Film Review
It is a bizarre thing that the single most important film in cinema
history is also one of the most utterly repugnant.
The Birth of a Nation was cinema's
first blockbuster, introducing camera and editing techniques that are
now universally accepted as part of the language of cinema.
It was also the most commercially successful of all the silent films and
remained the most profitable film in history until Disney released
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in
the 1937. Yet these achievements sit ill alongside the film's
ugly racist rewriting of history and it is impossible not to regard the
film as anything other than a flagrant piece of white supremacist
propaganda of the worst kind.
Even at the time when
The Birth of a
Nation was first seen, it provoked controversy, causing fierce
riots in many of the towns and cities where it was shown. Its
director D.W. Griffith saw nothing morally abhorrent in the film and
could not understand the adverse reaction it garnered. The film
was based on
The Clansman, an
overtly negrophobic play by Thomas Dixon which put forward the
controversial but popular view that it was the Ku Klux Klan which saved
the Southern states from anarchy in the aftermath of the Civil
War.
It is testament to the power of the new medium of cinema
that Dixon's fallacious account of history became the received wisdom
for several years after the film was released.
Virtually all historians today regard this version of events as totally
inaccurate and agree that the former Negro slaves played a positive, if
not essential, role in the reconstruction of the South after the war of
secession.
As is apparent in many of his subsequent films, D.W. Griffith was an
idealist with a tendency to over-simplify complex issues. Perhaps
it was his political naivety that prevented him from seeing the
unpleasant xenophobic aspect of the film he was making. From the
titles at the start of the film, it looks as if Griffith
sincerely intended that
The Birth of
a Nation would be an anti-war statement, and certainly the first
half of the film achieves this aim. With its spectacular
reconstruction of Civil War battles and poignant images of the
consequences of war, the film portrays the devastation and misery that
war brings with searing realism. The assassination of Lincoln is
another of the film's highlights, drawing maximum dramatic impact from
one of the most tragic events in American history.
By contrast, the second half of the film is very difficult to sit
through, despite its undoubted artistic merits. It's bad enough
that the Ku Klux Klan are portrayed as crusading heroes valiantly
defending the Aryan cause, but to have thrust in your face the message
that this vile organisation helped to found modern America is an insult
too far. It this doesn't cause you to vomit in disgust then the
film's portrayal of black Americans probably will. The recently
liberated Negro slaves are played by white actors blacked up (à
la Al Jolson) and depicted as lascivious, murderous fiends or
idiotic sub-human children. Meanwhile, the whites (previously
seen as the heroes of the Civil War) are shown to be downtrodden victims,
deprived of their democratic rights and reduced to becoming
an underclass that is mercilessly taunted by vindictive former slaves.
No wonder the civil rights groups had their
work cut out after this misguided and shamefully biased distortion of
reality was hammered into the consciousness of white America.
Perhaps no single piece of art in the entire history of the United
States has caused more social harm than
The Birth of a Nation. A
masterpiece it may be, an essential milestone in the history of cinema
it certainly is, but it is also one of the most evil and misguided
films ever made.
© James Travers 2009
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Next D.W. Griffith film:
Intolerance (1916)
Film Synopsis
In the early 1860s, the Stonemans, an affluent family from the Northern
States, visit their friends, the Camerons, in the South. Austin
Stoneman, a congressman who supports the abolition of slavery,
is unaware that his daughter Elsie is idolised by Ben, the oldest of
the three Cameron boys. This will be the last time either
family will know such peace and unity, for within a few months the
whole country is at war. The sons of both families enlist in
their respective armies and fight valiantly in the Civil War. All
are killed except Ben, who is wounded on the battlefield and taken to a
Northern hospital where he is cared for by Elsie, who works as a
nurse. The end of the war is followed by the assassination of
President Lincoln. Austin Stoneman and other congressmen take
advantage of this disaster to punish the Southern States by introducing
laws that favour the black man over the white. Appalled by the
anti-white lawlessness that has overtaken his country, Ben Cameron
forms the Ku Klux Klan, an organisation which attracts thousands of
white southerners, all eager to fight and die for their Aryan
birthright...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.