Date Seen: 6/13/17
Score: Let's talk about that in a minute.
DIRECTOR: D.W. Griffith
PRODUCER: D.W. Griffith & Harry Aitken
STUDIO: D.W. Griffith Co.
SCREENPLAY: D.W. Griffith & Frank E. Woods
CINEMATOGRAPHY: G.W. Bitzer
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| The film's iconic Klansman image, adorning posters and DVD covers everywhere |
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| The Stoneman Family and the Cameron Family |
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| Preparation for war |
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| Lillian Gish and Henry B. Walthall share a tender moment |
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| The Civil War begins |
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| Lillian Gish |
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| Apparently all it takes to get pardoned as a war criminal is to ask Lincoln in person |
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| They picked quite the night to go to the theatre |
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| The scheming "mulatto" Silas Lynch, played in Blackface by George Siegmann |
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| The "mulatto" maid, played in Blackface by Lenore Cooper |
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| Gus, played in Blackface by Walter Long |
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| Another example of the film's use of Blackface |
D.W. Griffith's 1915 Civil War and Reconstruction-era epic The Birth of a Nation is inarguably the most controversial American film ever made. Its biased, downright racist depiction of the unfolding of the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction in the American south makes Gone With The Wind look like Uncle Tom's Cabin. Even though it belongs to a time gone by, even critics in 1915 saw it as an inappropriate, dangerous revision of history. An editorial in The New York Globe released shortly after the film's premier said, "...To present the members of the [black] race as women-chasers and foul fiends is a cruel distortion of history. Bad things occurred, but what man will say that the outrages of black on white equaled [sic] in number the outrages of white on black? ...To make a few dirty dollars men are willing to pander to depraved tastes and to torment a race antipathy that is the most sinister and dangerous feature of American life." To inspire such words from a prominent white newspaper editorial 102 years ago says volumes about the level of racism that The Birth of a Nation perpetuates. Yet it is, with the same level of certainty as it is racist, one of the greatest films of all time.
"There has been nothing to equal it- nothing," wrote a reviewer in The Atlanta Journal in 1915. Celebrated midcentury American film critic and novelist James Agee said of D.W. Griffith, the mastermind of the entire production, "He achieved what no other known man has achieved. To watch his work is like being witness to the beginning of melody, or the first conscious use of the lever, or the wheel; the emergence, coordination and first eloquence of language; the birth of an art: and to realize that this is all the work of one man." It's hard to find words stronger than these to explain the importance of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation to the canon of cinema. To list just a few of the cinematic techniques he pioneered in this film: the close up, the Iris Shot (expanding or closing circular masks to open up or close a shot), the ability to shoot outside, the ability to shoot during the nighttime, tinted film frames, high-angle shots, panoramic long shots, fade-ins and outs, vignettes, lap dissolves, the dramatic retelling of history through film, cross-cutting between shots, tracking shots, parallel editing, scenes shot from multiple angles, and a score specifically compiled and arranged. I realize that many of these more specific cinematographic terms are unfamiliar. If you're interested in learning more about cinematography lingo, I would suggest checking out this website, which explores the "Grammar of TV and Film." If you're not interested in learning anything about the specifics, just know that basically all of the techniques listed above are used in essentially every film you've ever seen, given that all of those movies were made after 1915.
The cinematic techniques were not the only unprecedented aspects of The Birth of a Nation. It was the first blockbuster film, grossing an estimated $100 million dollars and costing $100,000 to make, becoming both the most expensive film made to date and the most successful, by a long shot. It was the first film to be screened at the White House, and various accounts have credited Woodrow Wilson, who is quoted at the beginning of the film, as having exclaimed, "It's like writing history with lightning! My only regret is that it is all so terribly true." Some historians, by the way, have discredited this quote, and Wilson's reps at the time denied the President's approval of the film only after massive riots had broken out due to its controversy. The film charged a whopping $2 entry fee (adjusted for inflation, that was roughly $50), and thus helped pioneer moviegoing as a middle class leisure activity, inspiring the establishment of lavish cinemas that look today more like operas than movie theaters. In so many ways, it helped pioneer the idea of film as an art, of cinemas as art galleries. The film also had two more serious and immediate political consequences: firstly, it caused a massive protest and boycott effort by the recently established NAACP; secondly, it inspired a revival of the Ku Klux Klan.
It is not an easy film to watch, for several reasons. First of all, it's over three hours long, which for any movie is a little unreasonable. I adore films, and I've never watched a movie that I felt really had to be three hours long or more. It took me several days to finish watching this film, partly because I made the mistake of trying to watch it on a plane, well within the line of sight of many people who were probably, and rightly, wondering why a young white girl was watching an old movie full of blackface and Klan members. It also took me several days to finish because I kept getting angry at it and having to take breaks. It's like why it took me over three years to watch Mad Men. I get frustrated at everyone and everything it stands for and I have to stop.
