Sight and Sound (2002) Greatest Films Club - Page 24

John^Lal · 07-09-2003, 11:52 AM

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This is for those of you who give a separate rating for the technical and content. It seems to me that most of the time the content rating is more reflective of your thoughts on the films. Is that is the case, what compells you to rate the technical side of the film? And just for an example, which films would you rate as great films with a low technical rating?

well, i have only done it officially once. but i did it because i liked the direction. in Jules et Jim, i liked the way he used the camera. visually it was stimulating. but the movie just wasn't for me. i had no interest in watching two best friends fall for the same woman over and over and neither of them show any real emotion. the movie did not agree with my morals and i could not respect any character in it except for Jules and Catherine's kid, because she was still innocent.

Seth Paxton · 07-09-2003, 06:44 PM

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and express his emotions vividly, which is different from The Great Stone Face.

Good point.

BoaN - the racism is bad enough, but to be honest what I also get out of every single Griffith film besides Broken Blossoms is a very Bruckheimer staging. He goes for the melodramatic cheap sell. Maybe it was innovative then, but to be honest having seen many films of the same era from different countries, I think the Bruck comparison is dead on. He had contemporaries that were doing better sensationalistic films, like Cabiria for one, and they didn't have to rely on the very black and white (no pun intended) bad guy/good guy setups.

Many of the moments of Intolerance are spectacular and that film is also much better than his standard fare, but even there we see a reliance on archtypes and cliches, if not by cinematic standards (which to be honest, by 1911-1915 there were such things as cinematic cliches) then by literary cliches.

Much of Griffith's work, seen in films like A Corner in Wheat or The Battle of Elderbush Gulch, films he wrote, falls squarely on cartoonishly evil and good characters/moments in order to grab the audience. Things that by today's standards are considered manipulative filmmaking, and IMO were manipulative even by the standards of that era. Indians get drunk, eat dogs and attempt to assult girls around age 10...oh, are they the villains? Should I be rooting against them.

Then he falls back on the parallel edit to have someone come racing to the rescue again and again. Audiences ate it up, but Bruckheimer audiences eat it up too.

But Fantomas could deliver the same thrills using at least some interesting devices such as paralleling characters and graying the area between good and evil, and that and Cabiria were both 1914 (Fantomas serial actually began before that) when Griffith was staging that craptastic Battle of Elderbush Gulch film. I mean Cabiria is on a scale as big as BoaN, but with better sets and better characters.

Griffith has the supreme benefit with posterity of having one of the most well-preserved collections of films, so that it was much easier to re-discover his work later on. Many other directors were doing work just as ambitious in terms of staging, yet with a much subtler use of techniques and narrative, but many of those films have been lost to time.

Anyway, there's my latest anti-Griffith rant. You just see what the French, Italians, and Germans were doing at the same time and you know that Americans were doing their best to control their own market and prevent foreigners from distributing product to America on a scale that would upstage them...and then now we all have to say "hail to DW, the forefather". Pffftt, I say.

Brook K · 07-10-2003, 12:57 PM

Seth, you can't drop bombs like that and not back them up. Give me some examples of this hoard of films that are as ambitious and compelling or invent as many storytelling and editing techniques as D.W. Griffith? Sure, by the 20's when Griffith's star was falling and he lost his audience and started repeating himself in search of box office while the Germans were inventing an entirely knew style of expression he's an easy target. (and early German films like Fritz Lang's Spiders are "nothing" but Indiana Jonesish crowd pleasers) But what films are his equal while he was inventing the very language of cinema?

You give two examples, one of which, Cabiria, I would argue is just as shallow, showy, and audience-pleasing as you accuse Griffith of being. Cabiria is also grand spectacle with characters that are pure black and white. Griffith saw Cabiria and was appropriately wowed at the time. He then created Birth Of A Nation and Intolerance and bettered Cabiria in every conceivable way. We haven't even mentioned the socially groundbreaking Broken Blossoms, perhaps the best film cinema had produced up to that point. And a generation of early American directors like King Vidor were learning at his feet with his influence felt in France, Russia, Germany, etc. as well.

You also seem to (again) be making judgements on Griffith based on 2003 values as your absurd Bruckheimer comments suggest. There was no "art cinema" in 1915. The movies were the red headed stepchild of the theater and considered a diversion for the common man while the elites were at the opera. Theaters were often in the seedy parts of town in between the bars, pool halls, and dance shows. It was strictly a for profit enterprise. Birth of A Nation and Intolerance were the movies being critically recognized for their revolutionary qualities, but they were still movies, 1st and foremost, and at the time that meant crowd-pleasing money makers. (You could just as easily have used Spielberg as Bruckheimer in this regard).

