To Feel a City Seethe as Modernity Is Born (3)
Though "Gangs of New York" throws in its lot with the rabble rather than the aristocracy, it shares with "Senso" (and also with "The Leopard," Visconti's 1965 masterpiece) a feeling that the past, so full of ambiguity and complexity, of barbarism and nobility, continues to send its aftershocks into the present. It shows us a world on the brink of vanishing and manages to mourn that world without doubting the inevitability or the justice of its fate.
"America was born in the streets," the posters for "Gangs" proclaim. Later, Amsterdam Vallon, in the aftermath of the draft riots, muses that "our great city was born in blood and tribulation." Nobody as steeped in film history as Mr. Scorsese could offer such a metaphor without conjuring the memory of D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," and Griffith, along with John Ford and others, is one of the targets of Mr. Scorsese's revisionism.
In Griffith's film, adapted from "The Clansman," a best-selling novel by Thomas Dixon, the American republic was reborn after Reconstruction, when the native-born whites of the North and South overcame their sectional differences in the name of racial supremacy. Ford's myth of American origins — which involved the subjugation of the frontier and the equivocal replacement of antique honor by modern justice — also typically took place after the Civil War.
In "Gangs," which opens nationwide today, the pivotal event in our history is the riot that convulsed New York in July of 1863. While this emphasis places the immigrant urban working class at the center of the American story — a fairly radical notion in itself — the film hardly sentimentalizes the insurrection, which was both a revolt against local and federal authority and a vicious massacre of the black citizens of New York.
The rioters are seen as exploited, oppressed and destined to be cannon fodder in a war they barely understand, but they are far from heroic, and the violence of the riots makes the film's opening gang battle seem quaint and decorous. What we are witnessing is the eclipse of warlordism and the catastrophic birth of a modern society. Like the old order, the new one is riven by class resentment, racism and political hypocrisy, attributes that change their form at every stage of history but that seem to be as embedded in human nature as the capacity for decency, solidarity and courage.
This is historical filmmaking without the balm of right-thinking ideology, either liberal or conservative. Mr. Scorsese's bravery and integrity in advancing this vision can hardly be underestimated.
This movie was a long time in the making, but its life has barely begun. Now that the industry gossip about it has subsided, let us hope that a more substantial discussion can start. People who care about American history, professionally and otherwise, will no doubt weigh in on the accuracy of its particulars and the validity of its interpretation; they will also, I hope, revisit some of their own suppositions in light of its unsparing and uncompromised imagining of the past. I said earlier that "Gangs of New York" is nearly a great movie. I suspect that, over time, it will make up the distance.
文章定位：
