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CLARA BOW in " FREE TO LOVE" 1922 (NO dvd.imdb)
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Lloyd Fonvielle
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 4:35 am    Post subject: Re: D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts Reply with quote

George Shelps wrote:

Quote:
If "good taste" were
the issue, then Roman Polanski
should never have gotten an Oscar.

I don't think it would be in bad taste for Griffith to get an Oscar for
his contributions to film. I do think it would be in bad taste to
expect a sexually abused woman to accept the "Roman Polanski Award" for
bringing awareness to the issue of child abuse.

Quote:
Your indignation is selective, Lloyd.

Hardly. I find the silliness of the left just as objectionable as the
silliness of the right. You seem to think that it's selective to make
moral judgments about any specific wrong, because there are so many
other things that are wrong. This is just a prescription for the
abdication of all moral judgment.



Mar de Cortes Baja

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Lloyd Fonvielle
Guest






PostPosted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 4:53 am    Post subject: Re: D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts Reply with quote

The idea that serious objections to "The Birth Of A Nation" only arose
in the 1990s is nonsense. They were loud and vocal from the moment the
film was released. In the 1940s, James Agee felt compelled to defend
the film against such objections, which were obviously still current at
that time. The fact that white Hollywood and white America may have
developed a kind of moral amnesia about the film during some periods may
be comforting to some, but not to me. It certainly doesn't constitute a
defense of the film.

Your whole thesis is based on indirect arguments that studiously avoid
the actual content of the film. Good progressive white people have
failed to condemn the film, so how bad can it be? Those who do condemn
the film have ulterior motives, so how can we take their objections
seriously?

Don't you think at some point you have to come to terms with the film
itself? With its unambiguous racist ideology?

I could argue, and might believe, that your love of Griffith has blinded
you to the actual content of the film, because it's just too painful to
face -- but that would not be evidence in favor of my analysis of the
film. It would not constitute a rational defense of my views.





ReelDrew@aol.com wrote:

Quote:
To update what I called the basically political nature of the
opposition to "The Birth of a Nation," in addition to conservative
Republican politicians and the NAACP, there were also many people
still alive from the Civil War and Reconstruction period. And while
those who were either pro-Southern or who were not especially partisan
to the North who favored the film, there was also quite a bit of pro-
Union sentiment, notably from veterans of the Grand Army of the
Republic who opposed the film because of their own bitterness toward
the South in a conflict that was far from being remote history. As
time went on, as Terry Ramsaye wrote in the mid-1920s, the passage of
a decade had "cooled the heat of controversy"--at least as far as the
American political and cultural mainstream was concerned. The two
years that began with the film's release and culminated in the US
entry into World War I can be seen as a period in which the motion
picture itself was emerging to become a major force in American life.
In a broader sense, therefore, the debate over "The Birth of a Nation"
involved the wider issue of whether this strange newcomer, the movies,
should be allowed to become central to thought and culture. While the
establishment of the feature-length motion picture by the late 1910s
by no means ended the fight over films and film artists--as obviously
apparent in the moralists' reaction to the tabloidized movie scandal
stories that led to the Hays Office--still, the 1920s found Hollywood
an American institution. And whatever the American film industry's
view of Griffith in other respects, including his subsequent films,
they quickly enshrined "The Birth of a Nation" as the first great
landmark of the film art. For decades, right up through the 1950s, it
seemed that a major selling point by Hollywood was to declare in
advertisements that every ambitious new film was praised as "the
greatest since 'The Birth of a Nation,'" "greater than 'The Birth of a
Nation," "in the illustrious tradition of 'The Birth of a Nation.'"

