THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1914)

Before THE BIRTH OF A NATION Movies were seen in little fifty and one hundred seat shoe boxes at five cents a seat. They were called NICKLEODEONS.

D. W. Griffith four walled  (rented outright) New York’s Liberty Theater for the premiere of his film.

He charged the unheard of ticket price of $2.00 a seat (which would be $800 a seat today).

In so doing he single handedly lifted the movies from a novelty into the major art form of the 20th and, now, the 21st century.

No other film artist has taken his risk nor equaled his spectacular success.

The box office records set by modern day films do not take into account inflation. The prices we pay for contemporary films are closer to the five cents people paid yesterday.

And the great five thousand seat theaters of yesterday have been torn down.

In their place are once again shoe boxes.

Griffith’s greatest star, Miss Lillian Gish, left $8 million in the care of New York’s Museum of Modern Art to be given to the person who most advances the art of the cinema.

To advance a medium we have to take it forward from its highest point.

THE GLOBE AND MAIL, January 22, 1975.

In much the same way that trumpeter Louis Armstrong devised a new musical vocabulary that was to have massive influence on the playing of jazz, David Wark Griffith developed a new grammar of film that altered the art of making motion pictures. Indeed, it is doubtful whether it could have been called an art until Griffith, born 100 years ago today, began his remarkable explorations of its potential.

Film-making was pretty raw when Griffith came on the scene, consisting of little more than the stiff, fixed-position filming of stage plays. Griffith’s genius yielded ideas that are now commonplace —the closeup, fade-in and fade-out, the long shot, vista, back lighting, and tinting, among others—but which, like most other bold innovations, encountered much opposition.

However, comfortably within his lifetime (he died in 1948), there was broad recognition of the fact that under his guidance film had emerged as a medium of expression as distinct from the stage as it was from the world of literature. The late author and film critic James Agee summed up the wonder: “To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of a melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, co-ordination and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art: and to realize . . . this is . . . the work of one man.”

There is ample testimony to the soundness of Griffith’s instincts when it came to molding screen actors and actresses into movie stars. Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish are outstanding examples, and it can be added that it was Griffith who induced the famous Douglas Fairbanks to leave the stage for the screen.

In the course of a career that earned for him such grand accolades as “father of the film art” and “king of directors,” Griffith produced and directed almost 500 pictures costing $23-mil]ion and grossing about $80-million. At the time of his death, his most famous film, The Birth of A Nation, had earned more than $48-million.

This epic of the Civil War and the reconstruction period, heavily biased as it was, nevertheless had a majestic sweep to it and went a long way toward capturing the essential genius of the man. Many critics agree, however, that his 1916 film, Intolerance, was the Griffith masterpiece, though it fell far short of the popular acclaim showered on The Birth of A Nation.

Intolerance, on the same grand scale, wove four stories together (the complexity of the device seemed to bother the audiences of the day), each depicting an example of intolerance. Same idea of the scale of Griffith’s operation may be obtained from the fact that he used 16,000 extras in one scene.

It seems doubtful that we will ever see the like again. Griffith’s talents were unique—and no one today could afford 16,000 extras.

A VERY GREAT EXPERIENCE by Urjo Kareda (THE TORONTO DAILY STAR).

D. W. Griffith’s THE BIRTH OF A NATION is not only the oldest movie in town—made in 1914—but quite the best as well.

Seeing it again offers the chance not only for a reunion with an archetype but also for a return to the source beginnings of this century’s enchantment with the movies.

THE BIRTH OF A NATION is a tremendous, heroic, lyrical melodrama about the Civil War and the period of reconstruction. (It’s strange to think that when the film was made, there must have been many people who remembered that historical period just as people remember the 1920’s now.)

It is always difficult to come to grips with on old film which winds up on the wrong side of the political fence.

