Rebecca Mead on Breitbart’s “Empire of Bluster.” Read the whole thing and make up your own mind. An excerpt:

Conflict also has the useful function of driving traffic to his sites. Breitbart.com is currently looked at by an average of 2.4 million people a month, according to Quantcast.com.

Breitbart considers himself an accidental cultural warrior. “I am not as partisan as people think I am,” he told me, calling himself eighty-five per cent conservative and fifteen per cent libertarian. His conservatism fails him on issues such as the legalization of prostitution, and he sometimes tilts toward favoring gay marriage. “But, when the entire media is structured to attack conservatives and Republicans, there is a huge business model to come in and counterbalance that,” he said.

He does not pretend to be an expert in policy, or to be particularly interested in it. “Just because I am paying attention to politics and culture doesn’t mean that I should be talking about the health-care bill, talking about the minutiae,” he told me. Instead, Breitbart is obsessed with wresting control of the political narrative from the established media organizations. If the wire services that Breitbart aggregates, and the bloggers he recruits, serve as his content providers, then Breitbart might be called a malcontent provider—giving seething, sneering voice to what he characterizes as a silenced majority.

Their keystone attraction was Broken Blossoms (1919), a then sixty-year-old silent film. The Museum, as it happened, possessed the only “original tinted nitrate print” known to still exist in the world. This precious and brittle jewel would be projected at the Exposition for the last time, before being tucked away into temperature and humidity controlled storage (from then on, future screenings would use copies of the original). For its last hurrah, this ancient print would be accompanied by a full, live orchestra, like in the old days. And to cement the evening as a particularly notable occasion, the movie’s eighty-four-year-old star, Lillian Gish, “would be presented following the screening.”

To average 1978 filmgoers drunk on Star Wars, all this was doubtless of little significance. To others, the announcement carried momentous power. Broken Blossoms had been hailed in its time as a film of startling beauty, a virtual kaleidoscope of color and light and emotional resonance. But in the decades since, the only way to see it had been through degraded 16mm black-and-white dupe prints, with all of the film’s tinted luminance — and thus much of what made it so beautiful — lost. The chance to see the only remaining 35mm print with the original tints intact, accompanied by a full orchestra, and with the film’s sole surviving star in attendance — well, one’s twentieth viewing of Star Wars could wait.

New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was justifiably proud of bringing this rare print to Los Angeles. Their Department of Film was established in 1935, at a time when movies — powerful and popular as they were — were nevertheless seen as disposable. Most of the original silent studios were long gone, their archives sold off or destroyed. Any copies that remained were left moldering in ill-kept warehouses and collections scattered across the globe. Countless thousands of prints were tossed into the trash. Even those films lovingly collected and preserved by fans degenerated with each viewing until most became pale shadows of their former glory.

Iris Barry, a popular writer and movie critic from Great Britain, became the first curator of MoMA’s film department. It was her assertion that film was much more than entertainment, it was Art — the first utterly new art to come along in centuries. As such, it was important to preserve old motion pictures so that they could be “studied and enjoyed as any other one of the arts.” To that end, she embarked on an ambitious goal of saving as many old films as she could before it was too late.

To jumpstart the MoMA archive, Barry traveled to Hollywood and begged for cooperation from studios and filmmakers in preserving their own heritage. To her delight, most people proved only too happy to help. Silent-era stars, directors, and production wizards were still in town, and many kept old prints of their work squirreled away in garages and storage sheds.

There were setbacks, of course. Early nitrate prints easily decomposed in poor conditions, rotting away like unembalmed bodies, and many times MoMA’s archivists would open a prized film can only to find a rust-like powder caked within. But by the end of Barry’s stint at MoMA in 1951, she had saved thousands of titles, and her department was using new triacetate stock to make copies tough enough to survive into our modern era of computers and digitization.

For most of the movies that made up America’s early cinematic heritage, however, it was too late. Over 80% of all films from the silent era, some of them quite famous and revered in their day, have now vanished forever. We owe it to Iris Barry and the good people at MoMA that Broken Blossoms did not become one of those grim casualties.

