--- Charles Brown <CharlesB at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us>
wrote:
> David Lynch
> Date: Mon, 04 Mar 2002 05:57:43 +0000
> From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com>
>
> >
> >CB: What's to like about a bad message in beautiful
> form ? A piece of shit
> >wrapped in a pretty ribbon is still a piece of
> shit, innit ?
> >
>
> No. There is no worse message than Griffith's The
> Birth of a Nation or
> Riefenstahl's The Triumph of Will, but they are
> great films. You assume that
> there is a neat form/content distinction to be made,
> but this applies least
> of all in works of art, where form is to a great
> extent content.
>
> jks
>
> ^^^^^^6
>
> CB: No they are not. They are horrible films. I
> don't assume any neat distinction. I just say that
> the promotion of KKKism destroys the "greatness" of
> the movie. A piece of shit wrapped in a pretty
> ribbon is not "great" at all.
Well, Charles, I certainly agree with you that when I think of these films, "horrible" is the first thing that comes to mind. However, having said that we could admit that they are (or are not) great from a technical point of view.
Take a film like "Gone with the Wind" or a poem by John Crowe Ransom. The first is an interesting, captivating film/story and Ransom wrote some very lovely poetry...but they both romanticized about the Old South. So are we just to think that they are "horrible" and not consider them in their complexity?
Thomas
>
===== "The tradition of all the dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living"
-Karl Marx
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