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In April this year, the 6th Beijing International Film Festival was held.
In the "Classic Restoration" section of this year's Beijing Film Festival, a 1916 film "The Party Fights Against differences" was screened. According to the friends who went to see it at the time, the tickets sold out in one day!
Let's take a look at the rating of "The Party is Different" on Douban, which is as high as 8.6 points!
The reason why the little friend has such a great enthusiasm for this movie, to put it bluntly, is 4 words: the masterpiece.
The history of cinema can not get around this movie in any way.
There is a set of numbers that can prove the "grandeur" of this movie:
The film was released on September 5, 1916, and the entire filming process took 22 months and 12 days, costing $2 million to shoot (note, that was 100 years ago), and more than 60,000 people.
This is truly an unprecedented super blockbuster!!
However, it was such a magnificent production that led to the director Griffiths completely losing money, and almost the entire second half of his life was struggling to pay off this debt.
So Michael Simino, who was frustrated by the filming of "Heaven's Gate", should be more pleased...
Why is that?
When David Griffith is mentioned, a series of titles will run out, such as "The Father of Modern Cinema", "Shakespeare of the Film Industry" and so on, which shows his pivotal position in the history of cinema.
Before him, movies were just used as entertainment for everyone.
It is he who makes film independent of drama and independent of a "seventh art" that can sit on an equal footing with poetry, music, dance, painting, sculpture, and theater.
It can be said that in the more than 100 years of film development, there is no second person who has had such a profound impact on film.
In The History of World Cinema, George Sadur said of him:
He introduced new formal factors and integrated wisdom to the film, adding two great works to American film, "The Birth of a Nation" and "The Party Fights Against the Others.". His work has become a model for filmmaking all over the world. ”
Yes, most people will remember his "The Birth of a Nation."
It was in this film with stark racism that there were montages, close-ups, and real sets.
These techniques contributed greatly to the development of the art of cinema and were used by countless later films.
"The Birth of a Nation" can be described as a mixed reputation, because it touched on slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and other social topics that were very sensitive at that time, and not only was it banned, but even caused social chaos.
It seems that this doom did not leave Griffiths, and a similar situation occurred in "The Party Fights Against the Other".
At that time, the First World War had already been fought on the European continent, and the clouds of bloodshed, killing, death, and terror were always lingering.
Griffith felt the catastrophe that prejudice and hatred had brought to humanity, so he chose to express his resentment with his works.
The film consists of four separate stories:
The first story, "Mother and law," takes place in the United States in the 1910s. It is about a young worker who is wrongly convicted of a murderer and hanged, and the wife eventually finds the murderer and rescues her husband.
The story also shows the severe economic crisis in the United States at that time: the capitalists exploited the workers and forced them to go on strike, and in the conflict, many civilians were killed.
The director uses powerful lenses to depict the brutal repression of workers by capitalism, and also attacks the "death penalty".
The second story is called "The Passion of Christ." It depicts the crucifixion of Jesus Christ in the Bible.
In fact, such an adaptation is very risky, and if it is not done well, it will be scorned by thousands of people like Scorsese's "The Last Temptation of Christ", but Griffiths believes that the emergence of this story is particularly necessary, even if it is risky.
The third story is called the "Massacre of San Bartolomi". It depicts the murder of a married Protestant man and woman in France in 1572.
The fourth story is called "The Fall of Babylon." The location occurred in Babylon in 539 BC, when the high priest colluded with the Persian king Cyrus to betray the country and lead an army to attack belsa, the king of Babylon, which eventually led to the collapse of the Babylonian kingdom.
A film consists of four stories, and you say: Isn't this the "platter movie" that is very popular now? Especially Valentine's Day movies love to get this set.
"xx, I love you", "Ben Love" lie gun together.
However, Griffith does not tell one story and then tell the next story, but intersperses these four separate stories together.
This completely confused the audience at the time!
In fact, even now, such parallel narratives are quite common, and even variety shows like "Where Daddy Goes" do this, and the audience may not be incomprehensible.
The problem, however, is that Griffith's approach is too avant-garde, ignoring the established aesthetic habits already formed by the audience of his time.
Griffith himself put it this way:
"My four stories come in alternation. In the beginning, they are like four separate streams of water that flow very slowly and calmly, and then gradually approach, flow faster and faster, and finally converge into a rapid stream of emotion. ”
Perhaps it was his words that inspired the Soviet school of montage on the other side of the ocean, so Pudovkin would use "ice civilization" in the movie to treat it as a metaphorical montage!