Even so, celluloid is more durable than flesh, and by 1978 that fragile print of Broken Blossoms had outlasted almost all of its creators. The picture’s pioneering cinematographer, Billy Bitzer, was felled by a heart attack way back in 1944. Thomas Burke, author of the short story on which the film was based, followed Bitzer into Hades a year later. The movie’s legendary director, D. W. Griffith, succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage in 1948. One of the three stars, actor Richard Barthelmess, died in 1963. Another, Academy Award-winner Donald Crisp, lasted to the ripe old age of 91 in 1974. And between these last two came the death of Hendrik Sartov in 1970, the man whose experiments with diffusion glass popularized glamorous, soft-focus photography in Hollywood fare via Broken Blossoms.

Only the third star of the film, actress Lillian Gish, was left to represent the original filmmakers at the historic 1978 occasion.

On the day of the screening, almost 1400 people showed up. The issue of Variety for May 3, 1978 reports that the aged film only snapped a single time, necessitating a quick-splice repair job, and that at the end Lillian Gish received a standing ovation. “I am deeply moved by your applause,” she said to the assembly. “just as I was deeply moved by this film. It’s as if it had nothing to do with me. This film really had everything to do with a man named D. W. Griffith.” As usual, Gish was the essence of graciousness when thanking her long-dead mentor, a man for whose reputation and legacy she proselytized via books, interviews, and events such as this.

I wonder what that audience was thinking as it viewed that film in the dark, the print covered in scratches and the grime of decades, the actors engaged in a forgotten language of pantomime as frustrating to modern eyes as Shakespeare’s English is to modern ears. Actor James Mason aptly describes the typical silent movie effect in his narration for the epic 1980 documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film: “Jerky, flickering, a little absurd. Moving at the wrong speed, with that tinkling piano.”

Audiences of the distant past, though, saw the best silent movies as the height of entertainment and emotional engagement. Our great-grandparents experienced Broken Blossoms in opulent movie palaces glittering with gold fixtures and crystal chandeliers, and manned by armies of fresh-faced, well-trained ushers. In the best cases, a full orchestra was on hand to play along with the action, giving these pictures a splendorous sonic accompaniment rivaling today’s THX-certified digital systems. It was a major event and spectacle, the equivalent of getting dressed up today and attending the latest Andrew Lloyd Weber musical at a tony Broadway theater.

For most of us today, on the other hand, silent movies are too often chores to be slogged through, distant and old and more than a bit weird. And then there’s the distorting lens of political correctness to consider. A February 2, 2009 piece in The New Yorker by Anthony Lane announced a MoMA screening of Broken Blossoms this way:

D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, which screens at MoMA on Jan. 29, is ninety years old, and in some respects the film is looking its age. . . As for the printed titles, you don’t know whether to snicker at the late-Victorian moralizing or wince at the racial nomenclature. Yet there is something in the tenderness of the telling, and the grace of the compositions, that stills the urge to jeer.

Snicker? Wince? Jeer? Back in 1919, Broken Blossoms was hailed by critics writing for another big-city publication, The New York Tribune, as

The most beautiful motion picture we have ever seen or ever expect to see. . . For the last two years we have seen at least one picture a day, yet with Broken Blossoms we sat on the edge of our seat, one hand grasping the arm, the other crushing a wet handkerchief, and trembled and grew hysterical over what we saw before us.

This was hardly an isolated reaction. Audiences of the time describe being swept away by the cinematography, the music, the tragic Romeo and Juliet cast of the tale, the poetry of the title cards. Even a decade later, movie magazines were still calling it the “highest example of screen realism” the pictures had yet seen.

The disconnect between this view of the film and the one expressed in that 2009 issue of The New Yorker is enormous. Have we really changed so much? Are the overwhelmingly positive and heartfelt emotional reactions elicited by Broken Blossoms in 1919 impossible for us to ever experience or understand today? Is our only recourse to declare it racist/sexist/dated (“painfully dated,” according to Roger Ebert) and join critics in their “snickers,” “winces,” and “jeers”?

To find answers to these questions, we must hop into Big Hollywood’s Hot Tub Time Machine and journey with Lillian Gish way back to the year 1919, when the father of filmmaking was pushing this nascent craft as far as it would go, lifting “flickers” out of the crowded doldrums of cheap Saturday afternoon entertainment and into the realm of true art.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, the genesis of Broken Blossoms.

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Iris Barry 1895-1969. Some solid biographical information about this unsung hero of early film criticism and preservation.

Iris Barry at the British Film Institute website. A look at not only Barry, but the genesis of film criticism in England.