Of course the immediately notorious thing about THE BIRTH OF A NATION is its violently anti-Negro bias and its final hosanna of praise for the Ku Klux Klan. (It was based on Thomas Dixon’s novel THE CLANSMAN, and at the end of it is the Klan which rides in for the rescue).

Griffith’s film is immersed in technical innovations.

Nobody who has ever seen a major battle scene can fail to see the beginnings in Griffith’s extraordinary stagings, photographed (in part) aerially, at a lower angle than usual, in superb compositions of movement punctuated by clouds of smoke.

Nobody who as ever seen scenes of farewell can ignore the originality of Griffith’s version, in which the screen is alive with outstretched arms and crazily waving handkerchiefs.

No amount of frantic editing can match the excitement and genius of Griffith’s system of intercutting as his narrative reaches its climax.

Moving from roaming marauders to beleaguered victims to the advancing rescuers, the film moves forward with cumulative impulse and tension.

Griffith’s use of fragile, vibrant actresses—Lillian Gish and Mae Marsh in this film—remains very moving. The famous scene in which Miss Marsh welcomes her brother home from the war is as rending as anything ever put on celluloid.

They stand, staring at one another for an aching moment. Then sudden chatter (we can’t, of course, hear it, but can assume its triviality). He picks vaguely at some silly frills that she’s put on her dress, she goes to straighten his hat.

Pause; another aching moment. Suddenly with all the swiftness of human emotions, she is in his arms and weeping. She draws him into the house, and as they stand framed in the doorway, his mother’s hands are seen moving out to embrace him. The perfect scene ends.

THE BIRTH OF A NATION is filled with such treasures. Most of the sequences are very brief—a matter of seconds, usually—but they fuse almost subliminally to form a mosaic of illuminated moments in human achievements and personal destinies.

The film is a very great experience. Nobody interested at all in their own cultural history can afford to miss it.

D. W. Griffith

By Anthony Kenny

Every year in some erudite movie journal a critic, lucubrating at length, compounds the common assumption that D. W. Griffith was “the father of the movies”. That Griffith nursed the movies from their crude infancy into a complex, sensual art form is beyond dispute; But it’s also true that, apart from the technical innovations in camerawork-(like the use of the closeup and the long shot—there was something else and finer that he brought to movies, and that was a rebellious disbelief in horizons.

For Griffith, there wasn’t anything a screen couldn’t show-marvelous illusions contained inside this frame of a tiny lens jumping out at that callow audience with the kind of kinetic impact that even life itself couldn’t sustain-which led him tn 1916 to creating Intolerance and, in doing so, breaking every rule in the book.

He came to the movies purely by accident after countless one-night theatre stands spent in grandiloquent credence in himself as a great actor. It certainly didn’t pay, and the Biograph company in New York needed a hack to spin out their one-reelers for them. Griffith needed the money and took the Job. He showed an uncanny instinct for sating an audience’s appetite. During his five years there he kept churning out hits that were formulaic (mini Indians—and—settlers epics, saved-by-the-bell suspensers and mercilessly condensed literary classics like The Count of Monte Cristo); at the same time he was toying with camera, chancing a new effect here and there, broadening scope with location work and developing a stable of actors like Lillian Gish and Bobby Harron who would become the movies⁹ first repertory company.

That instinct of his for knowing an audience’s needs must have been acquired in those boondocks theatre tours, perhaps even more forcefully from his Southern childhood steeped in stories of Civil War heroes and legends. Inflamed with notions of greatness as an actor and finding no recognition, he plunged himself into writing plays.

The rhapsodists of Griffith’s work conveniently forget that he brought a hack’s sensibility to the movies and that he was more than incidentally conscious of just who went to see movies.

From slums, film

What distinguishes movies from any other art is that the movies were born in the slums: in the early 1900s they fed a great rush of illiterates, immigrants and considered Social ingrates who previously had no access to the. theatre economically or socially. They flocked to the nickelodeons for action, romance, violence, heartbreak,_:spectacle, laughter; and there was something very exciting about the immediacy with which all these needs were gratified. In a! movie theatre in 1910 one didn’t need a wine-taster’s nostrils to smell dozens of occupations as well as see them, (New York, by the way, because the movies didn’t make it to California until later when the sun and the lush verdancy lured a cast of thousands.)

