The Birth of a Nation (1915)
Directed by D.W. Griffith

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.

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...