Oh, big city critics loved them some “Borat,” which spent 95% if its screen time manipulating, editing and boiling down average, working class, not-bothering-anyone Americans (and Romanian peasants) into the worst possible caricature imaginable. How they laughed and found genius and insight into the machinated savaging of everyday folks just minding their own business. But listen to some of them squeal and squawk now that the satire is turned on someone other than us. Here’s a sampling:

San Francisco Chronicle: 

Imagine if a white comedian went into the Deep South, disguised in a very convincing blackface and started acting like Stepin Fetchit.

Hollywood Reporter:  

Consequently, the character’s gayness reads false. Baron Cohen needs to spend more time in certain gay bars if he wants to learn how to do “flamboyant” and “fabulous.” It’s a ghost of the real thing.

The New Yorker: 

You can’t honestly defend your principled lampooning of homophobia when nine out of every ten images that you project onscreen comply with the most threadbare cartoons of gay behavior.

New York Post:

Not to get all PC on you, but the straight, outrageously dressed Baron Cohen camps it up in what has legitimately been criticized as swishy gay equivalent of blackface.

So here’s the lesson: Preying on unsuspecting everyday people, misleading them, manipulating them, pushing them until you get the reaction you desire and then editing them into something even worse, is a-okay. But… An obvious, over-the-top satire of gay men crosses the line.

As I said in my review, the only thing that mitigates the mean-spiritedness of “Bruno” is that, unlike “Borat,” everyone’s taking satiric fire. But now that the guffaws aren’t so one-sided, some aren’t guffawing so much. Worse, someone who isn’t gay lampooning flamboyantly gay men finds himself tarnished as a kind of “blackface” comedian. How interesting, when…

Everyday — on the big screen and small — we see Christians, Southerners, Republicans, Pro-lifers, Red Staters and the working class, ridiculed and savaged by actors who are none of those things. Where’s the cry of “blackface” then?

Baron Cohen is obviously a very talented actor, but there was nothing “brave,” “illuminating” or “ballsy” about “Borat.” Trashing the “great unwashed” is what’s known as a resume enhancer in Hollywood and Manhattan — about as “ballsy” as bringing beer to a frat party. ”Bruno,” on the other hand, actually is somewhat brave for risking charges of “insensitivity” (and worse) from the usual suspects.   

Maybe this is just the beginning for Baron Cohen, maybe he’s working his way towards something truly “fresh” and “brave” … something where he sends a Christian into a GLAAD meeting, a cowboy into a La Raza gathering… We’ll see what happens to a parked car with a “NObama” sticker at NYU or MSNBC, or to a screenwriter pitching a pro-Bush script at a Hollywood studio… Better yet, a Berkeley student with a Palin t-shirt, or a white South African running for elected office in a Democrat primary as an “African-American.”

Now that truly would be an ”illuminating” look at American prejudices, and one that required much less editing than “Borat” to make its subjects look bad. But maybe that’s just my prejudice talking.

First, though, they have to acknowledge that Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, John Murtha, Dick Durbin, Charles Rangel, Harry Reid and Charles Schumer, are not moderates, but, rather, leftists with a Socialist agenda.  Furthermore, they must recognize that the New York Times, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, CNN, the three major networks, the news magazines and the New Yorker, are not objective in their reporting of political events, and neither are Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Bill Maher, in their commentary.  If these entities and individuals are not on the payroll of the DNC, they certainly should be.  They certainly put in longer hours than Howard Dean.

Step #1:  It is high time that every American be guaranteed the right to speak freely.  It is not reserved solely for left-wing college students who wish to take advantage of the first amendment to shout down conservatives.  At the same time, they must not construe the conservative’s right to dismiss them as arrogant idiots as censorship.

Step #2:  Affirmative action argues that African Americans and Latinos are intellectually inferior and are unable to compete academically unless other students are handicapped because of their race.  Interestingly enough, when blacks and Hispanic students are given these unfair advantages, it’s rarely at any cost to white students, whose rate of college admissions remains constant; instead, it’s nearly always another minority group, Asians, who pay the price.  This is what left-wingers refer to as leveling the playing field.

Step #3:  Liberals always claim to be in favor of higher taxes, agreeing with Bill Clinton that the government invariably spends money more wisely than those who actually earn it.  However, such prominent proponents of higher taxes as George Soros, Ted Kennedy and Mr. and Mrs. John Kerry, protect their own otherwise taxable income through trusts and offshore accounts.  Obviously, any American who believes higher taxes are a good thing can do the honorable thing by spurning all deductions and paying Uncle Sam everything up to 100% of his income.

