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The Birth of a Nation

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This article is about the 1915 silent film. For other uses, see The Birth of a Nation (disambiguation).
The Birth of a Nation
Birth of a Nation theatrical poster.jpg
Theatrical release poster
Directed byD. W. Griffith
Screenplay by
Based onThe Clansman
by Thomas Dixon Jr.
Produced by
Starring
CinematographyBilly Bitzer
Edited byD. W. Griffith
Music byJoseph Carl Breil
Production
company
David W. Griffith Corp.
Distributed byEpoch Producing Co.
Release date
  • February 8, 1915
Running time
12 reels
133–193 minutes[note 1][2]
CountryUnited States
Languages
Budget$100,000+[3]
Box office$50–100 million[4]
3:12:43
The Birth of a Nation (full film)

The Birth of a Nation, originally called The Clansman,[5] is a 1915 American silent epic drama film directed by D. W. Griffith and starring Lillian Gish. The screenplay is adapted from Thomas Dixon Jr.'s 1905 novel and play The Clansman. Griffith co-wrote the screenplay with Frank E. Woods and produced the film with Harry Aitken.

The Birth of a Nation is a landmark of film history,[6][7] lauded for its technical virtuosity.[8] It was the first non-serial American 12-reel film ever made.[9] Its plot, part fiction and part history, chronicles the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth and the relationship of two families in the Civil War and Reconstruction eras over the course of several years—the pro-Union (Northern) Stonemans and the pro-Confederacy (Southern) Camerons. It was originally shown in two parts separated by an intermission, and it was the first American-made film to have a musical score for an orchestra. It pioneered closeups and fadeouts, and it includes a carefully staged battle sequence with hundreds of extras (another first) made to look like thousands.[10] It came with a 13-page Souvenir Program.[11] It was the first motion picture to be screened inside the White House, viewed there by President Woodrow Wilson, his family, and members of his cabinet.

The film was controversial even before its release, and it has remained so ever since; it has been called "the most controversial film ever made in the United States"[12]: 198  and "the most reprehensibly racist film in Hollywood history".[13] Lincoln is nevertheless portrayed positively, albeit a friend of the South, atypical of a narrative that promotes the Lost Cause ideology. The film has been denounced for its racist depiction of African Americans.[8] The film portrays its black characters (many of whom are played by white actors in blackface) as unintelligent and sexually aggressive toward white women. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is portrayed as a heroic force, necessary to preserve American values, protect white women, and maintain white supremacy.[14][15]

Popular among white audiences nationwide, the film's success was both a consequence of and a contributor to racial segregation throughout the U.S.[16] In response to the film's depictions of black people and Civil War history, African Americans across the U.S. organized and protested. In Boston and other localities, black leaders and the NAACP spearheaded an unsuccessful campaign to have it banned on the basis that it inflamed racial tensions and could incite violence.[17] Griffith's indignation at efforts to censor or ban the film motivated him to produce Intolerance the following year.[18]

In spite of its divisiveness, The Birth of a Nation was a huge commercial success across the nation—grossing more than any previous motion picture—and it profoundly influenced both the film industry and American culture. The film has been acknowledged as an inspiration for the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, which took place only a few months after its release. In 1992, the Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.[19][20]

Plot[edit]

The film consists of two parts of similar length. The first part closes with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, after which there is an intermission. At the New York premiere, Dixon spoke on stage between the parts, reminding the audience that the dramatic version of The Clansman appeared in that venue nine years previously. "Mr. Dixon also observed that he would have allowed none but the son of a Confederate soldier to direct the film version of The Clansman."[21]

Part 1: Civil War of United States[edit]