(Pudovkin," "Mother")
In fact, these four stories are not without commonalities, and the bonds that bind them are love, hatred and betrayal, and in this way, they illustrate the misfortune caused by "party unity" and brutality.
In the film, a shot of a mother shaking her cradle appears repeatedly as a metaphor for the "changing times".
That's because Griffiths was so fond of one of Whitman's poems: "The womb of the cradle connects history and the future." ”
Shake, shake, shake to Grandma Bridge~
I have to say that it is the audience's difficulty in understanding the connotation of the film, which makes the three-hour viewing process become like a needle felt, which has become the direct cause of the failure of this blockbuster.
In 1917, the United States fully participated in World War I and joined the war against Germany, which indirectly led to a new box office rout of this film that promoted tolerance and peace, until it was lost.
In fact, there is another reason, that is, its cost is too high! Griffith is arguably the most daring director, and he's not at all ambiguous about spending money on set arrangements.
For example, the magnificent Babylonian Palace, with a depth of 1600 meters and a tower of 70 meters, mobilized 4,000 extras.
Because the scene was too large for the lens to fit, in order to shoot the panorama, the photographer could only sit on top of the hot air balloon to shoot. Thus came this spectacular scene in the history of cinema:
In one shot of the Persian army, 16,000 people were mobilized.
Griffiths had to pay $12,000 a day to maintain the transportation, food supply, and command of goods.
On top of the four-story wall (as high as the real ones), a carriage driven by 4 horses can be driven side by side.
When filming war scenes, according to the needs of the plot, if you want to push down, you will push down.
Therefore, the cost of 2 million US dollars is not casually invested, and every real money and silver can be reflected in the visual level of the movie.
When the film finally lost money, Griffiths, as the "initiator", could only bear the loss of more than $1 million alone.
Because his economy was so difficult that the set was not worthy of demolition, the original Babylonian city stood for four years, until it was demolished in 1919.
The failure of the box office of "The Same Party" not only made a generation of big directors "discredited", but also made Hollywood executives begin to reflect on the drawbacks of the "director-centered system".
Some producers always say to directors when controlling the budget: "Even if you have griffith talent, we are not going to shoot "The Party Is Different" at the moment." ”
You see, "The Party Fights The Same" has become synonymous with "the bottomless pit of throwing money".
It is also based on this that Hollywood began to implement the "producer-centric system", which has continued to this day.
Although we have said how tragic the fate of this movie is, its positive impact cannot be ignored.
For example, as we said before, Soviet film directors admired this film so much that Eisenstein and others even analyzed its lens language and editing methods frame by frame, which directly contributed to the emergence of "montage theory".
The narrative technique of parallel montage is also revived in Orson Wells's Citizen Kane.
Wells uses a five-character narrative to reconstruct the controversial life of a media tycoon, which coincides with Griffith's practice of "four stories pointing to the same theme".
Wells has always been very cold, but there is no shortage of praise for Griffith: "We are the first day in this medium." ”
If you want to cite the movies influenced by "The Party Is Different", it is really too numerous to list, and the countries of the world are looking down on it.
From Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon", to Kieslowski's "Two Flowers", from Tom Tikwe's "Lola Run" to Aaron Renai's "Smoke Not Smoke", countless directors have said that they have benefited greatly from "The Party Fights Against the Difference".
"Griffith can do everything well, everything he does in Hollywood is very ahead of the curve." —Leonne Barrymore, who excavated Griffiths.
Fortunately, griffiths, who was ahead of time, received a fair evaluation from the world after his death.
After all, in this diverse world, we have long understood how narrow and extreme the "box office theory" is.
Hollywood has not forgotten Griffith, and in 1975 the United States also issued a stamp commemorating the 100th anniversary of Griffith's birth.
In September 2001, the Kodak Theater on Hollywood Boulevard in the United States was officially opened to the public.
Its super-high arches, and the 33,500-pound elephant sculpture, are a tribute to "The Party Is Different."
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the release of "The Party Fights Against differences".
The way we can greet it is to look at it again, and perhaps from which red, green, blue, yellow and purple film we can feel a new realization.
"There is no doubt that he (Griffiths) is a genius who influences the world."
- Chaplin
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