Step #4:  Even the most secular of liberals seems to believe that Jimmy Carter is a saint.  The evidence for this seems to be that he has on occasion posed with a hammer in his hand at Habitat for Humanity building sites and is constantly walking around with a expression on his face that suggests he has just forgiven Pontius Pilate for betraying him.  This is the same fellow, let us never forget, who called Yasser Arafat his good friend and who has accepted untold millions of dollars from Arab cut-throats, who ask nothing in return except that he go on insisting that there would be peace in the Middle East if only those darn Israelis would disappear from the face of the earth.

Step #5:  Stop insisting that all wars are bad.  It only makes you sound daft.  Carrying signs that equate a U.S. president, any U.S. president, with Adolph Hitler is not only rude, but suggests you’re certifiably nuts.  Every president has left office right on schedule.  Aside from FDR, who just happened to get elected four times, not one of them has remained in office beyond eight years.  On the other hand, Hitler ran Germany for 12 years and only death and the allied forces brought that to an end; Stalin ran the Soviet show for 31 years; while that hero of the left, Fidel Castro, held the reins, not to mention the whip, for about 50 years.

Step #6: Repeat after me, “Separation of church and state” exists nowhere in the Constitution.  The first amendment does not require the removal of Christmas trees from the village green, the 10 Commandments from courthouse walls or “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance.  All it does is forbid Congress from establishing a state religion, such as the Church of England, and anybody who tells you otherwise is a liar and, most likely, a card-carrying member of the ACLU.

Step #7:  Stop using the word “big” as a pejorative.  There is nothing intrinsically bad about big oil, big agriculture or big pharmaceuticals.  Overall, they do a very good job of keeping our cars on the road, food on our tables and most of us over 60 alive and functioning.  On the other hand, big government, which so many liberals simply adore, represents a usurpation of the allegedly inalienable rights of individuals.  A quick perusal of the Constitution should convince you that beyond declaring war, forging treaties, overseeing patents, printing money, running the post office, collecting taxes and protecting our borders — and a few other things that Washington doesn’t do at all well these days — the federal government has very limited responsibilities.

Step #8: Acknowledge that the United Nations is, in the main, an aggregation of venal diplomats who live high off the hog in New York City while representing the most corrupt and vicious regimes in the history of the world.  Only a fool or a diplomat would continue to suggest that this gang of well-dressed thugs possesses anything resembling moral authority.

Step #9:  Do not keep insisting that at a time when nearly all the large scale evil in the world is being perpetrated by Muslims that racial profiling is anything but a sensible approach to airport security.  During WWII, Swedish Americans were not suspected of performing espionage for the Axis powers and for a very good reason; namely, because they weren’t performing espionage for the Axis powers.  These days, their Swedish American children and grandchildren are not suspected of trying to blow up airlines, but the smarmy bureaucrats insist on pretending that they’re every bit as likely to be up to mischief as a bunch of 25-year-old Osama bin Laden look-alikes from Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Step #10: Stop trying to pretend that illegal aliens are the same as legal immigrants just so you can claim the moral high ground and accuse those of us who are opposed to open borders of being racists.

Step #11:  Once and for all, stop forgiving murderers.  Whether or not you’re in favor of capital punishment, only the victim of a crime has the right to grant forgiveness.  And inasmuch as the killer has deprived his victim of that ability, don’t take it upon yourself.  It doesn’t prove how compassionate you are, only that you’re as sanctimonious and as self-aggrandizing as, say, Jimmy Carter.

Step #12:  Stop bashing the U.S. military and the Boy Scouts.  The only reason you have the ability to shoot your mouth off is because men and women braver and better than you sacrificed life and limb for your right to do so.  As for the Boy Scouts, they are absolutely right to keep homosexuals from taking youngsters on camping trips.  While it’s true that many gays are perfectly fine people and that very few homosexuals are pedophiles, there’s no reason on earth to take unnecessary risks just so we can all prove how broadminded we are.  For what it’s worth, as decent as most Catholic priests are, I wouldn’t let them take youngsters into the woods, either.  It’s fine to be compassionate and understanding, but let the gays among us be understanding for a change and acknowledge that, every so often, common sense should trump political correctness.

And, finally, making this a baker’s dozen, Step #13:  Let us all agree that while being a woman, a black, a Jew, a Catholic, a Mormon or even a gay, for that matter, should in no way preclude anyone from being elected president of the United States, none of those things constitutes a very good reason to vote for someone.