The film's portrayal of the Siege of Petersburg, led by Ben Cameron

The film follows two juxtaposed families. One is the Northern Stonemans: abolitionist U.S. Representative Austin Stoneman (based on the Reconstruction-era Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania),[22][23] his daughter, and two sons. The other is the Southern Camerons: Dr. Cameron, his wife, their three sons and two daughters. Phil, the elder Stoneman son, falls in love with Margaret Cameron, during the brothers' visit to the Cameron estate in South Carolina, representing the Old South. Meanwhile, young Ben Cameron (modeled after Leroy McAfee)[24] idolizes a picture of Elsie Stoneman. When the Civil War arrives, the young men of both families enlist in their respective armies. The younger Stoneman and two of the Cameron brothers are killed in combat. Meanwhile, the Cameron women are rescued by Confederate soldiers who rout a black militia after an attack on the Cameron home. Ben Cameron leads a heroic final charge at the Siege of Petersburg, earning the nickname of "the Little Colonel", but he is also wounded and captured. He is then taken to a Union military hospital in Washington, D.C.

During his stay at the hospital, he is told that he will be hanged. Also at the hospital, he meets Elsie Stoneman, whose picture he has been carrying; she is working there as a nurse. Elsie takes Cameron's mother, who had traveled to Washington to tend her son, to see Abraham Lincoln, and Mrs. Cameron persuades the President to pardon Ben. When Lincoln is assassinated at Ford's Theatre, his conciliatory postwar policy expires with him. In the wake of the president's death, Austin Stoneman and other Radical Republicans are determined to punish the South, employing harsh measures that Griffith depicts as having been typical of the Reconstruction Era.[25]

Part 2: Reconstruction[edit]

Stoneman and his protégé Silas Lynch, a psychopathic mulatto (modeled after Alonzo J. Ransier and Richard Howell Gleaves),[26][27] head to South Carolina to observe the implementation of Reconstruction policies first hand. During the election, in which Lynch is elected lieutenant governor, blacks are observed stuffing the ballot boxes, while many whites are denied the vote. The newly elected, mostly black members of the South Carolina legislature are shown at their desks displaying racially stereotypical behavior, such as one member taking off his shoes and putting his feet up on his desk, and others drinking liquor and eating fried chicken.

Hooded Klansmen catch Gus, portrayed in blackface by white actor Walter Long

Meanwhile, inspired by observing white children pretending to be ghosts to scare black children, Ben fights back by forming the Ku Klux Klan. As a result, Elsie breaks off her relationship with Ben. Later, Flora Cameron goes off alone into the woods to fetch water and is followed by Gus, a freedman and soldier who is now a captain. He confronts Flora and tells her that he desires to get married. Uninterested, she rejects him, but Gus refuses to accept the rejection. Frightened, she flees into the forest, pursued by Gus. Trapped on a precipice, Flora warns Gus she will jump if he comes any closer. When he does, she leaps to her death. Having run through the forest looking for her, Ben has seen her jump; he holds her as she dies, then carries her body back to the Cameron home. In response, the Klan hunts down Gus, tries him, finds him guilty, and lynches him.

Lynch then orders a crackdown on the Klan after discovering Gus's murder. He also secures the passing of legislation allowing mixed-race marriages. Dr. Cameron is arrested for possessing Ben's Klan regalia, now considered a capital crime. He is rescued by Phil Stoneman and a few of his black servants. Together with Margaret Cameron, they flee. When their wagon breaks down, they make their way through the woods to a small hut that is home to two sympathetic former Union soldiers who agree to hide them. An intertitle states, "The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defense of their Aryan birthright."[28]

Congressman Stoneman leaves to avoid being connected with Lt. Gov. Lynch's crackdown. Elsie, learning of Dr. Cameron's arrest, goes to Lynch to plead for his release. Lynch, who had been lusting after Elsie, tries to force her to marry him, which causes her to faint. Stoneman returns, causing Elsie to be placed in another room. At first Stoneman is happy when Lynch tells him he wants to marry a white woman, but he is then angered when Lynch tells him that it is Stoneman's own daughter that he wishes to marry (against her will). Undercover Klansman spies go to get help when they discover Elsie's plight after she breaks a window and cries out for help. Elsie falls unconscious again and revives while gagged and being bound. The Klan gathered together, with Ben leading them, ride in to gain control of the town. When news about Elsie reaches Ben, he and others go to her rescue. Elsie frees her mouth and screams for help. Lynch is captured. Victorious, the Klansmen celebrate in the streets. Meanwhile, Lynch's militia surrounds and attacks the hut where the Camerons are hiding. The Klansmen, with Ben at their head, race in to save them just in time. The next election day, blacks find a line of mounted and armed Klansmen just outside their homes and are intimidated into not voting.

