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Just.... wow...
Right now, my blog - a personal log of my learning - has 0 viewers. It is however published, and as such, may be read by others. I feel compelled therefore to reiterate that the point of this series is not a critical review of the films, but I document what they teach me. That being said, in case there is any confusion, I absolutely deplore this film, so much about it is quite sickening. I shall grit my teeth and refrain from explaining everything I despised about it.
The Story
Two friends, young men from very wealthy families representing the Northern and Southern divide, both deeply rooted in the American gentry class at the time of the end of slavery in the US, get together at the family home of the Southern boy. They each fall in love with the others sister.
On the return of the Northern boy to his home, the North and the South go to war. Each boy joins opposing sides. During the war, the family home of the Southern Boy is ransacked, and all of the boy's brothers are killed in battle. The war goes badly for the South and great swaths of Confederate territory is razed by the North. The Southern family sell everything but their house to fund the war effort and live a subsistance lifestyle.
The two friends meet in a climactic battle. Though out-gunned, the Southern boy makes a suicidal last charge. He falls, wounded at the feet of his friend but not before he saves the life of an enemy soldier, however the battle, and eventually the war is lost.
The Southern boy is taken to hospital, where his nurse is the Northern boy's sister. He is told that he is to be hanged as a guerilla, however the sister and his mother, on meeting with the president appeal to him to spare her love. The president agrees and signs a writ sparing his life.
On his return home, the Southern boy sees how his family's fortunes have been devistated. President Lincoln manages to keep the peace, but is assassinated. Southern black slaves are freed and stop working, living off charity handouts from the North.
The Northern family moves to the South when the father takes ill, and take residence close to the Southern family. The Northern family's father is a proponant of racial equality, and attends rallies and meetings where black people learn of their new rights. Meanwhile the two sons court the sisters.
Thanks to the voting power of the black vote, the Northern families father is elected and brings his policies to a South which has not yet accepted his equal race policies. They are offended by white people being convicted by black juries, and it is quickly revealed that the blacks are corrupt - intimidating those who did not vote for their man, murdering innocents and getting away with it.
The film goes on to make ever increasingly ridiculous, one dimensional portrayals of black Americans, and I won't grace this page with descriptions of the events. Suffice to say, anarchy is imminent, until, inspired by watching two girls hide under a sheet from maurauding black people, before jumping up and scaring them, the Southern son founds the Ku Klux Klan.
The KKK ride horses and dressed in distinctive white, masked gowns fight the corrupt blacks in a second rebellion. On discovering his membership of the Klan, the Norther sister breaks off her relationship with the Southern son. The youngest Southern sister, collecting water from a well is bothered by a black officer, proposing marriage and refusing to take no as an answer. Her brother hears her cries for help and rushes to help, but she jumps from a cliff in fear of the black man. He arrives too late and she dies in his arms, telling him what happened.
A search of the town is organised for the officer, and he is found. The officer shoots dead the man who found him and rides off on horseback. He is captured and taken to a Ku Klux Klan trial, in which he is found guilty and lynched. The Klan dump his body in town, their motto pinned to his chest.
Black millitia are brought out in force to patrol the streets, and the Klan attack in force, while a leading black politician proposes marriage to the Northern sister. She rejects him in disgust but he attempts to force her to wed him. She is rescued by her father who, on learning that he wishes to marry a white woman is delighted, but on learning it is his daughter changes to disgust.
The Klan ride in, save the day and kill the blacks, the boys marry their loves and everyone lives happily ever after.
The Visuals
The film is mostly shot in medium or close ups, with some wide angle epic battle scenes. One visual trick that it used to great effect was to only show a portion of the action on screen in a circle, the rest covered with black. At times these could be incredibly tight, only one face actually on screen, tiny in the centre, others, only a corner blocked off.
The Sound
The version I watched had an orchestral score, it was good, it faded into the background but punctuated each scene with the appropriate mood and added a great deal, supporting the visuals.
What I learned
The Story
I put this film off for nearly a week, not only because of it's subject matter, but because of it's length. It is 3 hours long and I did not think I could get through a silent, black and white film of that length. I was gripped however, from start to finish, depite the objections I have to it's content. The reason why, I believe, is the absolute quality of the storytelling. Our hero's, the Southern family are written as thouroughly decent, brave and generous to a fault, yet as a result of these aspirational qualities, they lose so much and have misfortune piled upon them.
