The Birth of A Nation

Released: March 1915

Director: D.W. Griffith

Rating: N/A

Run-Time: 3 hours

Cast:
Lillian Gish: Elsie
Mae Marsh: Flora Cameron
Henry B. Walthall: Col. Ben Cameron
Miriam Cooper: Margaret Cameron
Ralph Lewis: Austin Stoneman
George Siegmann: Silas Lynch

During the very early years of film, namely between the 1890s and 1927, films were silent, with the exception of music.  Early on, films were generally a minute long and had somebody playing a piano off to the side of the screen.  It was a very new invention that spread like wildfire.  Nobody had ever seen anything quite like it.  During the early days of the 20th century, we began to see actual feature-length films with real movie stars.  During the subsequent years and events including World War I, films had been used for propaganda world-wide.  I’m getting ahead of myself here, but the use of film would become extremely important.  One of the earliest feature films is also one of the most notorious in film history: D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.  Released in March of 1915, The Birth of a Nation was one of the first truly “narrative” films ever created.  But it was also 3 hours long, which was completely unheard of.  It was a Civil War epic.  But the film was notoriously controversial for it’s portrayal of African-Americans during the Reconstruction.

The story of The Birth of a Nation follows two families caught on opposite sides during the Civil War.  I’m not going to really get into the story, because that really isn’t why I’m doing this.  This isn’t so much of a review of a film, as it is an analysis of the effect that the film had on political and racial issues.  This isn’t normally something I would ever consider doing for this website, but considering the film turns 100 next month, I feel it’s the perfect time to do this.  I should tell you that this film is public domain so it is available everywhere, should you choose to view it.  Being a film buff, I had heard about The Birth of a Nation, but had never actually seen it.  I talked to some people, and they had never heard of it.  Why not?  This is one of the most controversial films ever conceived.  The first thing I’m going to do is discuss the film itself and its merits.  Being released in 1915, The Birth of a Nation is first and foremost a silent movie.  No dialogue save the actual text that appears on the screen.  The music is mostly a combination of classical music.  The first thing you will notice is the picture quality.  It’s black and white, has a lot of scratches and artifacts.  This is 1915, so film-making was still pretty rudimentary.  The other thing you will notice is that during certain scenes, the tint of the screen will change color.  It’ll go from a sepia-toned color to red or green or blue.  It did that to really accentuate the mood.  The Birth of a Nation is actually one of the very first movies to do anything like that.  It was also the first to actually use night-shots.  The film was pretty revolutionary as far as filming techniques go.  It’s use of panning camera shots and still-shots had never really been done before.

For a movie that’s a century old, the acting is actually really good.  Lillian Gish’s Elsie and Henry B. Walthall’s Col. Ben Cameron stand out.  Again, this is a silent movie, so all the story-telling has to be done using body language.  Lillian and Henry are absolutely incredible in their roles.  In fact, most of the actors did a real great job.  The only one that really overdid it was Mary Alden as Lynch’s housekeeper.  That was unintentionally hilarious and over-the-top.  Overall, though, the quality of the acting is quite high.  The first half of the film is a Civil War drama with some pretty decent battle sequences.  Again, that’s not something that had been attempted yet.  The second half that tells the story of the Reconstruction is where people start having problems with the movie, and rightly so.  Basically, the film portrays the African-Americans as brutes who are laying waste to the white man’s world in the South.  A few things should be mentioned.  One:  This never happened.  Two:  D.W. Griffith did employ actual African-Americans to star in his movie, BUT, he took a number of his white actors and painted them up to look like African-Americans, poorly I might add.  If you compare the two, it’s very obvious who is actually black and who’s painted.  Our structure is very different from that of an African-American, so I’m not entirely sure how Griffith managed to get away with that.  The technique was used to allow white actors to portray black roles, but it’s known as a very racist technique in this day and age.  The film also portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as good guys and saviors.  The reality was that these guys were terrorists and scumbags.

It is very, VERY obvious that The Birth of a Nation is a racist movie.  There’s absolutely no question about it.  When it was released in 1915, not even 60 years had passed since the end of the Civil War.  Naturally, racial tensions were extremely high.  The NAACP, which was formed in 1909, had attempted to get the film banned.  The film actually caused a number of protests and riots in major cities across the country.  It certainly didn’t help that Nation was largely inspired by the play, The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon, Jr.  That book, combined with The Birth of a Nation inspired a second Ku Klux Klan movement during the 20s.  The Birth of a Nation was also the first movie to be screened at the White House.  The film was clearly historically inaccurate, but that didn’t stop white supremacists from using it as a recruiting tool and propaganda against minorities, mainly African-Americans.  Despite the fact that The Birth of a Nation was revolutionary for its time in terms of film-making techniques, it was also reviled as a very racist picture.  D.W. Griffith was also painted with the racist brush.

D.W. Griffith was born to Mary Perkins and Jacob “Roaring Jake” Griffith in 1875.  His father, Jacob Griffith was a colonel in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, so Griffith was there during the Reconstruction.  He had produced short films before 1910, but The Birth of a Nation was his largest success, but he was frustrated by the criticism that was leveled at him for Nation.  In response, he crafted Intolerance.  He eventually would co-found United Artists with the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks.  Griffith’s legacy is still being felt around the world.  Today, people are still absolutely enraged at the film, and the idea that some people would even consider even playing pieces of it in classrooms.  The fact that a movie like this can still piss people off a century AFTER it was released speaks to the film-making mastery of the man who made it.  From what I’ve read, D.W Griffith had no personal politics to speak of, so I can’t say for certain that he was racist, even though some of his movies clearly were.

While some of today’s films deal with racism in certain ways, none of them were really flat-out prejudicial the way The Birth of a Nation was.  I’m going to be honest here: I think that The Birth of a Nation is a good movie.  Is it enjoyable?  Not particularly, especially if you’re sensitive to racism.  I certainly don’t begrudge people who refuse to see this movie, because it is blatantly offensive.  I look at the film as a piece of cultural history, regardless of its inaccuracies.  It’s a significant film in the way that it pioneered techniques that are used by film-makers all over the world.  It had some really great performances and helped usher in a new era of film-making.  So, from a technical standpoint, it’s an amazing achievement in film.  Narratively, not so much.  The inaccuracies and portrayal of the African-Americans and the KKK are too much to ignore.  I’m not going to give The Birth of a Nation a score, because the film itself and the reactions to it speak for themselves.  There’s really not a whole lot I can say that can do it justice.  The film is in the public domain so you can watch it anywhere for very little, if not for free, but it is also available on DVD and Blu-Ray.  There is also the issue of censorship when it comes to movies like this, but that is another post for another day.

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