The film concludes with a double wedding as Margaret Cameron marries Phil Stoneman and Elsie Stoneman marries Ben Cameron. The masses are shown oppressed by a giant warlike figure who gradually fades away. The scene shifts to another group finding peace under the image of Jesus Christ. The penultimate title is: "Dare we dream of a golden day when the bestial War shall rule no more. But instead—the gentle Prince in the Hall of Brotherly Love in the City of Peace."

Cast[edit]

George Siegmann, Ralph Lewis, Lillian Gish, and Henry B. Walthall in a scene of the film
Credited
Uncredited[29]
Raoul Walsh as John Wilkes Booth

Production[edit]

1911 version[edit]

There was an uncompleted, now lost, 1911 version, titled The Clansman. It used Kinemacolor and a new sound process; one reason for this version's failure was the unwillingness of theater owners to purchase the equipment to show it. The director was William F. Haddock, and the producer was George Brennan. Some scenes were filmed on the porches and lawns of Homewood Plantation, in Natchez, Mississippi.[30] One and a half reels were completed.[31]: 330 

Kinemacolor received a settlement from the producers of Birth when they proved that they had an earlier right to film the work.[31]: 329 

The footage was shown to the trade in an attempt to arouse interest. Early movie critic Frank E. Woods attended; Griffith always credited Woods with bringing The Clansman to his attention.[31]: 331 

Development[edit]

After the failure of the Kinemacolor project, in which Dixon was willing to invest his own money,[31]: 330  he began visiting other studios to see if they were interested.[32]: 421  In late 1913, Dixon met the film producer Harry Aitken, who was interested in making a film out of The Clansman; through Aitken, Dixon met Griffith.[32]: 421  Like Dixon, Griffith was a Southerner, a fact that Dixon points out;[33]: 295  Griffith's father served as a colonel in the Confederate States Army and, like Dixon, viewed Reconstruction negatively. Griffith believed that a passage from The Clansman where Klansmen ride "to the rescue of persecuted white Southerners" could be adapted into a great cinematic sequence.[34] Griffith first announced his intent to adapt Dixon's play to Gish and Walthall after filming Home, Sweet Home in 1914.[26]

Birth of a Nation "follows The Clansman [the play] nearly scene by scene".[35]: xvii  While some sources also credit The Leopard's Spots as source material, Russell Merritt attributes this to "the original 1915 playbills and program for Birth which, eager to flaunt the film's literary pedigree, cited both The Clansman and The Leopard's Spots as sources."[36] According to Karen Crowe, "[t]here is not a single event, word, character, or circumstance taken from The Leopard's Spots.... Any likenesses between the film and The Leopard's Spots occur because some similar scenes, circumstances, and characters appear in both books."[35]: xvii–xviii 

Griffith agreed to pay Thomas Dixon $10,000 (equivalent to $270,532 in 2021) for the rights to his play The Clansman. Since he ran out of money and could afford only $2,500 of the original option, Griffith offered Dixon 25 percent interest in the picture. Dixon reluctantly agreed, and the unprecedented success of the film made him rich. Dixon's proceeds were the largest sum any author had received [up to 2007] for a motion picture story and amounted to several million dollars.[37] The American historian John Hope Franklin suggested that many aspects of the script for The Birth of a Nation appeared to reflect Dixon's concerns more than Griffith's, as Dixon had an obsession in his novels of describing in loving detail the lynchings of black men, which did not reflect Griffith's interests.[32]: 422–423 

Filming[edit]

Griffith (left) on the set of The Birth of a Nation with actor Henry Walthall (center) and others

