One crude but unquestionable indication of his greatness was his power to create permanent images. All through his work there are images which are as impossible to forget, once you have seen them, as some of the grandest and simplest passages in music or poetry....
This was the one time in movie history that a man of great ability worked freely, in an unspoiled medium, for an unspoiled audience, on a majestic theme which involved all that he was; and brought to it, besides his abilities as an inventor and artist, absolute passion, pity, courage, and honesty. "The Birth of a Nation" is equal with Brady's photographs, Lincoln's speeches, Whitman's war poems; for all its imperfections and absurdities it is equal, in fact, to the best work that has been done in this country. And among moving pictures it is alone, not necessarily as "the greatest" -- whatever that means -- but as the one great epic, tragic film.
-James Agee
"Birth Of A Nation" was released in 1915. I don't think it's hyperbole to claim it is an impossible exercise in imagination to even begin to comprehend what the viewers would have felt watching a Griffith epic on an enormous flashing screen 100 years ago.
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40 years ago the Oscar Nominees for Best Picture were the following:
"One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest"
"Jaws"
"Nashville"
"Barry Lyndon"
"Dog Day Afternoon"
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My first passionate feelings towards cinema seemed to coincide precisely with the industry's mainstream decline. This was the Bush/Cheney, post-9/11 what-have-you and it seemed like a new cast of rich and slimy men were wielding power and destroying things from all corners. I went to movies occasionally, with friends, at some megaplex across from some megachurch. It just wasn't part of the culture, and it certainly still isn't, not really, at least not as a central cultural conversation like it seemed to be in the golden days, whatever that means.
So it's also impossible for me to imagine that movies like the ones up for best picture in the 1975-6 season were available for every kid in the country to feast on. These were the films the studios were willing to sling money towards. Similar ones seemed to be making an impact in Europe, so why not?
Studio bosses don't have the guts to take real chances on flicks these days. Cuz it's all about the loot, man.
Seriously how many more superhero movies can we endure? It's getting embarrassing just to see the incessant stream of commercials every week.
When I see one, I switch it off immediately and then wipe the sweat from my brow.
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In other news, the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra is 100 years old.
He's seen it all. From Griffith to "Antman" :
The Trap
During that time I kept out of circumstances that were too full of mystery
As people with stomach ailments avoid heavy meals,
I preferred to stay at home inquiring into certain questions
Concerning the propagation of spiders,
To which end I would shut myself up in the garden
And not show myself in public until late at night;
Or else, in shirt-sleeves, defiant,
I would hurl angry glances at the moon,
Trying to get rid of those bilious fancies
That cling like polyps to the human soul.
When I was alone I was completely self-possessed,
I went back and forth fully conscious of my actions
Or I would stretch out among the planks of the cellar
And dream, think up ways and means, resolve little emergency problems.
It was at that moment that i put into practice my famous method for interpreting dreams
Which consists in doing violence to oneself and then imagining what one would like,
Conjuring up scenes that I had worked our beforehand with the help of powers from other worlds.
In this manner I was able to obtain priceless information
Concerning a string of anxieties that afflict our being:
Foreign travel, erotic disorders, religious complexes.
But all precautions were inadequate,
Because, for reasons hard to set forth,
I began sliding automatically down a sort of inclined plane.
My soul lost altitude like a punctured balloon,
The instinct of self-preservation stopped functioning
And, deprived of my most essential prejudices,
I fell unavoidably into the telephone trap
Which sucks in everything around it, like a vacuum,
And with trembling hands I dialed that accursed number
Which even now I repeat automatically in my sleep.
Uncertainty and misery filled the seconds that followed,
While I, like a skeleton standing before that table from hell
Covered with yellow cretonne,
Waited for an answer from the other end of the world,
The other half of my being, imprisoned in a pit.
Those intermittent telephone noises
Worked on me like a dentist's drill,
They sank into my soul like needles shot from the sky
Until, when the moment itself arrived,
I started to sweat and to stammer feverishly,
My tongue like a veal steak
Obtruded between my being and her who was listening,
Like those black curtains that separate us from the dead.
I never wanted to conduct those over-intimate conversations
Which I myself provoked, just the same, in my stupid way,
My voice thick with desire, and electrically charged.
Hearing myself called by my first name
In that tone of forced familiarity
Filled me with a vague discomfort,
With anguished localized disturbances which I contrived to keep in check
With a hurried system of questions and answers
Which roused in her a state of pseudo-erotic effervescence
That eventually affected me as well
With a feeling of doom.
Then I'd make myself laugh and as a result fall into a state of mental prostration.
These ridiculous little chats went on for hours
Until the lady who ran the pension appeared behind the screen
Brusquely breaking off our stupid idyll.
Those contortions of a petitioner at the gates of heaven
And those catastrophes which so wore down my spirit
Did not stop altogether when I hung up
For usually we had agreed
To meet next day in a soda fountain
Or at the door of a church whose name I prefer to forget.
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