These Amazing Shadows Page #9

in the middle still stands.

Of course it's funded by

the paint industry,

so they're trying to sell

house paint and saying...

"Hey, it's gonna help

you survive nuclear attack."

I mean, this is, you know...

This is a little weird.

The dingy house on the left,

the dirty and littered house on the right,

or the clean white house in the middle.

It is your choice.

The reward may be survival.

Every movie that is popular,

every movie that is popular,

captures...

something of the ideas

that were alive at the time.

And very often,

the ideas that they capture...

and that make them so acceptable

to the public are lies.

This is D.W. Griffith's film.

Essentially, Griffith,

right then and there,

invented a lot of the grammar of film.

Its aesthetic and historical significance

from the point of view of film

is beyond debate.

Its value as a portrayal

of American history...

is not at all beyond debate.

It is basically

a pro Ku Klux Klan view...

of what happened in the South.

I think The Birth of a Nation

really legitimized

the motion picture industry.

It was the first film to be shown

at legitimate Broadway theaters.

I think for the first time,

people realized almost

not only the power of the motion picture,

but also almost

the danger of the motion picture.

What it could accomplish.

Unfortunately...

all these innovative ideas...

were used to advance the notion...

of segregation, Jim Crow,

racism and racial bias.

It was a dangerous film and it caused...

a lot of personal harm to people...

after it came out during that time.

Birth of a Nation was propaganda,

you know, and it was slander,

but it's important to recognize.

I think by ignoring it

or by denying,

you know,

the existence of Birth of a Nation,

you're almost losing

a piece of cinema history.

So we'll find them in the end,

I promise you,

we'll find them.

Just as sure as the...

turning of the earth.

I know the generation of people

that saw The Searchers

when they were young

will never forget it.

It was essentially about a man,

played by John Wayne,

who comes to save a little girl

who has been kidnapped...

by an Indian tribe.

It's always the menacing music,

the menacing war paint...

that was assigned

to these characters.

Growing up,

if you look back at all the cowboy

and Indian stuff I watched as a kid,

why were we the heroes?

I didn't quite get that.

Took me a long time to realize that,

even when you played

cowboys and Indians with your friends.

Today, I'd want to be the Indian,

they're the rebels.

And I would be for the Indians

against the cowboys.

I saw The Searchers

with an American Indian

and I was unaware of the racism in the film

until I was sitting next to her and she...

just stormed out

at a certain scene in the movie.

And I went out to follow her,

I said, "What's going on'?"

She said, "Did you see the movie'?"

I said, "Yeah, I saw it."

"Well, did you see what happened?"

These are my people...

Go!

Go, Martin, please!

Stand aside, Martin.

So he was searching for her

so he could kill her,

so she

wouldn't have to live with them.

Because she was living a fate

worse than death.

It was very disturbing.

Ethan, no, you don't!

Stand aside.

I thought that was really...

something that I really

wouldn't want my daughter to look at.

It really helped...

create a persona...

about Indian people that

continues to this day.

The Exiles was made

about Native Americans...

living in Los Angeles in the 1950s,

in other words, Native Americans,

not out in the desert

or in the mountains,

in the kind of environment

that most people,

in cliched terms think of,

but trying to survive

in a brutal urban environment.

The Exiles really put kind of a face...

on Indian people at the time.

During that time period,

it was either relocation

or maybe the serving

in the armed services.

Where a lot of Indian people

left the reservations and...

came to cities

and met other Indian people.

It showed kind of the truth of living...

in an urban area

as far as the isolation,

depicted in the young woman.

She's always seen to be alone...

and longing for a better life.

Film very much is important

in depiction of a people.

Yo, what's your problem, man?

Y'all are brothers, you ain't

supposed to be fighting each other.

Little punk.

Get off my porch, mama's boy.

When Boyz in the Hood

as a document of its time,

it's a document of

what was going on in that time period.

You have to think, young brother,

about your future.

It gave a voice to...

to the voiceless.

Listen,

I want to do something with my life,

all right?

I want to be somebody.

The film, for me,

it's like my diary.

Ricky!

It was a cathartic thing for me to show

where I was from

and what I'd gone through.

Film is a reflection of...

the times of which we live in,

good or bad.

I was responsible

for pushing forward Birth of a Nation

into the Film Preservation Board.

That movie led to the deaths of

many, many black people...

through lynching,

through enacting laws, segregation,

through Jim Crow and everything.

But it really shows the power of film

and for evil as well as good.

When you watch a movie from the past,

you're involved in a dialogue.

A dialogue between past and present.

There's what's up on the screen

and then there's the person looking at it

and every person who looks at it

brings their own history

and finds their own value in it.

You look at every war

that we've been through

and whether it's a war that we won,

like the good war, World War II,

or a war we lost, like Vietnam,

a war like what's going on now

in Iraq and Afghanistan,

where we don't know

what the result is going to be...

the result is the same

on the people who fought it and...

I think that's

important for people to understand.

The best years of our lives

is about three G.L.S

returning from service to their hometown.

I enlisted in the Army Air Corps,

I was a bombardier in a B-17.

I was no hero,

but I was there, I did the job.

Naturally, it hit me particularly hard

when Dana Andrews

playing the bombardier goes out to...

a field where they're cocooning

old B-17 bombers,

and he approaches one

and climbs back up into it.

And the sound comes up

and the filmmaking

makes him experience a bombing raid.

And the sound is extraordinary.

That had a particular meaning

for anybody who was in a bomber.

Hey, you!

What're you doing in that airplane?

It had a great effect on me.

The movies create order

out of the chaos of our lives

and that's what this was.

I was the last person

that I ever would have thought...

would have gone to war.

I War scared me when I was young.

After I came back from Vietnam,

I gave away my uniforms,

I really put the whole thing behind me.

I just thought I could shut the door

and move on with my life.

I don't guess I spoke with another veteran

and or about my experience

for eight or nine years.

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes