Gone with the Wind Part 1

This post is part of The Film Experience's wonderful Hit Me With Your Best Shot series.

The 1939 film that my family watches is not The Wizard of Oz (which I love), but Gone With The Wind. It was one of the first English-to-Vietnamese literary translations that my mother read as a child, it was one of the first films my sister downloaded when she signed up for an iTunes account, and it is one of the very few 3hr+ movies that I can sit through in one sitting, even if the movie itself helpfully gives us an intermission break.

Perhaps this was because in our matriarchy of happily settled refugees in Australia, the story of the perseverance of Scarlett O'Hara during the civil war has more resonance than a girl who would rather return to boring Kansas than stay in the wonderful land of Oz. Perhaps we saw something real in the endurance of strong women during the struggles of war. In a similar way, my favourite shot for this first half is clearly this shot:

As a kid, for all the intriguing melodrama of Scarlett's love life, it was this shot that remained in my mind because it brought home the huge scale of the casualties of war. It was one of the very first images of war (fiction or otherwise) that I had seen, and it was a rude shock to see such realism amongst Scarlett's personal dramas.

The shot begins as a mid shot of Scarlett walking through the town and eventually zooms out to show all the wounded lying across the tracks. The sequence ends when the camera finds the Confederate's flag. I prefer this shot in the middle of the sequence because, as part of the slow zoom out, with the devastation of war building throughout the sequence,  there comes a point where, for me, I no longer want to see any more. But I also cannot turn away. I am reluctant for the camera to zoom out any further and reveal even more casualties. The relief comes when the zoom finally finishes and I see the tattered Confederate flag - there are no more dying men to see.

In today's cinematic landscape, we might see a similar zoom out that shows thousands of men fighting and dying, but we know that that is mostly CGI. There's a palpable realism to this shot, one that rises above the pretty dresses and interior soundstages that dominate the film and grounds the melodrama of the film within a real, resonant historical context.