Griffith began filming on July 4, 1914[38] and was finished by October 1914.[32]: 421  Some filming took place in Big Bear Lake, California.[39] Griffith took over the Hollywood studio of Kinemacolor. West Point engineers provided technical advice on the American Civil War battle scenes, providing Griffith with the artillery used in the film. Much of the filming was done on the Griffith Ranch in San Fernando Valley, with the Petersburg scenes being shot at what is today Forest Lawn Memorial Park and other scenes being shot in Whittier and Ojai Valley.[40][41] The film's war scenes were influenced after Robert Underwood Johnson's book Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War, The Soldier in Our Civil War, and Mathew Brady's photography.[26]

Many of the African Americans in the film were portrayed by white actors in blackface. Griffith initially claimed this was deliberate, stating "on careful weighing of every detail concerned, the decision was to have no black blood among the principals; it was only in the legislative scene that Negroes were used, and then only as 'extra people'." However black extras who had been housed in segregated quarters, including Griffith's acquaintance and frequent collaborator Madame Sul-Te-Wan, can be seen in many other shots of the film.[26]

Griffith's budget started at US$40,000[37] (equivalent to $1,070,000 in 2021) but rose to over $100,000[3] (equivalent to $2,680,000 in 2021).

By the time he finished filming, Griffith had shot approximately 150,000 feet of footage (approximately 36 hours of film), which he edited down to 13,000 feet (just over 3 hours).[38] The film was edited after early screenings in reaction to audience reception, and existing prints of the film are missing footage from the standard version of the film. Evidence exists that the film originally included scenes of white slave traders seizing blacks from West Africa and detaining them aboard a slave ship, Southern congressmen in the House of Representatives, Northerners reacting to the results of the 1860 presidential election, the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, a Union League meeting, depictions of martial law in South Carolina, and a battle sequence. In addition, several scenes were cut at the insistence of New York Mayor John Purroy Mitchel due to their highly racist content before its release in New York City, including a female abolitionist activist recoiling from the body odor of a black boy, black men seizing white women on the streets of Piedmont, and deportations of blacks with the title "Lincoln's Solution". It was also long rumored, including by Griffith's biographer Seymour Stern, that the original film included a rape scene between Gus and Flora before her suicide, but in 1974 the cinematographer Karl Brown denied that such a scene had been filmed.[26]

Score[edit]

Sheet music for "The Perfect Song", one of the themes Breil composed for the film

Although The Birth of a Nation is commonly regarded as a landmark for its dramatic and visual innovations, its use of music was arguably no less revolutionary.[42] Though film was still silent at the time, it was common practice to distribute musical cue sheets, or less commonly, full scores (usually for organ or piano accompaniment) along with each print of a film.[43]

For The Birth of a Nation, composer Joseph Carl Breil created a three-hour-long musical score that combined all three types of music in use at the time: adaptations of existing works by classical composers, new arrangements of well-known melodies, and original composed music.[42] Though it had been specifically composed for the film, Breil's score was not used for the Los Angeles première of the film at Clune's Auditorium; rather, a score compiled by Carli Elinor was performed in its stead, and this score was used exclusively in West Coast showings. Breil's score was not used until the film debuted in New York at the Liberty Theatre but it was the score featured in all showings save those on the West Coast.[44][45]

Outside of original compositions, Breil adapted classical music for use in the film, including passages from Der Freischütz by Carl Maria von Weber, Leichte Kavallerie by Franz von Suppé, Symphony No. 6 by Ludwig van Beethoven, and "Ride of the Valkyries" by Richard Wagner, the latter used as a leitmotif during the ride of the KKK.[42] Breil also arranged several traditional and popular tunes that would have been recognizable to audiences at the time, including many Southern melodies; among these songs were "Maryland, My Maryland", "Dixie",[46] "Old Folks at Home", "The Star-Spangled Banner", "America the Beautiful", "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", "Auld Lang Syne", and "Where Did You Get That Hat?".[42][47] DJ Spooky has called Breil's score, with its mix of Dixieland songs, classical music and "vernacular heartland music" "an early, pivotal accomplishment in remix culture." He has also cited Breil's use of music by Wagner as influential on subsequent Hollywood films, including Star Wars (1977) and Apocalypse Now (1979).[48]

