Seth Paxton

I strongly disagree. Other filmmakers were doing it as well, but not with the same SENSATIONALISTIC subject matter.

We see it still today. Was Showgirls talked about because of its craft, or the sexual sensationalism that was used? Much of Verhoeven's work falls close to that line.

Would Passion of Christ even be talked about nearly as much were it not for the amped up violence, instead taking on the subject in a much tamer manner?

You can push buttons with content that doesn't inherently make the film itself good (Passion may be good in many other areas but the huge BO does seem to stem from the violence at hand making the film more emotional for audiences). But by pushing those buttons you can play to a certain audience who will be emotionally stirred not by the filmmaking as much as the subject matter.

There is little doubt that BoaN made A LOT more money than Intolerance and BBlossoms. Of course DWG's shorts had been doing well before BoaN which is where he is credited for codifying the language really, yet those films were often MORE RACIST, more sensationalized than BoaN.


If 10 filmmakers are all doing the same thing and everyone goes to see DWG because they are subject to the cliche of "petting the dog" (good guys are nice to dogs, kids, women, bad guys kick dogs, hurt kids, rape women), he will codify the language because that is where everyone will be seeing this new grammar being invented by EVERYONE ELSE.

Vampires or Phantoms were popular, certainly more creative in their juxtiposition of protagonist and antogonist (often the lines between the two sides was blurred), they relied on good parallel editing and the same sort of tension building that DWG films were doing. What they didn't have was white men saving white women from A.Indians and black men.

At his least racist DWG had stories like a rich wheat baron cornering the market and putting all the farmers in the poorhouse, starving to death. The pleasant ending for that audience, the baron falls and is killed in a grain hopper.

His subjects played to the masses because they fell back on the ideals they wanted displayed, bordering on propoganda for poor and middle class white men, and not just in BoaN.



When other artists codify the language of their art, they usually do so by crafting it so well, ala Shakespeare. Of course the King James Bible is also noted with helped to codify the English language, but that falls more in line with DWG since it had a built-in audience no matter how well written it was.

In the same way lots of other filmmakers were using the same techniques to a similar degree of quality but their films had a smaller built-in audience so people came to identify these things with DWG.

In many ways its not so different from modern Disney and how strongly it has been implied that their films originated with foreign animation, copying not only plotlines by character styles and names (such as Lion King or Atlantis). American audiences will always know those things via Disney, but that doesn't make them the creative genius behind the work. Of course they argue that they never saw such films but some of the evidence is pretty damning. That gets off subject though.