There are many parallels between The Birth of a Nation and Gone With The Wind, but I'll just say this: they are the two most ambitious films I've ever seen. Ambitious because of the scale their stories demanded, and ambitious because of the anxiety they carry in their attempts to revise history to fit a racist and outdated agenda. In many ways I wish D.W. Griffith had decided to just lop off either the first or the second half of the movie and focused on one part of history; the fact that he manages to encompass so much in three hours is both incredible and annoying. I feel like I lived through the Civil War and Reconstruction, if only because it took so damn long to watch it play out.
The first half of the film, which centers around the Civil War, is surprisingly tame. It focuses on the exposition of the characters and setting, introducing the Northern abolitionist Stoneman family and the Southern slaveholding Cameron family, two groups that are somehow irreparably linked despite the fact that they could not be any more incompatible. The Stoneman family is comprised of Austin Stoneman, an obvious and unflattering parody of Thaddeus Stevens, his daughter, Lillian Gish, and son. The Cameron family is much larger and much more complicated, but it starts out with three sons and two daughters. Two of the Cameron boys die in the Civil War, in addition to Stoneman's son, leaving only the handsome and racist "Little Colonel," the eldest Cameron son, left standing. He's in love with Elsie Stoneman (Lillian Gish), which is of course problematic, considering he's a Confederate soldier who later goes on to found the Ku Klux Klan, and Elsie's father is the Leader of the House and the biggest advocate for abolition in the entire world. It's really entertaining that Griffith's fictional world mashes together representations of actual events and people on such a small scale. It's sort of like having a bunch of various action figures and making them have a tea party. "Okay, off-brand Superman, you're going to arrange a marriage between your daughter, Barbie, and your cousin's best friend, Fred Flintstone. Gumby will be officiating the wedding, and off-brand Cabbage Patch Kid will be handing out programs."
I actually enjoyed the first half of the film, probably because it's not marred by the kind of blatant and cringeworthy racism that surfaces in the second half. Instead, it's actually kind of a nice family story that illustrates pretty well the devastation of the Civil War and the way it tore apart families and friends. In a particularly touching scene, one of the Cameron boys is nearly bayonetted by the Stoneman son, who realizes what he's about to do just in time to put down his weapon. Immediately the two are shot, and they die literally in each other's arms. The shots of the Civil War are like gigantic Matthew Brady panoramas, and Griffith's clever manipulation of the scale of the extras is evident throughout these scenes. Even more historical detail is paid to the scenes of Abraham Lincoln. While the entire film is riddled with inaccuracies, most of which are unforgivably inappropriate and racist, I would like to say, on the record, that perhaps the most ridiculous "historical facsimile" of at least the first half of the film occurs shortly after the "Little Colonel," AKA the oldest Cameron boy, has been sentenced to death in a Union army hospital. His hysterical mother and his nurse, who just happens to be Elsie Stoneman, his long-lost love, are so upset that they literally walk into Abraham Lincoln's office and beg for him to pardon the man. Like, they just walk in. To the Oval Office. I literally laughed out loud. The assassination of Lincoln is also depicted, pretty impressively although not without its unintentional hilarity, and- guess what- two of the Cameron kids are there that night in Ford's Theatre (traveling all the way from South Carolina, which is never elaborated on or explained).
The second half of the film is where things get interesting- and by interesting, I mean bad. It's a potpourri of racist stereotypes and depictions, from blackface to the idea of Black men as sexual predators to the notion of Black laziness. The intertitles explain, inaccurately, that following the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, so many Blacks were elected to public office that they outnumbered the whites. Not so subtly, the film portrays white people as the victims of Reconstruction, completely revising the true historical facts surrounding the era's treatment of African Americans. It's honestly beyond horrifying- it makes me angry. Radical Reconstruction and Southern Redemption leading into the early 1900s were undoubtedly the most intense and unrelenting periods of mass violence against Blacks following slavery. Basically every evil act of post-slavery violence you can imagine is portrayed in The Birth of a Nation, from lynchings to sexual aggression toward white women to mob rule to voter intimidation to Jim Crow, and every single one of them is considered a victory for whites. The Ku Klux Klan, fictionally the invention of Little Colonel Cameron, is portrayed as a group of vigilantes who band together after a white girl dies after being chased by a Black man (although, to be fair, she's the one who jumps off the cliff), with the intention of preventing Blacks from terrorizing whites. Not only does Griffith portray Klansmen as heroes, but at the end of the movie he shows the fallen Confederates in Heaven, and the fallen radical Blacks in Hell. For real.
