hce_nthu
115年
英文
第 32 題
📖 題組：
Though The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) was the first film he ever made, Pare Lorentz came to it with a strong belief in the persuasive power of cinema and its ability to make people face up to reality. As a film critic and co-author of Censored: The Private Life of the Movies (1930), he had frequently indicted Hollywood for “censoring” the public’s access to information about “tough contemporary facts”. Thus, when the Resettlement Administration (RA) asked him to make Americans aware of the necessity of its programmes, he leapt at the chance and convinced Rex Tugwell of the need, not for short public information films but for a new kind of “dramatic/informational/persuasive movie” that would be “worthy of commercial distribution”. By 1934, the Dust Bowl extended from Texas to North Dakota, with reports that over 180 million acres had already been ruined for agricultural cultivation and that a further 775 million were at risk. Lorentz had already proposed a film about the appalling cost of this situation to Hollywood. Having been rebuffed, he only became more determined to use the RA’s support to command the public’s attention. As many film historians have noted, he succeeded in producing a **seminal** film, both “politically committed and aesthetically ambitious”, that shaped the American documentary tradition. Presenting The Plow as “a record of the land” and “a picturization of what we did with it”, the prologue immediately conveys a sense of collective national guilt. Each section is carefully orchestrated, with poetic narration delivered by operatic singer Thomas Chalmers and visuals edited to Virgil Thomson’s musical score to unite the film as a lyrical whole. Idyllic shots of tall waving grass show “the richness of the western plain lands before their abuse”, and serve as the measure of the ensuing disaster. Homesteaders, farmers and the frenzy of mechanized harvesting prompted by the agricultural profits available during the First World War, contribute in turn to an ever-expanding exploitation of the land. A dramatic montage juxtaposing tractors on the home front with tanks on the Western Front foreshadow the destruction which Lorentz soon marks with images of dead animals and bleached bones on parched, depleted soil. His most powerful footage, however, is of the violent dust storms themselves, blocking out the sun, bringing the terror of the “black blizzards” to “millions who had only read about what was happening far away on the Great Plains.”
Though The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) was the first film he ever made, Pare Lorentz came to it with a strong belief in the persuasive power of cinema and its ability to make people face up to reality. As a film critic and co-author of Censored: The Private Life of the Movies (1930), he had frequently indicted Hollywood for “censoring” the public’s access to information about “tough contemporary facts”. Thus, when the Resettlement Administration (RA) asked him to make Americans aware of the necessity of its programmes, he leapt at the chance and convinced Rex Tugwell of the need, not for short public information films but for a new kind of “dramatic/informational/persuasive movie” that would be “worthy of commercial distribution”. By 1934, the Dust Bowl extended from Texas to North Dakota, with reports that over 180 million acres had already been ruined for agricultural cultivation and that a further 775 million were at risk. Lorentz had already proposed a film about the appalling cost of this situation to Hollywood. Having been rebuffed, he only became more determined to use the RA’s support to command the public’s attention. As many film historians have noted, he succeeded in producing a **seminal** film, both “politically committed and aesthetically ambitious”, that shaped the American documentary tradition. Presenting The Plow as “a record of the land” and “a picturization of what we did with it”, the prologue immediately conveys a sense of collective national guilt. Each section is carefully orchestrated, with poetic narration delivered by operatic singer Thomas Chalmers and visuals edited to Virgil Thomson’s musical score to unite the film as a lyrical whole. Idyllic shots of tall waving grass show “the richness of the western plain lands before their abuse”, and serve as the measure of the ensuing disaster. Homesteaders, farmers and the frenzy of mechanized harvesting prompted by the agricultural profits available during the First World War, contribute in turn to an ever-expanding exploitation of the land. A dramatic montage juxtaposing tractors on the home front with tanks on the Western Front foreshadow the destruction which Lorentz soon marks with images of dead animals and bleached bones on parched, depleted soil. His most powerful footage, however, is of the violent dust storms themselves, blocking out the sun, bringing the terror of the “black blizzards” to “millions who had only read about what was happening far away on the Great Plains.”
32. According to the author, Lorentz’s dramatic montage that juxtaposed tractors on the home front with tanks on the Western Front
- A was a protest against the First World War.
- B signaled the ruination of the land.
- C celebrated the agricultural profits available during the First World War.
- D celebrated the mechanized harvesting
- E was preceded by images of dead animals and bleached bones on parched, depleted soil.
思路引導 VIP
在影片中，導演故意把用來耕田的「耕耘機」和戰場上的「戰車」剪輯在一起。請思考看看：戰車通常代表什麼樣的後果？而當導演把這兩者畫上等號時，他想暗示當時的大規模機械化耕作，對大自然會造成什麼樣的影響呢？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
影像隱喻與環境警示
太棒了！你能精準選出 (B)，代表你對文章中「影像隱喻」的對比邏輯掌握得非常透徹。這題的核心在於理解導演洛倫茨（Lorentz）如何利用視覺對接（montage）來傳達抽象意涵。文中提到，他將「後方的耕耘機（tractors）」與「前線的戰車（tanks）」並列，其目的在於預示（foreshadow）後續的破壞。既然戰車象徵戰爭的毀滅，那麼將耕耘機與之類比，便是暗示當時過度開發、機械化的耕作模式，本質上對土地也是一種「毀滅性的打擊」，因此這組蒙太奇鏡頭正是在預告土地的荒廢與毀滅。
文本邏輯與細節辨析
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