From the standpoint of the controversy, although, of course, it never
went away entirely, the new central position enjoyed by Hollywood in
American life had the effect of tending to marginalize the effect of
"The Birth" dispute on the broader movie-going public for a number of
years. At no time have I found any effort by Griffith's peers in the
directorial community to condemn or even question the specific point
of view in "The Birth of a Nation." Given how the "Birth" issue has
now come to outweigh everything else with Griffith, I've been
decidedly intrigued by the fact that the controversy seems never to
have been addressed by any of the directors for all these decades. I
asked Kevin Brownlow not long ago if he had ever brought up the
controversy to great filmmakers like King Vidor, Frank Capra, John
Ford and others, and he said no, he had not. Even Raoul Walsh, who
both acted in the film and was one of its assistants, never to my mind
commented on the controversy. The point here is that the later
"outrage" of the '90s, used to justify dropping the award by the DGA,
is a purely manufactured one having to do with matters of political
image and control. In all the decades before, such socially committed
filmmakers as Chaplin, Ford, Vidor, Capra, Walsh, von Stroheim, Jean
Renoir, George Cukor, Rouben Mamoulian, George Stevens, William Wyler,
Elia Kazan, Orson Welles, John Huston, Stanley Kubrick, on and on, had
consistently praised Griffith as the father of their art without even
once modifying their regard by saying that this was in spite of his
being a racist or having made a racist film. Just yesterday, I
finally was able to come across a newspaper article by George Stevens
in 1956 in which he said the greatest films were those inspiring
controversy with their passionate views. He cited as outstanding
examples "The Birth of a Nation," "Gone With the Wind," "The Best
Years of Our Lives," "The Caine Mutiny." Nowhere, however, did
Stevens, an ardent liberal who had been one of the first, I believe,
to film the Nazi death-camps after they had been liberated--not once
did Stevens state that there was anything objectionable in "The
Birth"'s controversial material. In truth, the decision by the DGA to
drop the Griffith award was in some ways more of a judgment on the
past leaders of the organization than on DWG himself since it
suggested that its earlier members had demonstrated moral and social
blindness in naming their highest honor after him.

How this came to be such a major issue in the late 1990s is, I think,
a kind of internal and perhaps even unconscious power struggle with
wider political implications in American society and early Hollywood.
By the '90s, most of the directors who had begun their careers were
either dead or dying. Griffith's most visible champion in the
industry was, of course, Lillian Gish who passed away in 1993. By the
late '90s, Kazan, Billy Wilder and Robert Wise, all of whom were
familiar with Griffith's work in their youth and had started directing
in Hollywood in the '40s when DWG was still around, were, on the
whole, simply too elderly or frail to have much input on the DGA's
1999 decision. (Parenthetically, however, I should note that Wise
subsequently did express the view that the DGA's decision was a
mistaken one resulting from external pressures.)

The void in the disappearance of directors who had learned their craft
from directly experiencing DWG's films was naturally filled by later
generations. Among them are those like Martin Scorsese who genuinely
honor Griffith and his achievements. Then there are others who, in my
opinion, are more into their own egos and images like Francis Ford
Coppola who has succeeded in suppressing the most complete version of
Abel Gance's "Napoleon" and was all too ready to assent to the DGA's
removal of Griffith's name from the award.

The real power dynamics in this denouement, though, is what I see as
the perhaps unconscious rivalry between Steven Spielberg, the
directorial king of Hollywood in the 1990s, both from the standpoint
of the box office and political influence, and Spike Lee, who rose to
power as the directorial king of modern black directors. As part of a
strategy to topple what they saw as the traditional white power
structure in Hollywood and enhance their own dominance, the new black
filmmakers like Lee and John Singleton began constantly denouncing
Griffith as the symbol of all that was "racist" in Hollywood, with
Singleton indeed likening "The Birth" to the Holocaust. Singleton,
who, I think, has had some problems of his own, has slipped a bit from
the limelight, but Lee, of course, remains a major figure. And
because of all the negative publicity he had generated toward
Griffith, he apparently had raised the specter that if the DGA should
some day honor him with their lifetime achievement award, he would
throw a fit if it bore the name of Griffith. Additionally, Spielberg,
sensing the pressure from Lee, with all the possible anti-Semitic
overtones and wishing to maintain his own leadership in Hollywood,
both morally and politically, clearly did not want to deal with the
embarrassment of his receiving the DGA's highest award bearing DWG's
name. So in the interest of political expediency and "image,"
Griffith was publicly swept into the dustbin and Spielberg became the
first director to receive a post-DWG award.