Having gained some financial independence, Griffith left Biograph and went to work on his Civil War epic, The Birth of a Nation, which despite its racism made more money than any film up until that time. The racist, element still makes skins crawl but Griffith,, whose father was the head of the Ku Klux Klan, was equally appalled at the allegations and the outrage instigated by it. There even exists a theory that he made tntoferance~and its theme of “live and let live”—to clear his name, if not as outright contrition.

But Griffith was on to something much bigger than that: he wanted to make a movie more expansive in visual and emotional scale than anything else. Something to rival his Idol, the theatre producer Belasco. Throwing caution to a gale, he spent $2-million on a movie that juggled four separate plots and which was originally planned as a single movie called The Mother and the Law. His innovations reached a peak in Intolerance where a single theme thrust four stories into sometimes electrifying motion.

The four narratives-the fall of Babylon under Balshazzar, the story of Christ, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of the Hugenots in 16th-century France and the modern story {The Mother and the Law) of two lovers almost tragically separated by a frame-up-were cross-cut so deftly that Griffith was able to develop a single rhythm out of the four that rushed to a climax at the end of the picture.

He fell upon the idea-perhaps even accidentally-that intercutting four narratives could create continual suspense and a fleeting sense of living that surpassed even what words could do on paper. Watching Intolerance is like delirious speed-reading where chapter tumbles over chapter.

Intolerance is one of the messiest movies ever made. Especially in the cases of the Biblical story and the persecution of Brown Eyes, the Hugenot, the parts don’t quite mesh and, instead, there’s a sense of an intelligence behind it all winging it.

What interests Griffith most is the modern story of the Dear One (Mae Marsh) and the Boy (Bobby Harron) rent apart by the meddling of some temperance women. Marsh has her baby taken away from her and in a graphic, shivery scene she watches her baby through the windows of an institution while the camera lingers voyeuristically to allow the emotion the chance and time to transcend the banality of the melodrama,

Faces like songs

Griffith had a penchant for sentimentality and for adapting pre-sold melodrama, but he also had an instinct for pushing the camera and his actors to an extreme in close-ups where the tiniest facial movement registered like the notes of a song. It’s there in the courtroom scene where Harron is being sentenced to death and Marsh implores the judge for his life and hers. The genesis and gestation of despair travels across her face like shafts of light slowly being strangled by clouds.

Intolerance is about the denial of pleasure—the pleasure of sex, religion and thought. Paradoxically, the sensual dynamism of the sequences of images in the movie acts as an antidote to the suppression of pleasure. The movie gives it to us in heaps and it’s a great, gauche gallop into risk.

Quite rightly, much has been said and written about the power of the Babylonian battle scenes, the massacre of the Hugenots and the now-classic sequence where the car with Mae Marsh races the governor’s train to bring about a pardon for The Boy on the gallows. The shots of the car, the train and The Boy on the gallows build unbearably and unleash a tidal wave of emotion. The quieter moments though, resonate long after the virtuoso strokes of action. Like the scene after the Dear One’s father’s death where the camera draws away from Marsh and the sweetly dark-hued Harron walking into the sunlight in their turn of the century, clothes. That scene is a glimpse of forever because people, we assume, will walk away hand in hand after any massacre.

Life didn’t turn out so rosy for Griffith who, after movies like Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, Hearts of the World and Orphans of die Storm, lived the rest of his life in relative anonymity. Having built his own studio, Mamoroneck, and fallen prey to the vagaries of rapidly changing tastes, the promise of a comeback continued to haunt his waning alcoholic years.

