my friend Peter prefers to see old films on tv, while his wife prefers only new films - he even has a huge recorded video collection (filling walls) of old films of the 60ies & 70ies - & while I visited them there was later in evening so often quarrel between them, because he wanted to find either a channel transforming an old film or showing one of his old videos, while his wife, moans, telling that she saw that film already twice or threetimes, while me as visitor want to stay relatively diplomatic & neutral.
I like old films - I like new films, depends on whether they're interesting enought to intrigue & fascinate me.
My friend Larine (she's 26) also refuses to watch any film in tv that is older than herself. She doesn't even know actors like Anthony Quinn, Jean Paul Belmondo or Dustin Hoffmann. - Does she know Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, Doris Day, Roman Polanski,Clint Eastwood, Sophia Loreen, Brigitte Bardot, Dean Martin, Steve McQueen, Klaus Kinski, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Omar Sharif, Geraldine Chaplin? - Does she know any actor of films older than 2 decades ago? - I doubt it!
So this evening I just zapped a bit between the channels (I'm not a zapper) - & stopped for a while on a channel where there was just a very old silent movie playing - which of course you see seldom enough in nowadays tv - I watched it for some minutes - black & white - some scene in maybe England in the beginning of last century - all actors theatralically moving & acting to make clear what the scene was about - with these cute framed text plates between to explain the scene, when silent acting seemed unintelligible..
scene changing to an old babylonian scene when Belsazer ruled & got threatened by king Cores of Persia..
I thought: "boring old film with probably no meaning.." & changed the channel - there was just another stupid flat 'new' action film - so after some second I zapped back to this silent movie - already a bit curious how it go on..
well & the more I saw the more it enthralled me. - Wow it was a great & intelligent story, told with that primitive picture language of that time - in fact it were 3 stories, told parallel - with clever cuts between the scenarios -
the third story was about the barbaric killing of the Huguenotes in France by Queen Catherine de Medici, known as the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre.
Later on I read in wikipedia about that film that it had 4 storylines - but I wouldn't count the sometimes switches to scenes with Jesus Christ, as a different storyline - they were just put in as parables to reflect scenes inside the other 3 stories..
it was a 2 hours long evening filling film - a sensation for that time (1917) - & told stories about injustness, prejudices, intolerance, treachery - this strange brew resulting in stupid escalations or violence, war & crime etc. - yes it was all a bit melodramatic - but it really must have been a great film in that time - European regisseurs later on copied a lot this new technique of cuts between storylines in a film..
By the way "Intolerance" was one of the most expensive films of that time (about 2 million $ which would mean more than 30 millions today) - the huge babylonian temple hall must have cost a fortune.