As for Spike Lee, he is now clearly trying to emulate the once-close
relationship Spielberg enjoyed with the White House during the Clinton
years. I suspect he thinks Spielberg's own power is starting to fade,
and Lee has hitched his own star to Barack Obama's wagon. In no way
should anything I say here be construed as criticism or commentary one
way or the other on Senator Obama, either his prospects, his beliefs,
or what kind of president he will make. Mr. Obama, as far as I'm
concerned, is hardly responsible for all the things that Spike Lee has
been saying for years. I merely wish to assert my very strong
conviction that Lee, whatever his abilities as a director, is very
much an opportunist and that it is his wish to be seen as the American
cinema's leader of the African-Americans and to gain even wider
influence, an ambition that led him to make Griffith an issue in the
first place. I do not think, however, that Lee has any genuine
dedication to the underprivileged, evident to me in his attack on
Jesse Jackson the other day for daring to criticize Obama. I doubt
that Lee cares any more for Obama than he does the blacks whose views
he claims to voice on film--I think Lee is just using Senator Obama
for his own political purposes, hoping as he does that an Obama
administration will enshrine him as the new king of Hollywood the way
Spielberg once was during the Clinton years.

Mr. Fonvielle is quick to repeat the wheezy canard that the DGA was
justified in dropping the Griffith award because a black filmmaker
would be offended at receiving such an award. Really? And should a
Jew be offended if he were given a drama award bearing Shakespeare's
name? After all, as Fonvielle just argued in a post, many people have
long asserted that "The Merchant of Venice" is anti-Semitic. Unlike
with Griffith, however, they have not used the controversy over that
one play to denigrate the author's entire work.

For the record, I believe the first black director in the history of
world cinema was a brilliant artist in Argentina, Jose Agustin
Ferreyra (1889-1943). Nicknamed "El Negro," he was the son of black
and white parents and grew up in poverty in Buenos Aires. His talent
as a designer led him to work in the Argentine cinema in 1915 and he
quickly became a director that same year. With his mastery of the
art, he dominated the Argentine cinema in both the silent and sound
eras as its most creative figure. There was nothing racial about his
films per se--they were very much reflective of the tango culture,
depicting the lives of the people he understood so well. His
recognition in the wider world is, needless to say, long overdue. In
respect to the present discussion, I think it should be mentioned that
one of the directors whom Ferreyra most admired was--D. W. Griffith.
He stated that Griffith, Thomas H. Ince, Cecil B. DeMille and Maurice
Tourneur were the filmmakers he held in the highest regard. A
completely spontaneous genius, after viewing their films and
assimilating their techniques, Ferreyra felt no need to watch other
films in order to continue making his own throughout the '20s and
'30s. He just drew on the world around him, working without a script
in an almost anarchical fashion but one that yielded outstanding
results. And if anyone had given him an award with Griffith's name on
it, I have no doubt that he would gladly have accepted it. Yes, I
realize he was an Afro-Argentinian, not an African-American. But
apologists for the DGA's decision like Fonvielle have practically
painted Griffith as the white racist supreme and the dedicated enemy
of black people everywhere in the world at all times, something which
is simply not true. As such, they have completely ignored the very
positive inspiration that Griffith provided to many pioneer filmmakers
of color in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. If cinema has
any hope of being taken seriously as an art, it is the narrow
political considerations of the ideological dogmatists that should be
cast aside, not the artists. Anyone with any love and respect for
cinema should be honored to be given awards bearing the names of
giants like Griffith and Ferreyra, great creators who helped liberate
the cinema from its swaddling clothes to become a true art.

William M. Drew


--



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Lloyd Fonvielle
Guest






PostPosted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 4:53 am    Post subject: Re: D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts Reply with quote

George Shelps wrote:

Quote:
You clearly have an obsessive attachment
to this topic, having raised it time and
time again here. Yet you virtually excused Eisenstein's cinematic
apology for a regime that murdered millions.
This is selective indignation.

Eisenstein's film didn't specifically advocate murder. "The Birth Of A
Nation" did.