Not long after Griffith’s successes (Intolerance was a financial failure) he was being acclaimed as “the Belasco of the Screen” and soon, “the Shakespeare of the Screen”.) The titles fed the delusions of grandeur he had whipped up into -illusions of grandeur on the screen. The hackwork and the genius are there in Intolerance. The pure spectacle of Balshazzar’s feast in the Babylon­ian sequence showed that, in movies, nobody had a bigger vision. What marked him an artist was his obvious and simple belief that it couldn’t really begin to compare with the spectacle of an emotion deeply felt.

Further reading:

O’Dell, Paul: Griffith and the Rise of Hollywood. A. S. Barnes, 1970.

‘Abe Lincoln’ Says D.W. was No Bigot

To the Editor:

I played the part of Abraham Lincoln in D. W. Griffith’s ‘The- Birth of a Nation,” and I say Griffith was not a bigot. The assertion made by Andrew Sardis in The Times on Jan. 19 that Griffith distorted history in “the outrageous ‘Birth of a Nation’” and that he was a man of “flagrant bigotry” is inaccurate and unfair.

When the film was first released, about 60 years ago, there was much controversy and debate about what was shown in the picture. But its most severe critics had to admit that, according to the accounts of reliable observers (who had first-hand experiences and were still alive at this time) and the reports of newsmen and writers of the Reconstruction Period, “The Birth of a Nation” was not a distortion of history. Now, over 100 years after Reconstruction, Griffith is called a bigot because he presented true events.–JOSEPH E. HENABERY, Tarzana, Calif.

David Wark Griffith by JAMES AGEE

He achieved what no other known man has ever achieved. To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever or the wheel; the emergence, coordination, and first eloquence of language; the birth of. an art: and to realize that this is all the work of one man.

We will never realize how good he really was until we have the chance to see his work as often as it deserves to be seen, to examine and enjoy it in detail as exact as his achievement. But even relying, as we mainly have to, on years-old memories, a good deal becomes clear.

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.

The most beautiful single shot I have seen in any movie is the battle charge in The Birth of a Nation. I have heard it praised for its realism, and that is deserved; but it is also far beyond realism. It seems to me to be a perfect realization of a collective dream of what the Civil War was like, as veterans might remember it fifty years later, or as children, fifty years later, might imagine it. I have had several clear mental images of that war, from almost as early as I can remember, and I didn’t have the luck to see The Birth of a Nation until I was in my early twenties; but when I saw that charge, it was merely the clarification, and corroboration, of one of those visions, and took its place among them immediately without seeming to be of a different kind or order. It is the perfection that I know of, of the tragic glory that is possible, or used to be possible, in war; or in war as the best in the spirit imagines or remembers it.

This is, I realize, mainly subjective; but it suggests to me the clearest and deepest aspect of Griffith’s genius: he was a great primitive poet, a man capable, as only great and primitive artists can be, of intuitively perceiving and perfecting the tremendous magical images that underlie the memory and imagination of entire peoples. If he had achieved this only once, and only for me, I could not feel that he was what I believe he is; but he created many such images, and I suspect that many people besides me have recognized them, on that deepest level that art can draw on, reach, and serve. There are many others in that one film: the homecoming of the defeated hero; the ride of the Clansmen: the rapist and his victim among the dark leaves; a glimpse of a war hospital; dead young soldiers after battle; the dark, slow movement of the Union army away from the camera, along a valley which is quartered strongly between hill-shadow and sunlight; all these and still others have a dreamlike absoluteness which, indeed, cradles and suffuses the whole film.

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.

(Today, The Birth of a Nation is boycotted or shown piecemeal; too many more or less well-meaning people still accuse Griffith of having made it an anti-Negro movie. At best, this is nonsense, and at worst, it is vicious nonsense. Even if it were an anti-Negro movie, a work of such quality should be shown, and shown whole. But the accusation is unjust. Griffith went to almost preposterous lengths to be fair to the Negroes as he understood them, and he understood them as a good type of Southerner does. I don’t entirely agree with him; nor can I be sure that the film wouldn’t cause trouble and misunderstanding, especially as advertised and exacerbated by contemporary abolitionists; but Griffith’s absolute desire to be fair, and understandable, is written all over the picture; so are degrees of understanding, honesty, and compassion far beyond the capacity of his accusers. So, of course, are the salient facts of the so-called Reconstruction years.)

