Generally speaking, Griffith has two classic films worth remembering: the birth of a country (19 15) marks the birth of a master and competes with the party (19 16) declares the independence of film art.
The Birth of a Country is Griffith's masterpiece. His fond memories of listening to novels at his parents' knees as a child, his helpless experience of changing careers many times as an adult, his wandering career as an actor, his unsatisfactory drama experience, and his experience as a director in 400 film studios have all become his precious creative wealth. After running around to form a company and financing successfully, he took a fancy to Thomas Dixon's novel Kinfolk and began to adapt it. So, in the production environment where the tickets, notebooks and team were all collected, Doug was ambitious and high-spirited, walked into the set and started filming again.
1965438+February 8, 2005, was the day when The Birth of a Country premiered in the United States, and it was also an unforgettable day for Griffith. He didn't expect this to be the most mixed film before and after him. He didn't expect this to be a box office aphrodisiac movie that made him famous.
After the film was released, the United States reacted strongly, shocking the whole country and even causing riots in several towns. All walks of life express their opinions, and the news media pay close attention to them. Except for a few racists, the mainstream understanding can be summarized as follows: this film is outstanding in art, successful in business and reactionary in politics. In the present words, this film violates "political correctness".
Judging from the plot, the film embodies Griffith's black-and-white racial view and the regional complex of north-south confrontation. The story is divided into two parts: the "reconstruction period" in American history. The first half is the story before the "reconstruction period", which describes the rural life of the southern white farmers and black slaves living in harmony and weeding. The second half of "Reconstruction Period" shows the complicated contradiction between North and South, the racial conflict when soldiers meet, and the seemingly just Klan violence.
The sharp contrast between the two parts of the film reveals Griffith's true position against civil war and slave liberation. It is reasonable that the political content of this film was denied by most just people.
The birth of a country's artistic achievements is also obvious to all. As far as narrative structure is concerned, the film once again proves that Griffith is good at blending the essence of Dickens' novels for his own use. Only in this way, the film's rigorous and clear narrative structure, vivid characterization and extremely tense lens language have deeply attracted a large number of audiences. As the film critic Iverson pointed out in The History of American Film, "All Griffith's films are influenced by Dickens' writing style, and the whole literary cross-editing style and quite strange coincidence plot are completely derived from Dickens".
Griffith's creative idea of drawing lessons from novel narrative techniques has been strengthened by Fran?ois Truffaut, a master of the new wave. Truffaut admitted that his films "The Pianist" and "Jules and Jim" were inspired by novels that made him ecstatic. He believes: "Film is an art that pays attention to structure, and it is closely related to literature. All kinds of characters are lively and emotional as depicted in the novel. When I directed a film, my ambition was to make it into a novel. "
If "The Birth of a Country" is Griffith's masterpiece to show his talents and create box office, then "Let's Oppose Differences" is Griffith's work to respond to other people's accusations and defend himself, which is of course the pinnacle of his film art.
Griffith used rivers to describe the story of "Let's Oppose Differences", which has audio-visual effect and is also in line with the film language he founded: "At the beginning of the four stories, four rivers flowed down from the mountains respectively, and they flowed slowly and calmly in a decentralized way; Then they get closer and flow faster; Eventually it merged into a thrilling emotional torrent. "
Griffith used an 8-hour video to interpret these words. The theme of the film is "the evolution from intolerance to tolerance", and there are four stories from different times and regions to illustrate this theme. The core stories of the four stories are "Modern Story" and "Mother and Law", and the other three metaphorical stories serve as a foil, namely, the story of Christ, the story of France and the story of Babylon. Choose these stories of different time and space to strengthen the universal significance of the theme.
Griffith created a parallel montage, which unfolded, crossed and contrasted four stories at the same time. Three of the stories adopted the narrative mode of "last-minute rescue", which enhanced the dramatic tension of the stories. This mode is still one of the magic weapons of all kinds of movies, especially suspense and thriller movies.
In the 1920s, the "Kuleshov Lab" of Soviet Russia conducted a case study on "advocating different from the same party", which inspired directors such as Kuleshov, Eisenstein and pudovkin, and founded the Montage School through theory and practice.