Quote:
No, I object to your persistent focus on
one issue as well as your belief that
BOAN has no other significant themes besides racism

I have never said it had no other significant themes.



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Lloyd Fonvielle
Guest






PostPosted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 4:53 am    Post subject: Re: D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts Reply with quote

George Shelps wrote:

Quote:
Lloyd Fonvielle wrote:

The Nazi analogy is apt.

No, it is not. Naxism was not simply
a form of racial discrimination, it was
genocidal.

It only became genocidal, as a practical matter, during the war. Before
that it was program of political exclusion and expulsion. Even during
the war, Hitler considered the possibility of resettling all German Jews
in Madagascar.

Quote:
Hitler's measures against Jews began
with political repression -- denying them
the right to participate politically in
German society was based on the view
that Jews were racially disposed to
anti-social venality

Not that simple. There was more to
Hitiler's racism than that. It was
a crackpot Darwinisn that justified
extermination of inferior groups...Slavs (a group I belong to) almost as
much as Jews.

The racism of "The Birth Of A Nation" was based on a similar crackpot
Darwinism, which saw the political domination of blacks by whites as an
"Aryan birthright". Griffith didn't advocate the wholesale
extermination of blacks, anymore than Hitler advocated the wholesale
extermination of Jews in the early stages of his career, but I'm sure
Griffith would have been happy to see all American blacks relocated to
Madagascar.

Griffith certainly believed that the extra-legal murder of blacks
suspected of sexual assaults on white women was not only acceptable but
admirable. If you want to argue that Griffith's views simply reflected
the common views of his time, then you have to make the case that
mainstream America supported lynching, which was hardly the case. A
shocking number of Americans did support lynching, or were indifferent
to the issue, but it wasn't a practice that most people endorsed.

I realize that lynching is fairly uncommon today, but even so, do we
really want to deny or minimize the vileness of a work of art which
advocates lynching, even to protect the reputation of a great artist?
Is any artist's reputation worth that?



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George Shelps
Guest






PostPosted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 4:53 am    Post subject: Re: D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts Reply with quote

|navigareNOSPAM@cox.net (Lloyd Fonvielle) wrote:


Quote:
George Shelps wrote:

If "good taste" were
the issue, then Roman Polanski
should never have gotten an Oscar.

I don't think it would be in bad taste for
Griffith to get an Oscar for his
contributions to film.

But would it be in "bad taste" to
have a black performer
bestow the award?


Quote:
I do think it would be in bad taste to
expect a sexually abused woman to
accept the "Roman Polanski Award" for
bringing awareness to the issue of child
abuse.

If the Polanski award was based on
an entire career, then his recent
scandal ought not to cancel that out
but no one should require anyone
to accept an award they didn't wish
to receive.

Quote:
Your indignation is selective, Lloyd.

Hardly. I find the silliness of the left just
as objectionable as the silliness of the
right.

No, you take one category of injustice (racism) and elevate it in status
and use it it as a political stick--which is what the
left always does.

Quote:
You seem to think that it's selective to
make moral judgments about any
specific wrong,

You clearly have an obsessive attachment
to this topic, having raised it time and
time again here. Yet you virtually excused Eisenstein's cinematic
apology for a regime that murdered millions.
This is selective indignation.

Quote:
because there are so many other things
that are wrong. This is just a prescription
for the abdication of all moral judgment.

No, I object to your persistent focus on
one issue as well as your belief that
BOAN has no other significant themes besides racism
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George Shelps
Guest






PostPosted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 4:53 am    Post subject: Re: D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts Reply with quote

Lloyd Fonvielle wrote:

Quote:
The Nazi analogy is apt.

No, it is not. Naxism was not simply
a form of racial discrimination, it was
genocidal.

Quote:
Hitler's measures against Jews began
with political repression -- denying them
the right to participate politically in
German society was based on the view
that Jews were racially disposed to
anti-social venality

Not that simple. There was more to
Hitiler's racism than that. It was
a crackpot Darwinisn that justified
extermination of inferior groups...Slavs (a group I belong to) almost as
much as Jews.
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Feuillade
Guest






PostPosted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 1:50 pm    Post subject: Re: D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts Reply with quote

On Jul 12, 10:31 pm, Lloyd Fonvielle <navigareNOS...@cox.net> wrote:

Quote:
The idea that serious objections to "The Birth Of A Nation" only arose
in the 1990s is nonsense.  