It's not merely our admiration of them that makes it so compelling, it's the feeling that these are three dimensional people, and the quality of the acting plays no small part here. When the Southern sister sells her clothes and can only dress in, what she would feel is rags, she pouts and looks ready to burst into tears, then we watch her quite literally put a brave face on the situation and dance like a little girl dressing up.
While we are supposed to respect the sister's bravery in the face of great adversity, the film does not make her a brave character. She wobbles, has emotions that we can all, if not respect, certainly understand. That is key, here, parts are strictly divided into those characters who are important and whose motivations we should understand, and the others, the backdrop, whose characters can be summed up in one word - for example, the guard at the hospital is lazy, and everything he does can relate directly back to laziness. President Lincoln is generous, the looters are greedy, John Wilkes Booth is dastardly. They are not treated with the same respect and as such, they become a force of nature, their actions inevitable and they cannot be changed or pursuaded from their course. In this manner, the story inflicts itself on our actual characters, they struggle to cope while all around them, nature follows it's inevitable course, that is until they decide to fight back, to change things and it is this journey, made up of those micro moments of understandable, yet ultimately commendible behaviour albeit while also showing weakness for us all to see.
I also noticed there is a great deal of foreshadowing, right from the off when a kitten is placed with a puppy and the two start to scrap. Great moments of tension are allowed space to breath, especially the assassination of President Lincoln where we get lingering shots of John Wilkes Booth preparing to commit murder. We know what is about to happen, yet the film still gives us a heart stopping moment, and the payoff is spectacular.
After this moment, the second half of the film begins and while the same principles are being applied, it is much more difficult to sympathise with them. The black characters are slouching caricatures, often white actors in blackface, who act more like monkeys than humans. It feels far too on the nose for a modern audience, and as a result of the history of race relations in Western society in the last couple of hundred years, does sadly ruin the second half of the film. It is impossible to care about the plights of the characters, when one leaps from a cliff at the prospect of being proposed to by a black man. When she runs screaming from his proposal, I have watched it through many times now, I can only interpret his pursual of her as concern for her welbeing, and given how blatent the rest of the film is with it's portrayal of black people, I feel if it wanted to suggest he was pursuing her for neferious reasons, it absolutely would not have shied away from making it obvious that he was planning to take her by force. His entire approach of the girl is mirrored by the Northern boy creeping up on the Southern girl through the bushes when he begins his wooing of her, he offers marriage, and she screams and runs. He looks genuinely concerned and chases after her telling her he means no harm. I cannot interpret it any other way as to infer he did mean her harm would be such a change in direction as to how the film has been communicating with the viewer until that point, but regardless, even if he had meant her harm, it does not help as the riddiculousness of the portrayal of blacks has destroyed any emotion.
Quite simply, when the North are facing the South, and both sides are treated with a modicum of respect, the film works, but when the "baddies" are disrespected, it is difficult to maintain any emotional connection to the "goodies".
The Visuals
This is quite simply a spectacular film in terms of it's cinematography. The battles are awe inspiring and use movement to incredible effect. The sheer number of actors involved, their fluidity across the screen and the viciousness of battle combine to great effect. Attention is guided skillfully and by blocking, the shape of the screen is changed for key moments.
When attention is not being guided, there is often more than one thing going on in a scene at a time, with events occuring in the foreground and/or the background to add authenticity to a scene, make it feel natural and allow the viewer to take in more story at once, yet it never devolves into a cacophony, our attention is guided to the story so we do not linger, and the information imparted is brief - an elderly man in a rocking chair on a porch adds to the feeling of a well to do Southern family, and later in the scene he becomes the focus as his grand daughter hugs him. Those moments when our focus is drawn to only one character feel special, intimate in contrast to the busy scenes that dominate the film.
My favourite moment is the assassination of Lincoln, the tight circle revealing only John Wilkes Booth, tiny on the center of the screen, manically murderous, before creeping into his box and standing behind him before shooting and then making his escape across the stage is a moment that will never leave me, and for me, is the true ending of this film.
