Word: films
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...EARLY 1915 David Wark Griffith finished a small film based on contemporary news reports. The Mother and the Law dealt with the oppression of the lowly by the rich and intolerant. Feeling that its theme was bigger than his treatment, Griffith began to expand the film and then became interested in parallel situations set in former societies. Some seventeen months later he had spent two million dollars, hired thousands of extras, and built acres of sets on a film eight hours long. Distributors refused to book a feature that ran for two evenings, and Griffith...
...very abstract view of human experience. A triumph of sentimentalist humanism, it made dramatic sense and power out of all history, which it saw as human circumstance. Its basic notion, that a few universal sentiments motivate human actions, were more common in Griffith's Christian times than now. The films of the period, though, don't reflect it. Even Birth of a Nation, which was changing everyone's ideas of what films could be even while Intolerance was in production, dealt with members of two families in a historical context, tracing individuals' emotions through a war. The Expressionist practice...
...sent to take away the wine. For the villagers, their wine is like the sacred blood of ancestors. Every day they work in the fields tending grapes. In a collective brainstorm the village manages to hide the wine before the Germans arrive. The rest of Stanley's Kramer film shows the conflict between the Germans' systematic force and the Italians' slippery deception. The Italians win. The Germans leave empty-handed...
...book, outside authority-the Fascists and the Germans-is defeated by the people. There are endless problems to be overcome in successfully hiding the wine, and each is solved by a different person. The village works together with a respect for the individual talents its people. In Kramer's film, this disappears. The few difficulties portrayed are solved either by Bombolini or the returned Fascist, two men in positions of authority. By ignoring the contributions that the villagers make, Kramer destroys the idea that the people are the creative element...
Kramer describes himself as a "discarded liberal." He used to say that people dissatisfied with the system should "Cool it, it's all going to come together." "Well, it didn't." Kramer admits now. It is tempting to dismiss Stanley Kramer as a big-time film producer with six million dollars to make a movie. But standing in front of us, he looked vulnerable. His answers were nervous and he swept back his close-cut hair as if disorder might betray his appearance. His favorite film this year was "If," he said, because it destroyed his false sense of values...