You're right -- it *would* be nonsense, if anyone had suggested that.

But no one has.

It's remarkably easy to refute an argument no one has made, isn't it?

Tom Moran
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George Shelps
Guest






PostPosted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 5:09 pm    Post subject: Re: D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts Reply with quote

navigareNOSPAM@cox.net (Lloyd Fonvielle) wrote:

Quote:
George Shelps wrote:

You clearly have an obsessive
attachment to this topic, having raised it
time and time again here. Yet you
virtually excused Eisenstein's cinematic
apology for a regime that murdered
millions. This is selective indignation.

Eisenstein's film didn't specifically
advocate murder. "The Birth Of Nation" >did.

Untrue. Eisenstein advocates class
murder by a regime that murdered
Tsar Nicholas and his family---and
millions more.
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George Shelps
Guest






PostPosted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 5:31 pm    Post subject: Re: D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts Reply with quote

navigareNOSPAM@cox.net (Lloyd Fonvielle) wrote

Quote:
George Shelps wrote:


Quote:
The Nazi analogy is apt.


Quote:
No, it is not. Naxism was not simply
a form of racial discrimination, it was
genocidal.

It only became genocidal, as a practical
matter, during the war. Before that it was
program of political exclusion and> >expulsion. Even during the war,
Hitler
considered the possibility of resettling all
German Jews in Madagascar.

German Jews...but not Eastern European
Jews, who were the principal Holocaust
victims.

Quote:
Hitler's measures against Jews began
with political repression -- denying them
the right to participate politically in
German society was based on the view
that Jews were racially disposed to
anti-social venality

Not that simple. There was more to
Hitiler's racism than that. It was a
crackpot Darwinisn that justified
extermination of inferior groups...Slavs
(a group I belong to) almost as much as
Jews.

The racism of "The Birth Of A Nation"
was based on a similar crackpot
Darwinism, which saw the political
domination of blacks by whites as an
"Aryan birthright". Griffith didn't advocate
the wholesale extermination of blacks,
anymore than Hitler advocated the
wholesale extermination of Jews in the
early stages of his career,

Oh, baloney. MEIN KAMPF reeks with
genocidal hatred.


Quote:
but I'm sure Griffith would have been
happy to see all American blacks
relocated to Madagascar.

Crystal ball gazing?

Quote:
do we really want to deny or minimize
the vileness of a work of art which
advocates lynching, even to protect the
reputation of a great artist? Is any artist's
reputation worth that?

I am not trying to protect Griffith's
reputation---although the DGA's trashing
of it is really a disgrace.

I simply disagree with your take on the
movie. The heart of it is a protest
against Reconstruction, wherein Americans treated their fellow Americans
as traitors and pariahs--against the pleas for reconciiation by Lincoln
in his Second
Inaugural.

Fratricidal war was followed not by
concord but by a continuation of that
war.

It seems to me that Griffith is saying that the death of Lincoln, "the
Great Heart" unleashed chaos in the South, and
led to social upheaval and the rise
of the Klan....the movie is not designed
as a screed for racism and racial
murder, but is, as Agee said, "one
great tragic film."

The remnants of Dixon's novel are
there, and mar the film. but do not
constitute its raison d'etre.
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Lloyd Fonvielle
Guest






PostPosted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 6:43 pm    Post subject: Re: D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts Reply with quote

George Shelps wrote:

Quote:
navigareNOSPAM@cox.net (Lloyd Fonvielle) wrote:

Eisenstein's film didn't specifically
advocate murder. "The Birth Of Nation" >did.

Untrue. Eisenstein advocates class
murder by a regime that murdered
Tsar Nicholas and his family---and
millions more.

You're stretching. If you make a patriotic film about America you're
not necessarily advocating every bad thing America has ever done.

"God Bless America" doesn't endorse lynching. "The Birth Of A Nation" does.