Griffith never managed to equal The Birth of a Nation again, nor was he ever to strike off, in any other film, so many of those final images. Nevertheless, he found many: the strikers in Intolerance—the realism of those short scenes has never been surpassed, nor their shock and restiveness as an image of near-revolution; the intercutting, at the climax of that picture, between the climaxes of four parallel stories, like the swinging together of tremendous gongs; the paralyzing excitement of the melodrama near the waterfall in Way Down East; Paul Revere’s ride and the battle of Bunker Hill in America; Danton’s ride in Orphans of the Storm; most subtle and remarkable of all, the early morning scene in his German film, Isn’t Life Wonderful?, in which the apelike Dick Sutherland pursues Carol Dempster through a grove of slender trees. All these images, and so many others of Griffith’s, have a sort of crude sublimity which nobody else in movies has managed to achieve; this last one, like his images of our Civil War, seems to come out of the deep subconscious: it is an absolute and prophetic image of a nation and a people. I will always regret having missed Abraham Lincoln, his last film to be released: a friend has told me of its wonderful opening in stormy midwinter night woods, the camera bearing along toward the natal cabin; and that surely must have been one of Griffith’s finest images.

Even in Griffith’s best work there is enough that is poor, or foolish, or merely old-fashioned, so that one has to understand, if by no means forgive, those who laugh indiscriminately at his good work and his bad. (With all that “understanding,” I look forward to killing, someday, some specially happy giggler at the exquisite scene in which the veteran comes home in The Birth of a Nation.) But even his poorest work was never just bad. Whatever may be wrong with it, there is in every instant, so well as I can remember, the unique purity and vitality of birth or of a creature just born and first exerting its unprecedented, incredible strength; and there are, besides, Griffith’s overwhelming innocence and magnanimity of spirit; his moral and poetic earnestness; his joy in his work; and his splendid intuitiveness, directness, common sense, daring, and skill as an inventor and as an artist. Aside from his talent or genius as an inventor and artist, he was all heart; and ruinous as his excesses sometimes were in that respect, they were inseparable from his virtues, and small beside them. He was remarkably good, as a rule, in the whole middle range of feeling, but he was at his best just short of his excesses, and he tended in general to work out toward the dangerous edge. He was capable of realism that has never been beaten and he might, if he had been able to appreciate his powers as a realist, have found therein his growth and salvation. But he seems to have been a realist only by accident, hit-and-run; essentially, he was a poet He doesn’t appear ever to have realized one of the richest promises that movies hold, as the perfect medium for realism raised to the level of high poetry; nor, oddly enough, was he much of a dramatic poet. But in epic and lyrical and narrative visual poetry, I can think of nobody who has surpassed him, and of few to compare with him. And as a primitive tribal poet, combining something of the bard and the seer, he is beyond even Dovzhenko, and no others of their kind have worked in movies.

What he had above all, his ability as a craftsman and artist, would be hard enough—and quite unnecessary—to write of, if we had typical scenes before us, or within recent memory; since we have seen so little of his work in so many years, it is virtually impossible. I can remember very vividly his general spirit and manner—heroic,  impetuous, tender, magniloquent, naive, beyond the endowment or daring of anybody since; just as vividly, I can remember the total impression of various major sequences. By my remembrance, his images were nearly always a little larger and wilder than life. The frame was always full, spontaneous, and lively. He knew wonderfully well how to contrast and combine different intensities throughout an immense range of emotion, movement, shadow, and light. Much of the liveliness was not intrinsic to the characters on the screen or their predicament, but was his own vitality and emotion; and much of it—notably in the amazing flickering and vivacity of his women—came of his almost maniacal realization of the importance of expressive movement.

