It took me two days to watch the first epic film in film history, D.W. Griffith's 1915 masterpiece The Birth of a Nation. This film is worthy of being the creator of many "firsts", and it still has a shocking power for a hundred years, and the picture is excellent, presumably repaired and maintained many times by modern technology - only heavyweight films have such treatment.
Before I opened it, I didn't expect it to be like this- even "Gone with the Wind" was reported and removed from the shelves for self-criticism before being allowed to be re-released, and this film that nakedly expressed hatred for black people (note: referring to some "free blacks", excluding loyal servants of the old era) turned out to be unscathed, so that I, a Chinese in a foreign country, enjoyed it freely for three hours, and could not help but make people think: What kind of existence is it in the United States? Flipping through the data, it set off the climax of the second Ku Klux Klan movement after its broadcast, and many white Southerners were ecstatic, which led to some violence against blacks. It is estimated that during the active period of the Third Movement (i.e., now), it was also a biblical general existence, the kind that must be seen in the brainwashing of the Congregation.
Its lens language and shooting methods are needless to say, and to this day it is still a sample and source of inspiration for film scholars, and I can feel the strong vitality of the picture through black and white film and interspersed subtitles. Although some of the performance methods have become obsolete, such as the action language of the heroine Elsie and the little sister Flora, who strive to express the "delicate, pure and helpless noble woman", it is really exaggerated to the point that it can only be performed in comedy. But the whole mood is coherent, full and convincing, and the characters are classic and three-dimensional. The soul figure "Little Colonel" exists as a representative of the Southern man, born into a family of slave owners, brave and fearless in war, kind to wounded enemies, full of love for his parents and sisters, love and hate and not right, and is a implementer of chivalry. Because of this, his tragic color is particularly strong - the family's favorite little sister, the naïve Flora, fell off a cliff because she was harassed and chased by black Gus, and finally died in his arms. All he could do was avenge her, and throw the beast's corpse on the lieutenant governor's porch with the Ku Klux Klan logo, and the family's happiness could never come back. Nineteenth-century white men in black formal dresses representing the civilized world, but covered with a strange white robe and a strange twisted hood like the god of death. The hood was removed to reveal the Colonel's pale, upright face, a scene I could not forget, as if with a fatalistic sigh—what a dignified and normal life he should have lived.
Elsie is played by Lillian Gish
But who can let go of the madness of the times? Regarding the origins of the Ku Klux Klan, what I saw in Gone with the Wind is that during the "reconstruction", the black-majority state legislature and the leather bag party (speculative politicians) supported by the white radicals made the South a miasma, and the Southern commoners who originally wanted to bury their heads and lick their scars to live well discovered that the North was to let them be trampled into the mud by blacks, and even the minimum citizenship rights could not be realized, and even the virginity of wives and daughters could not be protected, "finally aroused a cold anger in the hearts of ordinary men in the South", and the Ku Klux Klan came out. The heroine of "Gone with the Wind" Hao Scarlett, because she was superficially close to the Yankees, she did not know that her honest husband Frank had already joined the Ku Klux Klan, and for the night she was bullied by blacks, she went to avenge her "comrades" and washed the town of Sandy in blood, and the women who sewed clothes and talked about tea that night finally told her, "Who, who, almost all the men you know, are in the party." "It made her faint in horror. In this regard, "The Birth of a Nation" also introduces in the subtitles that women in the South sewed 400,000 robes for the Ku Klux Klan and kept their mouths shut. , either husband or dad or son, which woman will betray?
The film's makeup is very 1915 (pictured), not at all like 1865-1871
There are several passages about the Ku Klux Klan ceremony, which is of great historical value. The first time, two Ku Klux Klans rode on horseback to scare the two black men, who pretended to be ghostly, chanted curses and drank blood, and frightened the two black people like chaff and chaff. The second time, presided over by the Little Colonel, introduced the relics of the Flame Cross, representing the never-conquered Scottish Highlanders, and the blood of his and the suffering relatives of the Southerners, soaked in the old flag of the Confederacy. Ritual is powerful, though we modern humans are getting farther and farther away from it. In the atmosphere of that era, it soothed people's hearts and incited hatred, decriminalized itself, and represented an immutable position and irreconcilable contradiction. I vaguely saw it a few times in later American films and books, basically described as shoe glue (four sounds) scene, looking silly and uncomfortable, thinking that this group of people must have a problem with their heads (such as for Gump and his grandfather). However, in 1915, only 50 years after the civil war, many of the witnesses to these ceremonies were still alive, and it was not disgusting to shoot them, but only to sigh. Love and hate are always there, but they are slowly forgotten with the passage of time (and fortunately people forget).
Liberty and union, one and inseparable, now and forever. This seemingly violent tribute to the film, in the ku Klux Klux Klan white armor swept the city across the city to "correct the chaos" as the end, its tendency is self-evident. However, the racial problem in the United States has never stopped and gone far, who is the righteous? This is an unsolvable problem. Hatred breeds hatred, and evil breeds evil. All this sowed the seeds of destruction from the moment European slave traders forcibly bound the black men to their ships on the west coast of Africa. The nobility of the noble is crumbling in the face of the violence that engulfs everything. But with good intentions, one will eventually lead to self-liberation and meet like-minded people— whether male or female, white or black, poor or rich. Just like at the end of the movie, the two lovers have gone through a catastrophe and finally achieved consummation. Hatred and meanness, after all, there is nothing that can be done about love. And the blade-wielding God of War is not what Griffiths's film wants, Jesus is. I almost got to give a standing ovation to the final composite shot — it was a great stunt (non-ironic, 1915 to understand).