Mar de Cortes Baja

www.mardecortesbaja.com <http://www.mardecortesbaja.com/blog>
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Lloyd Fonvielle
Guest






PostPosted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 6:48 pm    Post subject: Re: D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts Reply with quote

George Shelps wrote:

Quote:
The remnants of Dixon's novel are
there, and mar the film. but do not
constitute its raison d'etre.

The film has a lot of raisons d'etre, many of them very fine and
admirable. But one of them, which is at the core of the film, is
Dixon's political and social ideology, which is racist in an extreme way.



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George Shelps
Guest






PostPosted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 7:05 pm    Post subject: Re: D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts Reply with quote

    navigareNOSPAM@cox.net (Lloyd Fonvielle) wrote:


Quote:
Untrue. Eisenstein advocates class
murder by a regime that murdered
Tsar Nicholas and his family---and
millions more.

You're stretching. If you make a patriotic
film about America you're not necessarily
advocating every bad thing America has
ever done.

I am not stretching. OCTOBER celebrates the fall of nascent
parliamentary democracy and rise
of totalitarianism
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Feuillade
Guest






PostPosted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 7:05 pm    Post subject: Re: D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts Reply with quote

On Jul 13, 12:18 pm, Lloyd Fonvielle <navigareNOS...@cox.net> wrote:
Quote:
Feuillade wrote:
On Jul 12, 10:31 pm, Lloyd Fonvielle <navigareNOS...@cox.net> wrote:

The idea that serious objections to "The Birth Of A Nation" only arose
in the 1990s is nonsense.  

You're right -- it *would* be nonsense, if anyone had suggested that.

But no one has.

Of course they have.  

Um, no, they haven't. You need to pay attention.

Quote:
The narrative being expounded here is about a golden age of Griffith
appreciation, when he had his face on postage stamps and his name
on awards, until his reputation was savaged by politically correct
do-gooders in the 90s.

No, that's not the narrative.

Before, say, 1990 or so, "The Birth of a Nation" was viewed as a
flawed, controversial masterpiece. But the emhasis was on the
masterpiece.

Now all people see are the flaws and the controversy.

This points to a flaw in our society. We have lost nearly all
historical perspective. None of us, or very few, are willing to make
the effort to understand that a given work was made at a specific time
and place, reflects the attitudes of that time and place and should
not be judged by the standards of a different time and a different
place.

Like the man said, the past is another country. They do things
differently there.

There is no perspective. And perspective is what is needed, not blind
crawling before the gods of political correctness.

Is the film offensive in many ways? Of course it is. Should that be
all we see? Of course not.

Tom Moran
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George Shelps
Guest






PostPosted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 7:09 pm    Post subject: Re: D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts Reply with quote

navigareNOSPAM@cox.net (Lloyd Fonvielle) wrote:

Quote:
The remnants of Dixon's novel are
there, and mar the film. but do not
constitute its raison d'etre.

The film has a lot of raisons d'etre, many
of them very fine and admirable. But one
of them, which is at the core of the film,
is Dixon's political and social
ideology,which is racist in an extreme
way.

And I don't agree that Dixon's ideology is
at the core of the film.

But nothing short of a visual content analysis can resolve this...and
that's
not possible here.
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Lloyd Fonvielle
Guest






PostPosted: Sun Jul 13, 2008 9:18 pm    Post subject: Re: D.W. Griffith Biograph shorts Reply with quote

Feuillade wrote:

Quote:
On Jul 12, 10:31 pm, Lloyd Fonvielle <navigareNOS...@cox.net> wrote:

The idea that serious objections to "The Birth Of A Nation" only arose
in the 1990s is nonsense.

You're right -- it *would* be nonsense, if anyone had suggested that.

But no one has.

Of course they have. The narrative being expounded here is about a
golden age of Griffith appreciation, when he had his face on postage
stamps and his name on awards, until his reputation was savaged by
politically correct do-gooders in the 90s.

In fact "The Birth Of A Nation" and the man who made it have always been
morally problematic for many people and always will be, for reasons that
have to do with the film's content rather than with intellectual fashion.



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