It seems to me entirely reasonable to infer, from the extraordinary power and endurance in the memory of certain scenes in their total effect, that he was as brilliant a master of design and cutting and form as he was a composer of frames and a director of feeling and motion. But I cannot clearly remember one sequence or scene, shot-by-shot and rhythm-by-rhythm. I suspect, for instance, that analysis would show that the climactic sequence on the icy river in Way Down East is as finely constructed a piece of melodramatic storytelling as any in movies. But I can only venture to bet on this and to suggest that that sequence, like a hundred others of Griffith’s, is eminently worth analysis.

My veneration for Griffith’s achievements is all the deeper when I realize what handicaps he worked against, how limited a man he was. He had no remarkable power of intellect, or delicateness of soul; no subtlety; little restraint; little if any “taste,” whether to help his work or harm it; Lord knows (and be thanked) no cleverness; no fundamental capacity, once he had achieved his first astonishing development, for change or growth. He wasn’t particularly observant of people; nor do his movies suggest that he understood them at all deeply. He had noble powers of imagination, but little of the intricacy of imagination that most good poets also have. His sense of comedy was pathetically crude and numb. He had an exorbitant appetite for violence, for cruelty, and for the Siamese twin of cruelty, a kind of obsessive tenderness which at its worst was all but nauseating. Much as he invented, his work was saturated in the style, the mannerisms, and the underlying assumptions and attitudes of the nineteenth-century provincial theater; and although much of that was much better than most of us realize, and any amount better than most of the styles and nonstyles we accept and praise, much of it was cheap and false, and all of it, good and bad, was dying when Griffith gave it a new lease on life, and in spite of that new lease, died soon after, and took him down with it I doubt that Griffith ever clearly knew the good from the bad in this theatricality; or, for that matter, clearly understood what was original in his work, and capable of almost unimaginably great development; and what was overderivative, essentially noncinematic, and dying. In any case, he did not manage to outgrow, or sufficiently to transform, enough in his style that was bad, or merely obsolescent

If what I hear is right about the opening scene in Abraham Lincoln, this incapacity for radical change may have slowed him up but never killed him as an artist; in his no longer fashionable way, he remained capable, and inspired. He was merely unadaptable and unemployable, like an old, sore, ardent individualist among contemporary progressives. Hollywood and, to a great extent, movies in general, grew down from him rather than up past him; audiences, and the whole eye and feeling of the world, have suffered the same degeneration; he didn’t have it in him to be amenable, even if he’d tried; and that was the end of him. Or quite possibly he was finished, as smaller men are not, as soon as he had reached the limit of his own powers of innovation, and began to realize he was only repeating himself. Certainly, anyhow, he was natural-born for the years of adventure and discovery, not for the inevitable following era of safe-playing and of fat consolidation of others’ gains.

His last movie, which was never even released,¹ was made fourteen or fifteen years ago [in 1931]; and for years before that, most people had thought of him as a has-been. Nobody would hire him; he had nothing to do. He lived too long, and that is one of few things that are sadder than dying too soon.

There is not a man working in movies, or a man who cares for them, who does not owe Griffith more than he owes anybody else.

¹ [Editor's note: Griffith's last film, The Struggle, opened at the Rivoli, New York City, December 10, 1931, proved very unsuccessful, and was withdrawn soon thereafter.]

From Agee on Film: Volume I by James Agee (New York: Grosset if Dunlap, Inc., 1958), pp. 313-18. Copyright 1948, © 1958 by James Agee Trust.

James Cameron never went to film school. Stanley Kubrick never took a day of schooling he could get out of. The great Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci said, “Film students should stay as far away from film schools and film teachers as they can. The only school for the cinema is the cinema. And the best cinema is the Paris Cinematheque.”(http://www.cinematheque.fr/).

The original Paris Cinematheque was in an old house in Paris. Its curator, Henri Langlois, showed his “students” everything he could. He learned early that good taste, not bad taste, is the enemy of life.