In his original compositions for the film, Breil wrote numerous leitmotifs to accompany the appearance of specific characters. The principal love theme that was created for the romance between Elsie Stoneman and Ben Cameron was published as "The Perfect Song" and is regarded as the first marketed "theme song" from a film; it was later used as the theme song for the popular radio and television sitcom Amos 'n' Andy.[44][45]

Release[edit]

Poster and advertisement of The Birth of a Nation on the second week of release including preview images from the film

Theatrical run[edit]

The first public showing of the film, then called The Clansman, was on January 1 and 2, 1915, at the Loring Opera House in Riverside, California.[49] The second night, it was sold out and people were turned away.[50] It was shown on February 8, 1915, to an audience of 3,000 people at Clune's Auditorium in downtown Los Angeles.[51]

The film's backers understood that the film needed a massive publicity campaign if they were to cover the immense cost of producing it. A major part of this campaign was the release of the film in a roadshow theatrical release. This allowed Griffith to charge premium prices for tickets, sell souvenirs, and build excitement around the film before giving it a wide release. For several months, Griffith's team traveled to various cities to show the film for one or two nights before moving on. This strategy was immensely successful.[38]

Change of title[edit]

The title was changed to The Birth of a Nation before the March 2 New York opening.[31]: 329  However, Dixon copyrighted the title The Birth of a Nation in 1905,[31]: 329  and it was used in the press as early as January 2, 1915,[52][53] while it was still referred to as The Clansman in October.[54]

Special screenings[edit]

White House showing[edit]

The Birth of a Nation was the first movie shown in the White House, in the East Room, on February 18, 1915.[55] (An earlier movie, the Italian Cabiria (1914), was shown on the lawn.) It was attended by President Woodrow Wilson, members of his family, and members of his Cabinet.[56] Both Dixon and Griffith were present.[57]: 126  As put by Dixon, not an impartial source, "it repeated the triumph of the first showing".[33]: 299 

There is dispute about Wilson's attitude toward the movie. A newspaper reported that he "received many letters protesting against his alleged action in Indorsing the pictures [sic]", including a letter from Massachusetts Congressman Thomas Chandler Thacher.[56] The showing of the movie had caused "several near-riots".[56] When former Assistant Attorney General William H. Lewis and A. Walters, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, called at the White House "to add their protests", President Wilson's private secretary, Joseph Tumulty, showed them a letter he had written to Thacher on Wilson's behalf. According to the letter, Wilson had been "entirely unaware of the character of the play [movie] before it was presented and has at no time expressed his approbation of it. Its exhibition at the White House was a courtesy extended to an old acquaintance."[56] Dixon, in his autobiography, quotes Wilson as saying, when Dixon proposed showing the movie at the White House, that "I am pleased to be able to do this little thing for you, because a long time ago you took a day out of your busy life to do something for me."[33]: 298  What Dixon had done for Wilson was to suggest him for an honorary degree, which Wilson received, from Dixon's alma mater, Wake Forest College.[58]: 512 

A quote from Woodrow Wilson's History of the American People is included in the film's intertitles.

Dixon had been a fellow graduate student in history with Wilson at Johns Hopkins University and, in 1913, dedicated his historical novel about Lincoln, The Southerner, to "our first Southern-born president since Lincoln, my friend and collegemate Woodrow Wilson".

The evidence that Wilson knew "the character of the play" in advance of seeing it is circumstantial but very strong: "Given Dixon's career and the notoriety attached to the play The Clansman, it is not unreasonable to assume that Wilson must have had some idea of at least the general tenor of the film."[58]: 513  The movie was based on a best-selling novel and was preceded by a stage version (play) which was received with protests in several cities—in some cities it was prohibited—and received a great deal of news coverage. Wilson issued no protest when the Evening Star, at that time Washington's "newspaper of record", reported in advance of the showing, in language suggesting a press release from Dixon and Griffiths, that Dixon was "a schoolmate of President Wilson and is an intimate friend", and that Wilson's interest in it "is due to the great lesson of peace it teaches".[55] Wilson, and only Wilson, is quoted by name in the movie for his observations on American history, and the title of Wilson's book (History of the American People) is mentioned as well.[58]: 518–519  The three title cards with quotations from Wilson's book read:

"Adventurers swarmed out of the North, as much the enemies of one race as of the other, to cozen, beguile and use the negroes... [Ellipsis in the original.] In the villages the negroes were the office holders, men who knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences."