Just what was the effect of this film on audiences in 1915? Let's return to the beginning. Even for 1915, The Birth of a Nation was a racist film. Even one of its positive reviews, featured in The Moving Picture World Magazine, said plainly, "Some of the details are plainly morbid and repulsive." On one end of the spectrum was the NAACP, led by W.E.B. DuBois, which unleashed a major campaign against the film that, although unsuccessful, can be considered a watershed moment of activism in the organization's history. Certain cities and states banned the film outright, worried that it would inspire white-on-Black violence. Others, like basically every white person in the south, celebrated it: as the Atlantic Journal wrote in its review, "Race prejudice? Injustice? Suppression? You would not think of those things had you seen The Birth of a Nation. For none but a man with a spirit too picayunish and warped for words would pick such flaws in a spectacle so great and whole-hearted as this... after it's all over, you are not raging nor shot with hatred, but mellowed into a deeper and purer understanding of the fires through which your forefathers battled to make this South of yours a nation reborn!" It is known, too, that the film inspired a revival of the KKK, lending the terrorist group a valuable recruitment tool to attract members. Several of the articles I read pointed out that the film is still being used as propaganda for the KKK, although I find it unlikely that any dumbass with a confederate flag on the back of his truck would be willing to sit through three hours of a silent cinematic classic to be convinced of his own racial superiority.
And then there were those in the middle- the cinema-goers who, despite being disturbed by the racist revision of history, was nonetheless enchanted by the film's spectacular innovations. Roger Ebert makes a case for the film by focusing on the original, moderate spectators. He writes, "Some of the film's most objectionable scenes show the Ku Klux Klan riding to the rescue of a white family trapped in a cabin by sexually predatory blacks and their white manipulators. These scenes are credited with the revival of the popularity of the Klan, which was all but extinct when the movie appeared. Watching them today, we are appalled. But audiences in 1915 were witnessing the invention of intercutting in a chase scene. Nothing like it had ever been seen before: Parallel action building to a suspense climax. Do you think they were thinking about blackface? They were thrilled out of their minds."
Ebert's point is both revealing and disturbing. On the one hand, it shows the inversion of perception on either end of the audience. Audiences today see the blatant racism and are blind to the cinematic innovations, techniques they take for granted after years of continuous use. Audiences of 1915 saw the incredible technological innovations and were (mostly) blind to the racism, living in a time during which the Civil Rights Movement was only a seed of what it would become. The truth is, almost everyone who could spend $50 to see a film glorifying the KKK in 1915 was probably racist, and even if they weren't, they were willing to deal with it for the sake of art. Just as art has been revising history and shaping public opinion for centuries, film art was given the chance to do the same thing thanks to D.W. Griffith. For years, and as recently as the 1990s, groups have been trying to remove The Birth of a Nation from various Best Films lists and registries. They have made the case that this is not a film worth viewing. I could not disagree with this plan of action more.
In a way, The Birth of a Nation does more to demonstrate the hateful ideology of racism and its violence than any boycott or protest could. It shows, sincerely and un-ironically, how a racist white man was able to create a perfect example of the revisionist violence of his race and, in doing so, singlehandedly create the Hollywood movie business. Griffith's masterwork is so brutally inappropriate to modern day audiences that its grand scale of white supremacist actions and ideas almost seems like a tasteless joke. Some of the intertitle cards are so obviously biased and historically inaccurate that they seem like a parody of racist ideas. The Birth of a Nation damns itself and remains the most controversial American film of all time- yet it also stands, somehow fittingly, as a triumph of American cinema, a movie that created so many conventions of moviemaking that we take for granted. It's an example of the privilege of filmmaking and film viewing, especially during the turn of the twentieth century. There is no easy way to reconcile The Birth of a Nation's racism with its cinematic achievements. But the best thing to do in such a difficult situation is not to push it away, this perfect primary source artifact of how certain groups of people really saw Reconstruction, and how one early filmmaker used his privilege as a societal manipulator to create his own skewed image of history. As Ebert concludes, "If we are to see this film, we must see it all, and deal with it all."
Sources:
"The Birth of a Nation," by Joan L. Silverman, from The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (2013)
"The Birth of a Nation" from the American Film Institute's Filmsite Movie Review
"D.W. Griffith's Controversial Film, 'The Birth of a Nation,' by Conrad Pitcher, published in OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 13 No. 3 (1999)
Review of "D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation: A History of 'the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time" by Melvyn Stokes," by Randy Roberts, published in the Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2010)
"Racist Film: Teaching 'The Birth of a Nation'" by Paul McEwan, published in Cinema Journal, Vol. 47, No. 1 (2007)
"The Birth of a Nation," from Wikipedia
All pictures and gifs sourced from Google Images
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