The Birth of a Nation

I am a Ph.D. candidate in American History. I show BOAN (as does most American history professors) to my undergrads. Not only is it an accurate portrait of the propaganda being written in the 1870s, but it is a primary source document on how people in the 1870s and 1910s saw African Americans. Anyone wonder why the Civil Rights movement happened, or why lynchings happened, or why ML King, Jr.was assassinated? Well, watch BOAN and you'll get an insight into that most American of institutions, racism. Why is there racial hatred today, because of the rhetoric of hate by the people who made BOAN and the people who are depicted in it. If they affect you still, shouldn't know what they said? Especially if you find it abhorrent, watch it. It is also a good reminder of how distorted history can be made to look legitimate on celluloid.

The first half of this movie, if sold as a finished product by itself, would be remembered alongside movies like The Jazz Singer. A technical landmark that mostly holds up but is held back by some cringe-inducing elements of the time. The reality is that Birth of a Nation keeps going after the assassination of Lincoln. And in the second half, the intent of the film becomes one with the text and the reality of what you're watching becomes impossible to ignore. D. W. Griffith has famously claimed that he had no ill intent in making the movie, but after having seen it, Griffith was either lying or so monumentally blind to his own prejudices that he should never have been allowed out of the house.

This movie is not anti-Union, it is not pro-Antebellum south. It is anti-Black. The movie frames the ending of slavery as the beginning of the end for civilized society in the south, brought about by a conspiracy of carpet-baggers and scheming mulattos and blacks. The answers to this issue are redemptive violence by the Klu Klux Klan and a return to the master-servant relationship of slavery. The movie frames "the loyal soul" blacks who accepted their ownership and didn't want slavery to end as the redeemable memebers, while those that welcomed the end of slavery did so entirely to then turn that systemic violence back against the whites.

I genuinely do not believe that you can understand how malicious and hateful this movie is if you haven't seen it. One can have it described to them, one can know the individual scenes of hatred within, but until one has experienced the slow, pernicious leaking of racial hatred firsthand, it can't sink in how contemptible this movie is.

Technically important? Yes, nobody is denying that. Even as the movie's message becomes more and more evil, it is shot with a competency and ambition that it would take the rest of the industry decades to catch up to. It is worthy of preservation in that regard. But it is also entirely indicitave of the era that a movie which makes such strides (and was the first film to see great success in America and be played in the white house) is a movie which frames the idea of a white man being expected to shake a black man's hand as an indignity which exceeds lynchings and enslavement.

I don't think there's ever been a more maligned phrase than "politically correct" out there; the words immediately evoke a kind of liberal pseudo-fascism that some would have you believe is dominating freedom of speech and thought around universities and media outlets everywhere. I'm not so sure about that, but I am concerned at the counter-trend, of things that are labeled politically incorrect now proudly sporting that label as if they were a rebel, a David fighting these psedo-fascist Goliaths. That is hardly the case. D.W. Griffith's movie, far from being a politically incorrect movie unfairly condemned by the liberal elite, was a movie that perpetuated and, to a certain extent, created a Southern Myth that was damning to black people all throughout the country. The scary bit about this movie is not that it is one voice amoung many giving a personal recount of reconstruction. The movie is not presented that way, nor was it received that way. Until the 1960s, this movie WAS the commonplace, everyday understanding of reconstruction, understood by both Northerners and Southerners (aside: notice how the movie intentionately put as much distance between Northerners and Southerners as possible? The enemy is blacks and "radicals" (who were nothing of the sort), not Lincoln or the union soldiers. The movie was trying to appeal to a Northern audience).

Anyone who ever complains about the political correctness or historical "revisionism" of today's academics, see this movie. And understand, that it is the work of historical "revisionists" that are responsible for teaching the facts about our nation's history, grasped out of the hands of fictions like Griffith's horrific Birth of a Nation. And don't be so smug about complaining of political correctness in the future.

And don't try to seperate this film as an artistic work with the historical perspective of the film. Keep in mind, this film was not only a portrayl of history, it was also a *part* of history. It served to defend racial segregation, lychings, and the Klan at a time when all three of those were very real political issues. It is not a coincidence that the greatest period of lychings and Jim Crow laws came shortly after this movie. In short, this film oppressed people. So don't treat it like it existed in an entertainment vacuum, unaffected by and unaffecting everything else around it.

