like a leap than an inevitable development. And the result of this jump was revolutionary, it completely changed the fate of this art. On the one hand, it set a decisive example for its structure and presentation; on the other hand, its astonishingly high box office at the time also set the stage for the future direction of cinema, especially in the United States. step. Today, in many universities in the United States, the first sentence that students in related departments are instilled is: "Movie is a commodity."
Ironically, this epoch-making film is a tribute to Works by the KKK. 1915 was the year the KKK was rebuilt for the first time, and as a Kentuckian, the film also represented his position.
At that time, just half a century after the end of the Civil War, the politicians who deliberately usurped the most important fruit of the war - liberating the black slaves in the south and giving them equal rights. They assassinated Lincoln, instilling revenge and violence in blacks who had just been freed from a long period of inhumanity. And because these blacks have been away from the educated class for a long time, they are also in the stage of adapting to the new society and new identities. Some of their "uneducated" behaviors in the early stage aroused "traditional whites" (especially in the south). Disgust due to habitual and mental restraint. Personally, I believe that this balance issue that was not dealt with in the early days of liberation also greatly affected the pace of American society's real racial equality. For a party like the Ku Klux Klan, whose indisputable terrorist nature is actually defined by history, it may not have been established or acted in a way that is viewed by the vast majority of those within its sphere of influence. terrorist mentality.
Few people can escape their short-sightedness and look beyond the era of their own existence to examine it objectively. Therefore, we should think that in this film of Grignard, even the part that is obviously distorted now is only an objective presentation of a point of view at the time. It is precisely these objective relics that allow today's scholars to more thoroughly analyze the step-by-step process of history. Although racial discrimination is still an overly sensitive topic, most of the time it can't stand up to questioning and discussion, and it can easily arouse the rash anger of self-proclaimed "egalitarians". But when more people face up to these historical issues with a peaceful mind, perhaps many of the embarrassments that we can't explain today will be solved.
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