But what exactly makes a film required viewing despite personal ambivalence or objection? Nor should it. And Parker does editorialize, choosing to include scenes and tropes that viewers may bristle at: at least two instances of the brutalization and rape of black women and the portrayal of Turner as the constant, morally unambiguous hero.
Rather, the movie retreads some of the same emotional and visual terrain as Roots , 12 Years a Slave , and Django Unchained —and in some cases it does so less artfully. There are familiar tropes: the at once beautiful and devastating scenery of antebellum plantations with lush foliage being toiled by black bodies bent under the watchful eye of an overseer. The frustrating Uncle Tom house slave and the benevolent white benefactor. If the impact of The Birth of a Nation on the racial id of millions of American moviegoers is impossible to calculate, its most direct consequence is easier to gauge: the revival of the Ku Klux Klan.
Defunct since the Reconstruction era its job, after all, was done , the KKK saddled up for a long second life in the wake of Birth. The immediate spark came in in Atlanta when a Northern, Jewish factory manager named Leo Frank was convicted of murdering a year-old girl white girl named Mary Phagan. When Georgia governor John M. By , the KKK had nearly 5 million members and for decades afterwards remained a social club in the South as popular and respectable as the Kiwanis.
These days, repertory houses, university film programs and museums tread carefully when projecting a print of The Birth of a Nation , usually scheduling a cautionary introduction or post-screening panel discussion to provide context, as if some kind of moral protective gear must be put on before exposure to its poisoned atmosphere.
At the end, I was rooting for the Klan. Thomas P. Doherty is a professor of American Studies at Brandeis University and the author of numerous books on American film and culture, most recently Hollywood and Hitler, , published in by Columbia University Press. Twitter: TomDohertyFilm. Twitter: ScottFeinberg. More than anyone else — more than all others combined — he invented the film art. He brought it to fruition in The Birth of a Nation , an enormous risk that he embarked on without a real script and using just one camera manned by his invaluable cinematographer, G.
Before he walked on the set, motion pictures had been, in actuality, static. At a respectful distance, the camera snapped a series of whole scenes, clustered in the groupings of the stage play.
Griffith broke up the pose. He rammed his camera into the middle of the action. He took closeups, crosscuts, angle shots and dissolves. His camera was alive, picking off shots; then he built the shots into sequences, the sequences into tense, swift narrative. For the first time the movies had a man who realized that, while a theater audience listened, a movie audience watched.
Griffith , here in the archives: Last Dissolve. In The Birth of a Nation, Griffith made audiences see the Civil War through his eyes — the eyes of the son of a colonel in the Army of the Confederacy. Or truly terrible. One of Griffith's key contributions was his pioneering use of cross-cutting to follow parallel lines of action. A naive audience might have been baffled by a film that showed first one group of characters, then another, then the first again.
From Griffith's success in using this technique comes the chase scene and many other modern narrative approaches. The critic Tim Dirks adds to cross-cutting no less than 16 other ways in which Griffith was an innovator, ranging from his night photography to his use of the iris shot and color tinting. Certainly "Birth of a Nation" is a film of great visual beauty and narrative power.
It tells the story of the Civil War through the experiences of families from both North and South, shows the flowing of their friendship, shows them made enemies as the nation was divided, and in a battlefield scene has the sons of both families dying almost simultaneously.
It is unparalleled in its recreations of actual battles on realistic locations; the action in some scenes reaches for miles. For audiences at the time there would have been great interest in Griffith's attempts to reproduce historic incidents, such as the assassination of Lincoln, with exacting accuracy.
His recreation of Sherman's march through Georgia is so bloody and merciless that it awakened Southern passions all over again. The human stories of the leading characters have the sentiment and human detail we would expect of a leading silent filmmaker, and the action scenes are filmed with a fluid ease that seems astonishing compared to other films of the time. Griffith uses elevated shots to provide a high-angle view of the battlefields, and cuts between parallel actions to make the battles comprehensible; they are not simply big tableaux of action.
Yet when it comes to his version of the Reconstruction era, he tells the story of the liberation of the slaves and its aftermath through the eyes of a Southerner who cannot view African-Americans as possible partners in American civilization. In the first half of the film the black characters are mostly ignored in the background.
In the second half, Griffith dramatizes material in which white women are seen as the prey of lustful freed slaves, often urged on by evil white Northern carpetbaggers whose goal is to destroy and loot the South. The most exciting and technically accomplished sequence in the second half of the film is also the most disturbing, as a white family is under siege in a log cabin, attacked by blacks and their white exploiters, while the Ku Klux Klan rides to the rescue.
Meanwhile, Elsie Lillian Gish , the daughter of the abolitionist Senator Stoneman, fights off a sexual assault by Stoneman's mulatto servant Lynch. Stoneman has earlier told Lynch "you are the equal of any man here. But when he is told his daughter Elsie is the woman Lynch has in mind, Stoneman turns violent toward him--Griffith's way of showing that the abolitionists and carpetbaggers lied to the freed slaves, to manipulate them for greed and gain.
The long third act of the film is where the most offensive racism resides. There is no denying the effectiveness of the first two acts. The first establishes a bucolic, idealistic view of America before the Civil War, with the implication that the North should have left well enough alone.
The second involves unparalleled scenes of the war itself, which seem informed by the photographs of Matthew Brady and have an powerful realism and conviction.
Griffith has a sure hand in the way he cuts from epic shots of enormous scope to small human vignettes. He was the first director to understand instinctively how a movie could mimic the human ability to scan an event quickly, noting details in the midst of the larger picture. Many silent films moved slowly, as if afraid to get ahead of their audiences; Griffith springs forward eagerly, and the impact on his audiences was unprecedented; they were learning for the first time what a movie was capable of.
As slavery is the great sin of America, so "The Birth of a Nation" is Griffith's sin, for which he tried to atone all the rest of his life. So instinctive were the prejudices he was raised with as a 19th century Southerner that the offenses in his film actually had to be explained to him.
To his credit, his next film, "Intolerance," was an attempt at apology.
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