"... The policy of the congressional leaders wrought…a veritable overthrow of civilization in the South... in their determination to 'put the white South under the heel of the black South.'" [Ellipses and underscore in the original.]

"The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation... until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the southern country." [Ellipsis in the original.]

In the same book, Wilson has harsh words about the abyss between the original goals of the Klan and that into which it evolved.[59][60] Dixon has been accused of misquoting Wilson.[58]: 518 

In 1937, a popular magazine reported that Wilson said of the film, "It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true."[61] Wilson over the years had several times used the metaphor of illuminating history as if by lightning and he may well have said it at the time. The accuracy of his saying it was "terribly true" is disputed by historians; there is no contemporary documentation of the remark.[58]: 521 [62] Vachel Lindsay, a popular poet of the time, is known to have referred to the film as "art by lightning flash."[63]

Showing in the Raleigh Hotel ballroom[edit]

The next day, February 19, 1915, Griffith and Dixon held a showing of the film in the Raleigh Hotel ballroom, which they had hired for the occasion. Early that morning, Dixon called on a North Carolina friend, Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy. Daniels set up a meeting that morning for Dixon with Edward Douglass White, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Initially Justice White was not interested in seeing the film, but when Dixon told him it was the "true story" of Reconstruction and the Klan's role in "saving the South", White, recalling his youth in Louisiana, jumped to attention and said: "I was a member of the Klan, sir".[64]: 171–172  With White agreeing to see the film, the rest of the Supreme Court followed. In addition to the entire Supreme Court, in the audience were "many members of Congress and members of the diplomatic corps",[65][66] the Secretary of the Navy, 38 members of the Senate, and about 50 members of the House of Representatives. The audience of 600 "cheered and applauded throughout."[32]: 425 [67][68]

Consequences[edit]

In Griffith's words, the showings to the president and the entire Supreme Court conferred an "honor" upon Birth of a Nation.[58][page needed] Dixon and Griffith used this commercially.

The following day, Griffith and Dixon transported the film to New York City for review by the National Board of Censorship. They presented the film as "endorsed" by the President and the cream of Washington society. The Board approved the film by 15 to 8.[69]: 127 

A warrant to close the theater in which the movie was to open was dismissed after a long-distance call to the White House confirmed that the film had been shown there.[33]: 303 [64]: 173 

Justice White was very angry when advertising for the film stated that he approved it, and he threatened to denounce it publicly.[58]: 519 

Dixon, a racist and white supremacist,[70] clearly was rattled and upset by criticism by African Americans that the movie encouraged hatred against them, and he wanted the endorsement of as many powerful men as possible to offset such criticism.[32] Dixon always vehemently denied having anti-black prejudices—despite the way his books promoted white supremacy—and stated: "My books are hard reading for a Negro, and yet the Negroes, in denouncing them, are unwittingly denouncing one of their greatest friends".[32]: 424 

In a letter sent on May 1, 1915, to Joseph P. Tumulty, Wilson's secretary, Dixon wrote: "The real purpose of my film was to revolutionize Northern sentiments by a presentation of history that would transform every man in the audience into a good Democrat... Every man who comes out of the theater is a Southern partisan for life!"[32]: 430  In a letter to President Wilson sent on September 5, 1915, Dixon boasted: "This play is transforming the entire population of the North and the West into sympathetic Southern voters. There will never be an issue of your segregation policy".[32]: 430  Dixon was alluding to the fact that Wilson, upon becoming president in 1913, had allowed cabinet members to impose segregation on federal workplaces in Washington, D.C. by reducing the number of black employees through demotion or dismissal.[71]

New opening titles on re-release[edit]

One famous part of the film was added by Griffith only on the second run of the film[72] and is missing from most online versions of the film (presumably taken from first run prints).[73]

These are the second and third of three opening title cards that defend the film. The added titles read:

A PLEA FOR THE ART OF THE MOTION PICTURE:

We do not fear censorship, for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue—the same liberty that is conceded to the art of the written word—that art to which we owe the Bible and the works of Shakespeare and If in this work we have conveyed to the mind the ravages of war to the end that war may be held in abhorrence, this effort will not have been in vain.