I saw this film at a small "Art House" theatre when I was a graduate student. It was supported by program notes, and reviews of the film by respected critics, these stressed Griffith was a trend setting director who had made significant contributions to modern cinema. I remember three major developments were attributed directly to him, firstly his use of a mobile camera for tracking rather than bringing events to the camera; secondly pioneering the use of close-up photography in the cinema and thirdly the incorporation of pseudo-documentary sequences (e.g. the assassination of Lincoln) into a fictional story. I therefore watched this film with great anticipation; but as something of a young idealist I was more and more sickened by what I then felt was glorification of the KKK, and afterwards I was bitterly disappointed by my evening. I decided that if I ever watched TBOAN again it would only be when I was better informed both about American history of the period and about the work of other contemporary Hollywood film-makers. It is now 60 years later and I see "The Birth of A Nation" is scheduled to be screened on TCM next month, so probably the time has come to watch it again; and perhaps comments based on my original viewing so long ago may be appropriate at this time as the impressions I now have of this film will be those that have been with me for most of my life.

Films showing conflicts must present both sides as believing utterly in the righteousness of their cause; but historical films also have at least a moral responsibility to ensure the material shown has some reasonable approximation to historical accuracy, and whenever possible the convictions of both sides should be equally fairly presented. Most of the criticisms of TBOAN on this database derive not from its sympathetic presentation of the KKK but from the fact that this is presented as the only side which is relevant. We need to remember that slavery was introduced into human society back in prehistoric times - it was usually associated with a recognised obligation on the part of the slave-owner to provide a reasonable standard of living for his slaves, and alternative mediaeval societies from which slavery had been eliminated often did not do even this for their dispossessed citizens. Members of ruling classes everywhere lived a lifestyle which required the full time labours of many slaves or underprivileged workers to maintain, and only after the invention of the steam engine did it become possible to picture a world from which slavery might eventually be eliminated. Although this then probably became inevitable, its elimination has still not been completed; and in the United States it took place in an appallingly destructive way, part of which is pictured in TBOAN. Every nation has shameful episodes in its history which have and will cause distress for many generations before they are gradually outgrown. Recognising that the American Civil War did not result only from a dispute about slavery but much more from a whole range of economic and cultural issues, I appreciate that it would be grossly improper for me as a Canadian to seize on some of the controversial aspects of TBOAN as an excuse to condemn the film. I will re-watch it as a valid and important effort to document the concerns of the group of citizens it featured (although I will still reserve the right to feel Griffith should have made more effort to also document the concerns of those with opposing viewpoints.) My concerns here are directed more to assessing the importance of TBOAN in the development of the modern cinema, and I currently find myself siding with the relatively few users who have commented that its significance seems to be greatly overrated. When I first saw this film I had seen relatively few of the important early silent films, and it was easy to accept claims that Griffith's work was of overwhelming importance. Now I have seen other contemporary works; and have also come to appreciate that all surviving copies of about 90% of these works have totally disappeared (whilst probably half of the 10% of which copies still exist are not available for home viewing even from specialist libraries as the only copies are located in inaccessible archive collections). This is not brought out clearly by most of the 200 user comments on this film listed by IMDb, and it is so important that it has led me to pen these further comments. Film-makers in the silent era were extremely productive - Griffith himself is credited by IMDb with having directed over 500 films, most of them silent, and several other directors/producers have well over 100 films credited. Since so few survive, we must recognise how far our current assessment of early directors might change if we were able to see and compare more of their works. I believe that many innovations in film technology have been exclusively attributed to Griffith primarily because of the ready availability today of copies of 'TBOAN', 'Intolerance' and 'Orphans of the Storm'. I found this feeling very strongly reinforced when I had a rare chance to see a screening of Lois Weber's 'Hypocrites'. Weber was, for a time, the highest paid director in Hollywood and received a best director award in 1916 (ahead of Griffith, just one year after he released TBOAN). All I will say at this point is that, although I am admittedly relying on rather uncertain memories, I believe 'Hypocrites' was more stimulating for its innovative cinematographic techniques than 'Intolerance'. It would be interesting to know whether other database users have had similar thoughts about this or other early works.

This movie had the stockholders quaking when they saw the costs mount. It was the most expensive movie made up to that time, and it shows that silent films really COULD create spectacle on a grand scale.

One of the posters remarked on how ridiculous the Klansmen's hoods looked. Actually, the original "ghost costumes" were all homemade and there was no standardized uniform- some had spikes on the head, horns, painted faces on the masks, etc.

I myself had an ancestor who was a member of the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan, and they saw themselves as guerilla fighters against an occupying power, not as terrorists. Today we can condemn them. At the time, it must have seemed to them that the war was over, but that the battle lines were still firmly drawn.

This film is a good peek into the attitude of the general public in 1915 about Reconstruction. It became a national obsession, and probably gave impetus to Col. William Joseph Simmons's decision to "resurrect" the Klan in that year.