My programs in Toronto began in earnest in 1968 (the year of the Paris student riots) at Toronto’s legendary ROCHDALE COLLEGE where I served as Director Of Cinema Studies.

When Rochdale closed I used libraries, church halls, university spaces and bars until in 1992 an altercation at a bar up the street caused me to move the program here for what was supposed to be one night.

“We like this,” said the folks who came out.

“Good,” I replied, “This is where it will be.”

And this is where it has been.

And it has been and continues to be a very great pleasure to meet people who value these works as much as I do.–Reg Hartt.

THE FILM SCHOOL AT THE CINEFORUM, 463 Bathurst below College Across From The Beer Store. 416-603-6643. You may bring your own food and drink.

Saturday, January 30. 7pm: JOHN HERBERT’S FORTUNE AND MEN’S EYES (1971) Harvey Hart. http://thepassionatemoviegoer.blogspot.com/2008/03/tom-mccarthys-encore_07.html

Saturday, February 6, 13, 20, 27;

Reg Hartt Presents THE BEST OF THE SEX & VIOLENCE CARTOON FESTIVAL

Saturday, February 13, 20, 27. Reg Hartt: GILGAMESH (A Talk).

I discovered this story in 1980. I wrote my version of it in 1992 as an epic poem in free verse. I want to transcribe the poem to the screen as an animated silent film. The design will be simple. The art is to be like that of a child when they first start to draw.

The film will be seen with music provided by a large orchestra.

This project is to be self-funded (no government grants. That may be fine for those who accept them but the role of an artist is to be a witness against our time. It is not to be a mere entertainer nor is it to be someone who eats at table of the beast and criticizes his/her host. That is just bad manners).

The money for the project is to come from these programs. You can help by making a donation after the talks and events.

You will not be getting a tax receipt for your donation. You will be helping me create my first film.–Reg Hartt

Sunday, January 31

Happy National Gorilla Suit Day (http://www.cineforum.ca/?p=2254)

1pm: GORILLA SUITS DOCUMENTARY Created by Ron Hall.

2pm: KING KONG VS. GODZILLA (1962) Ishiro Honda . The original Japanese version. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Kong_vs._Godzilla

7pm Sunday, January 31. CASABLANCA (1942) Michael Curtiz. Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart. Yes, you have seen it but you have not seen in the place Brit artist Peter Moore describes as “the most perfect place on earth to see a movie.”

7pm, Monday, February 1. THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) D. W. Griffith.http://www.tvdays.com/stern.htm

7pm Tuesday, February 2. THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE (1921) Rex Ingram. Rudolph Valentino. Presented with a score created by Reg Hartt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Horsemen_of_the_Apocalypse_%28film%29

7pm Wednesday, February 3, 10, 17, 24 THE MICHAEL JACKSON TRIBUTE

7pm Thursday, February 4. Lone Wolf and Cub: White Heaven in Hell (1974)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Wolf_and_Cub

9pm Thursday, February 4 ZATOICHI IN DESPERATION (1972)

http://www.kungfucinema.com/zatoichi-24-zatoichi-in-desperation-1972-850

2pm February 7, Leo Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE (1968) Sergei Bondarchuk. 8 hours. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_Peace_%281968_film%29

7pm Monday, February 8, D. W. Griffith’s INTOLERANCE (1916) http://www.filmsite.org/into.html

7pm Tuesday, February 9 Robert Crumb’s FRITZ THE CAT (1972) Ralph Bakshi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_the_Cat_%28film%29

9pm Tuesday, February 9 Ralph Bakshi’s COONSKIN (1975) Ralph Bakshi.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coonskin_%28film%29

7pm Thursday, February 11, THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (1939) Sidney Lanfield. Basil Rathbone. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hound_of_the_Baskervilles_%281939_film%29