Certainly Murnau, Eisenstein, Vertov, Vidor, Clair, Dreyer, Keaton, Chaplan etc. would move cinema in new and exciting directions in the 20's and beyond, but it was Griffith who discovered the language that each of these artists spoke in. In any endeavor there will be those who come later and improve and create new uses for innovations, but the pioneer should never be forgotten or worse, revisionised from an icon to a hack.

Lew Crippen · 07-10-2003, 02:36 PM

I’m not intending to pile on Seth, but a couple of more examples of why I disagree with your assessment of Griffith. Some of this will probably turn out to be repeats of Brook’s comments.

· He virtually (nothing happens in a vacumn) invented narrative filmmaking. Birth of a Nation was made in 1914. I’m not aware of any feature-length, narrative films made before this film and certainly none that were of this size and scale.
· The very good guy and the very bad guy observation is fair. But in 1915, what other feature-length films were more sophisticated in their story-telling techniques? I think it important to remember that he (and others) were in the process of inventing a new way of story-telling, handicapped by no speech. The technique was not mature and audiences were not yet educated enough to appreciate later subtleties.
· What you call, falling ‘back on the parallel edit’ and then comparing to current Bruckheimer, most knowledgeable critics call ‘inventing cross-cutting as a story telling technique’. I’m sure that you have forgotten that no one did this before, but I certainly can’t think of anyone (not that I have done personal, primary research, but a good many film historians credit Griffith with the first use of this technique, along with many others). What seems obvious today was revolutionary then.
· Not so factual, but more my opinion, I don’t find anything in Cabiria to equal the battle charge in Birth of a Nation. I think that this scene holds up well today.
· Aside from cross-cutting, Griffith either invented a number of other, now-standard cinematic devices or brought together ones pioneered by others to be used in a holistic fashion in telling his stories. I can’t remember the book (it is somewhere in my library) but the title is something like ‘History of Film Style’ has a list of what the author considers Griffith’s innovate accomplishments. And as I recall, the author takes issue with some things that have been attributed to Griffith by others, so I don’t think that this is a blind assessment.
· I refer to my earlier post on his mastery of crowd scenes. I don’t think that you can find any director’s efforts during this time who even come close to the detail in the background in some of these scenes. I refer you again specifically to the scene where the troops are marching to war. Actually you can’t make a Bruckheimer comparison here, because none of his director’s films have ever been close in this regard (I admit that I’ve not seem them all).
· And not everything in this film is quite so binary as you indicate. There are plenty of instances of conflicted emotions and motives. Look again at the meeting of the two young boys in the first reel. Absolutely brilliant as we quickly learn much about each of them and it carries through to the end.

Finally Brook and I tend to talk up foreign films and directors—so at least you know we are not being provincial.

And really finally, while the Americans were no doubt trying to control the market and make big profits, this is the first time that I’ve seen the conspiracy theory applied to film history. (and you can’t use as an argument, the superiority of films that can not be seen and compared).

Lew Crippen · 07-10-2003, 02:41 PM

Oops, one more thing—I agree with Brook as to Cabiria’s merits—and with you as to its scales and epic proportions.

Two points: I’ll give this film the benefit of bringing in elephants, but I still think that Griffith’s war scenes are far superior both technically and from the point of advancing the story than the big scenes in Cabiria; and more importantly Griffith’s style of storytelling grips me far more than that used by the Italians during the same period.

Holadem · 07-10-2003, 02:47 PM

Can anyone recommend a pre - Birth of a Nation film? I would like to watch something like that for comparison's sake. It would have to be available on DVD of course.

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Holadem

Lew Crippen · 07-10-2003, 03:13 PM

Having written that Cabiria is not so fine a narrative film as Birth of a Nation it is well worth seeing and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the history of film. It is on DVD. About 6-18 months before Birth of a Nation

Les Vampires is not strictly speaking a narrative film, as it is a serialization of a continuing story, much in the style of many written 19th centaury stories). This is also circa 1915. It was directed and written by Louis Feuillade and is highly recommended. Very innovative filmmaking technique, but on a small scale. Also on DVD

The 1996 film Irma Vep is one confusing but fun-filled homage to, or remake of Les Vampires.

Rent these two at the same time, ~~make some popcorn and grab a beer~~, slice some paté and pour yourself a glass of wine (we are talking French here) and prepare for a blast. Depending on your stamina you may want to have this cover a weekend, as I think Les Vampires comes in at over six hours.

Lew Crippen · 07-10-2003, 03:15 PM

And don’t be misled by the title. Les Vampires has nothing to do with vampires.

Holadem · 07-10-2003, 03:29 PM

Thanks Lew, I shall check it out.

Now everyone, please resume your regularly scheduled Seth lyching.

*pulls up a chair* this should be fun

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Holadem