Gone With The Wind

David O Selznick's (Fleming, Wood, Cukor) 1939..... well, film
This film is pretty insane. Though the direction isn't. It is though elegantly and well done. In not much depth, staging or camera, we have shot-reverse, but also a lot of shots keeping the interlocurs close together. The general plan is flicking between this and much, much wider shots. Some of these are fine images (apart from the sets, even). The camera movements are often pans to the side, but there are also a few lovely flowing, presumably some kind of crane shots, down the ever present staircases. Mention should also go to some impressive, in not being overdone, track-ins (not zooms?) up to the face. This classic melodrama trick is really pulled off to perfection here; the trick itself, though obviously not the narrative, stays the right side of hokey.
And then there is the rest of the image. We have the absolutely mad technicolour, the mattes and backdrops, in their fiery colours. The reds, and the still terrific burning Georgia. We also have the wonderfully huge staircases, in the emptying mansions. Not only the sweeping moves down, but the general set-pieces. This couldn't help, at times, to make one think of Kane; the huge sweep of a life, the kind of alienation involved.
Lighting is generally the epitome of Hollywood golden age; soft to an absolutely unnaturalistic degree. Also not how many of the romantic scenes often to light from behind, so even with the fill what we actually see is largely in shadow.
The memorbale lines with the script add to a slight predictability about that part at times, though generally it is very good.
It is difficult not to, and has surely been done thousands of times, cross this film with 'Birth Of A Nation'. I would suggest the differences are largely cosmetic. The same atmosphere and structuring principles of domination, nastiness, and oppression stink up this film, for all its attempts to get out of it. 'Birth Of A Nation', in its vile character, foregrounds its racism. 'Gone With The Wind' lets it sink into the background; it makes the earlier film seem backward in that 'Birth...' hadn't yet had the amnesia, wasn't yet too under the thumb of a diseased consciousness to be able to completely forget its own roots in exploitation. One bizarre aspect of the race question here is how it keeps popping up, where it least 'should'. This film is right to be taken apart for ideological symptoms. The suggestion of the women as slaves is walked into, seemingly by accident, and this films relentless logic. Themes of oppression, domination, violence, are present throughout, always displaced.
While the first half to two thirds is directly comparable to 'Birth', it comes out as a melodrama, and a pretty insane one at that. The script, narrative structure, and acting is well done that this takes on a special sort of quality; ridiculous, silly, but in its deliriousness extremely powerful. It seems almost like a compilation, chucking on all the most extreme, 'turned to the max', emotional moments, one after the other, until they start dropping like flies. The themes don't stint; there is some nasty sexual violence from nearly all concerned, duplicity, a cyncialness about the central 'romance' (is it even a romance), and other miseries. These form the strangest multicoloured meal.
This film is so huge it contains many surprises (not least the end). The gothic element, the almost Soviet valoriaztion of the worker combined with a fascist soil-love, turns at one point into a strange Southern gothicism, shadows and all, and washed out greys of the land. The relations to everything, to the homestead, the concept of 'love', each other, are absolutely contradictory. This film's relentless logic, its refusal to compromise in any area, make it frankly pretty weird, as it accidentally displays the truth in so much that often seems opaque, shy.
Ultimately, I would take 'Birth' over this for the quality of filmmaking any day. The structure of that is better, the images frankly more exciting, varied, and simply more beautiful. The mis-en-scene here is a little wooden and staid in comparison. This film can be resisted, and I would say it must be ideologically; but it can't be denied as a kind of gazumping force, where so much of what is powerful turns into its opposite, and back into terror.