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depression.
The Crowd is an American silent movie praised for being one of the last of
its genre of silence but yet the only one to be as realistic as the real life of
an American couple and their visions of family, everyday life and the way
they deal with troubles that normal people usually would. It brings on to
the screen a sense of reality that was never before seen if we consider the
fact that no other American Hollywood-ish movie had ever shown a toilet
in a bathroom scene before amongst other moments of the story that
basically is an essay of the normal American life without the language of
the flourishing melodrama or passion that poured through the movies of
the times. We have a man and his family making his life and living it, not
the way he wanted but in the best way he can with the given
circumstances.
The Crowd meets the American with a shove of reality within the story of
its caracters, but also brings on a language to cinema that could have been
lost or ignored because of the new ideas of sound-screening format movies.
But the uniqueness of this pelicula comes when Vidor, its Director, chooses
to hide cameras in the location where the shoots happened bringing
beyond vivid experience of film-making to viewers combining such shoots
with natural and fluid camera movements.
To analyze the contents of the movie and reactions of viewers across
America, it is important to remember, first, that Hollywood, cinema and all
media in general are made for entertainment and the best to entertain
people would be to bring them out of their realities, to give them something
to hope for, better days, or a love Huxley said:
The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be
found among those who appear to be most normal."Many
of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to
our mode of existence, because their human voice has
been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even
struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic
does." They are normal not in what may be called the
absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in
relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect
adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their
mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal
people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they
were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.
Referncias:
HUXLEY, Aldous. Brave New World.
DIKS, Tim. Filmsite http://www.filmsite.org/crow.html