As someone who has made films for the past 30 years, I am seeing new levels in them all the time!silentmovies742 wrote:I don't think after a PhD in the subject I need to see a whole new level in film
I work in comedy and animation. There, it's never about the script. It's always about the visual storytelling. The best animated films have the no plot at all, and the best comedic animated films have few words if any. Instead they focus on visual design, personality of the character through physical pantomime acting and cinematic clarity. That is to narrative film making as poetry is to narrative writing. The fluency on that particular level of communication is exactly what drew me to silent films in the first place. A lot of directors in the sound era could still operate on that level... Hitchcock, Tashlin, etc... But in the silent era, almost all the greats focused on cinematics because the medium required a focus on visual communication.
I see Birth of a Nation, not just as an exercise in techniques or a "first" for any particular use of them, but rather as a very early film that is completely fluent on a visual cinematic level. It's an engaging film with a lot of contrasts in mood, pacing and scale, along with truly inspired setups and staging. You could take any of those battle sequences and do frame grabs and create a really well planned storyboard out of them. And you can find the characters striking poses that are expressive, dynamic and alive all the way through the film. That isn't true of many other films from that era. Griffith was like a juggler that could keep a whole bunch of balls in the air at once, while most other directors of that era were juggling one or two at a time.
I really don't care if the subject matter isn't relevant because it has so much going on besides the plot. I understand if someone can't get past the story- I understand that is a huge hurdle for people. But that isn't a problem for me, because that isn't what I'm watching the picture for. If you look for visual storyTELLING instead of the linear story, there is a LOT in Birth of a Nation to appreciate.
Visual fluency takes study, just like verbal fluency does. There's a great deal to learn from the great early films. I see something new going on every time I watch a film like Birth of a Nation. That's exciting, because there are a lot of films I see that just shut my brain down and put me in a chatty dialogue induced coma while I watch... the "books on tape" model of film making. But I guess I can also understand someone reading Shakespeare's sonnets and complaining that there isn't enough action in the plot to keep their interest.