9pm Thursday, Feb. 11, ZATOICHI’S CONSPIRACY (1973) http://www.kungfucinema.com/zatoichi-25-zatoichis-conspiracy-1973-851

6 pm Sunday, February 14 Fritz Lang’s DR. MABUSE, THE GAMBLER (1922) (4 hours)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Mabuse_the_Gambler

7pm Monday, February 15 D. W. Griffith’s BROKEN BLOSSOMS (1919) http://www.filmsite.org/brok.html

9pm Monday, February 15 D. W. Griffith’s DREAM STREET (1921) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Street_%28film%29

7pm, Tuesday, February 16 GRIM NATWICK: THE FINEST ANIMATOR OF THEM ALL http://www.animationartist.com/InsideAnimation/DavidJohnson/InterviewNatwick.html

9pm Tuesday, February 16 Wakefield Poole’s BOYS IN THE SAND (1971) with Casey Donovan. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boys_in_the_Sand

7pm Thursday, February 18, THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (1939) Alfred Werker. Basil Rathbone. http://cinemaforever.com/CF_The_Adventures_of_Sherlock_Holmes_1939_rev.html

9pm Thursday, February 18, ZATOICHI: DARKNESS IS HIS ALLY (1989)

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/10065/zatoichi-darkness-is-his-ally/

7pm Sunday, February 21. Ray Bradbury’s IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953) Jack Arnold. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Came_from_Outer_Space

7pm Monday, February 22 D. W. Griffith’s ORPHANS OF THE STORM (1921) http://www.cinemaweb.com/silentfilm/21ootsto.htm

7pm, Tuesday, February 23 BOB CLAMPETT’S WICKEDEST ANIMATED CARTOONS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Clampett

9pm Tuesday, February 23 Wakefield Poole’s BIJOU (1972) http://lightindustry.org/bijou

7pm Thursday, February 25,

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (1959) Terrence Fisher. Peter Cushing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hound_of_the_Baskervilles_%281959_film%29

9pm Thursday, February 25 ZATOICHI (2003) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zat%C5%8Dichi_%282003_film%29

7pm Sunday, February 28, Abel Gance’s NAPOLEON (1927) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napol%C3%A9on_%281927_film%29

ZATOICHI: DARKNESS IS HIS ALLY

9pm: Hosted By Grey Coyote.

Fortune and Men’s Eyes (1971)

CAST: Wendell Burton, Michael Greer, Zooey Hall, Danny Freedman; DIRECTED BY: Harvey Hart; PRODUCER: Lewis Allen, Lester Persky, Donald Ginsberg MGM.

Presented With An Introduction By Reg Hartt: HOW JOHN HERBERT CHANGED MY LIFE FOR THE BETTER.

http://thepassionatemoviegoer.blogspot.com/2008/03/tom-mccarthys-encore_07.html

6 pm Sunday, February 14

http://www.leninimports.com/dr_mabause.html

Abel Gance's NAPOLEON

7pm Sunday, February 28.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoléon_(1927_film)

7pm Sunday, February 21.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Came_from_Outer_Space

IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE

2pm Sunday, February 7.

Shown With Intermissions.

Directed by    Sergei Bondarchuk
Produced by    Goskino
Mosfilm Studios
Written by    Leo Tolstoy (novel)
Sergei Bondarchuk
Vasili Solovyov
Starring    Ludmila Savelyeva
Vyacheslav Tikhonov
Sergei Bondarchuk
Music by    Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov
Distributed by    Kultur International Films
Mosfilm
Release date(s)    28 April 1968 (U.S.)
Running time    484 Min (4 parts)
Italy 263 Min
(2 parts)
UK:401 Min
(video version)
USA 390 Min
Country    Soviet Union
Language    Russian, some French
Budget    ~ $100,000,000 ($700,000,000 with inflation)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_and_Peace_(1968_film)

D. W. Griffith's ORPHANS OF THE STORM

7pm Monday, February 22.

http://www.und.edu/instruct/cjacobs/DWGriffith.html