We watched 2 films in class today,
a. The Great Train Robbery
b. Birth of a Nation
I’m beginning to feel that I’ve not really been thinking when I watch a movie, whenever I’m in class and Rey points out and asks all these questions about the film, I began to notice how much I miss out on when I watch a film and when I actually start noticing these things, I realize I’ve been learning a lot even though it’s only been the first few classes of the semester.
Rey pointed out stuff that had to do with Genre and the first division of genre;
Comedy Tragedy
Between the two films that we watched; I would have to say that I paid more attention and was more interested in Birth Of a Nation. The Birth of a Nation was the show that started cinema back then, as DW Griffith attempted and used techniques that have never been used before and compared to the other films shown in class from back then, this film shows a newer, more modern and sophisticated way of filming. As Rey said, the director paid a lot of attention into making sure that it was historically relevant, and reproduced a lot of the backdrops and scenes. I personally thought that it was contradictory to a certain extent because if he was so particular about making sure that everything was historically correct, all the scenes and how he depicted the black people was the total opposite of what actually happened, and people know that, so obviously it came out extremely racist. He totally switched the roles of the white and blacks, ‘white minorities?’ -made not sense to me because if I’m correct, the blacks were the slaves at that time and THEY were the minorities. When I read the review by James Agee, where he said something about the director understanding the blacks and that’s why he depicted them in that way- feet on the tables, eating and drinking during meetings, and even the subtle but strong facial expressions, I was wondering to myself on how can he say that the director understood them? does that mean he understood them as savages? or the lower class? I agreed more with what Jane Addams had to say and since DW Griffith was a southerner and practiced slavery, I would assume that he was absolutely fine in the whole idea of slavery. Even though it was a great piece of art, I don’t think it should have been made with such a strong racist incline. For me, that was probably one of the few things that stuck in my mind from the entire film and it kind of destroys part of it’s beauty (this is similar to my comment on Rey’s blog as I felt that it said exactly what I felt when watching and this exact explanation was enough)
I must say that there were parts of the film that made me bored, but I really sat up and paid attention to the film at parts such as when the film started to incline towards racism and when Lincoln was shot.
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