Text: taixugong
Edit: Mr. Friday
Image: Network
In the second half of 1969, there were two small events in the United States: one was the Woodstock Music Festival in New York State on the East Coast. As we all know, this rock and roll event will make hundreds of thousands of young people who love peace, music, and love to make love get together, and it will be a carnival for three days and three nights. Another incident occurred in Chicago, thousands of miles away from New York, where seven brothers accused of inciting violence staged a lawsuit drama for nearly half a year for launching demonstrations and accused of inciting violence. The incident ended with the "Seven Gentlemen" being imprisoned.
Why put these two things together, except that they both arose because of the anti-Vietnam War, and more importantly, I think they are both a typical embodiment of American culture, and he can help us a lot in understanding the United States.
There have been many video works involving the Woodstock Festival, which was covered a lot in articles before Friday Literature. Thankfully, the movie about the "Trial of the Seven Gentlemen" is now out, which is what we are going to talk to you about today, the NEFLIX production of "The Trial of the Seven Gentlemen in Chicago".
(This article involves a small number of spoilers and does not affect everyone's reading after reading.) ）
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" >, a delicate commercial film with political, legal, and biographical themes</h1>
The movie "The Trial of the Seven Gentlemen of Chicago" uses most of the ink on the trial process, which inevitably uses a lot of legal expertise and involves a lot of political and historical background. How to structure professional things in the form of commercial feature films, so that the public can get the pleasure of watching movies, but also will not be criticized by professionals, but also smoothly convey the director's ideas, this is the difficulty of such film creation, not to mention that this film is not a single protagonist-style character biography, but a group play, which is more difficult.
Fortunately, the screenwriter-turned-director Alan Sorkin has accumulated enough experience and qualifications to control this kind of film, from the American drama "The White House" that made him famous, to the "Social Network", which won countless international screenplay awards, to the well-known "Steve Jobs"...
▲ Director Alan Sorkin directed the scene
Personally, I think this is a masterpiece of Alan Sorkin's screenwriting, and it is also the pioneering work of his own self-directing and self-acting, which allows his personal style to reach the extreme.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > two, the rhythm is smooth, the plot is meticulous, and the conflict is superimposed</h1>
To judge the quality of a commercial film, of course, there are three measures: that is, whether its rhythm is smooth, whether the storyline is rigorous, and whether its contradictions and conflicts are strong. For "The Trial of the Seven Gentlemen of Chicago", these three points are enough to praise from the perspective of viewability.
▲ Stills from "The Trial of the Seven Gentlemen of Chicago"
The overall editing of the film is fast-paced, which is the generality of films involving law and litigation, and it is also the hard need to show the personality of 150 days of litigation and 8 protagonists (seven gentlemen plus a prosecutor) in 120 minutes, which tests the skills of the director and screenwriter, and also highlights the style of the creator.
▲ The prosecutor prosecutor in the film
In this regard, the director chose a large number of contemporary style rock music, combined with strings to string together each plot paragraph and character shaping, forming a paragraph like a MV, so that the audience is as happy as watching a rock music performance. At the same time, the director has put a lot of plot and professional information into these MV-like paragraphs in a visual way, killing two birds with one stone.
Commercially, the plot is decent for the film:
The scene of the seven gentlemen rushing to Chicago to plan a demonstration in the first few minutes is enough to arouse the audience's appetite;
The positive film directly cuts into the courtroom from the perspective of the prosecution lawyer, with clear left and right and clear contradictions;
In the process of the two sides of the litigation debating and playing, the director revealed the details of the incident day little by little, and showed the historical demonstration conflict like a puzzle, with tension and relaxation;
Although the ending side was defeated, everyone was happy, and since then the film has completed a reunion.
The dramatic tension and contradictions about the film are the most brilliant places for this movie:
Although it is a group play, there are opposites and communion between almost every two characters, and these small contradictions increase layer by layer, and then explode and resolve, until they merge with the big contradictions under the main line of the film (that is, the prosecution and the defendant).
Even after the convergence, the contradictions and conflicts under this main line can continue to escalate, escalating to the conflicts between everyone and the justices and even the entire American system...
Imagine how powerful the dramatic tension created by this can make the audience feel like they are on a roller coaster.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > third, American humor and irony</h1>
The film is based on history and legal events, involving a lot of institutional shady scenes are not fake, but its overall perception is comedic, humorous and satirical, and even hippie, which is the director's style, and I think it is also a typical American style, which is somewhat reflected in the language.
Some are embodied in visual montages, for example:
At the beginning of the film, the picture of President Johnson's speech on conscription was selected, but the outside of the picture was the ambient sound of the rock music scene fading in. It's a typical American satire (you'll see this kind of montage in too many Vietnam War satires).
Another example: at the scene of the trial, two hippie defendants, in order to express their dissatisfaction with the judge, put on a black judge's robe and claimed to pay tribute to the justice, and after being ordered to take it off, they revealed the police uniforms lined inside.
You know, these satirical humor styles are basically shown through the language of the film. It embodies a kind of cinematic defiance.
<h1 class = "pgc-h-arrow-right" >4, what can Chicago's Seven Gentlemen's Trials give us to think</h1> about
To this day, I have found that many people around me love to stand up and scold the United States after tea and dinner, of course, the scolded people usually do not even know what the House of Representatives, the Senate, and Congress are doing, let alone the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
Between the words, you will find that most of them are confused about the problem, they mistakenly believe that the United States is the world of a few bad politicians, and that one president can represent all Americans. They cannot see the existence of America's conscience under evil, corruption, and political darkness, and they cannot see the revolt that accompanied the oppression from the founding of the United States from beginning to end.
Together, the two make up the modern America.
Back to the movie, I don't know what thinking "The Trial of the Seven Gentlemen of Chicago" can bring us, but in the end, it is a high-quality film, which is enough for us to learn and learn from in the art of film.
Pay attention to "Friday Literature and Art" and interpret classic movies