Various film historians have expressed a range of views about these titles. To Nicholas Andrew Miller, this shows that "Griffith's greatest achievement in The Birth of a Nation was that he brought the cinema's capacity for spectacle... under the rein of an outdated, but comfortably literary form of historical narrative. Griffith's models... are not the pioneers of film spectacle... but the giants of literary narrative".[74] On the other hand, S. Kittrell Rushing complains about Griffith's "didactic" title-cards,[75] while Stanley Corkin complains that Griffith "masks his idea of fact in the rhetoric of high art and free expression" and creates a film that "erodes the very ideal" of liberty that he asserts.[76]

Contemporary reception[edit]

Press reaction[edit]

The New York Times gave it a quite brief review, calling it "melodramatic" and "inflammatory", adding that: "A great deal might be said concerning the spirit revealed in Mr. Dixon's review of the unhappy chapter of Reconstruction and concerning the sorry service rendered by its plucking at old wounds."[77] Variety praised Griffith's direction, claiming he "set such a pace it will take a long time before one will come along that can top it in point of production, acting, photography and direction. Every bit of the film was laid, played and made in America. One may find some flaws in the general running of the picture, but they are so small and insignificant that the bigness and greatness of the entire film production itself completely crowds out any little defects that might be singled out."[78]

Box office[edit]

A 1916 newspaper advertisement announcing the film's screening in El Paso, Texas

The box office gross of The Birth of a Nation is not known and has been the subject of exaggeration.[79] When the film opened, the tickets were sold at premium prices. The film played at the Liberty Theater at Times Square in New York City for 44 weeks with tickets priced at $2.20 (equivalent to $59 in 2021).[80] By the end of 1917, Epoch reported to its shareholders cumulative receipts of $4.8 million,[81] and Griffith's own records put Epoch's worldwide earnings from the film at $5.2 million as of 1919,[82] although the distributor's share of the revenue at this time was much lower than the exhibition gross. In the biggest cities, Epoch negotiated with individual theater owners for a percentage of the box office; elsewhere, the producer sold all rights in a particular state to a single distributor (an arrangement known as "state's rights" distribution).[83] The film historian Richard Schickel says that under the state's rights contracts, Epoch typically received about 10% of the box office gross—which theater owners often underreported—and concludes that "Birth certainly generated more than $60 million in box-office business in its first run".[81]

The film held the mantle of the highest-grossing film until it was overtaken by Gone with the Wind (1939), another film about the Civil War and Reconstruction era.[84][85] By 1940 Time magazine estimated the film's cumulative gross rental (the distributor's earnings) at approximately $15 million.[86] For years Variety had the gross rental listed as $50 million, but in 1977 repudiated the claim and revised its estimate down to $5 million.[81] It is not known for sure how much the film has earned in total, but producer Harry Aitken put its estimated earnings at $15–18 million in a letter to a prospective investor in a proposed sound version.[82] It is likely the film earned over $20 million for its backers and generated $50–100 million in box office receipts.[4] In a 2015 Time article, Richard Corliss estimated the film had earned the equivalent of $1.8 billion adjusted for inflation, a milestone that at the time had only been surpassed by Titanic (1997) and Avatar (2009) in nominal earnings.[87]

Criticism[edit]

Like Dixon's novels and play, Birth of a Nation received considerable criticism, both before and after its premiere. Dixon, who believed the film to be entirely truthful and historically accurate, attributed this to "Sectionalists", i.e. non-Southerners who in Dixon's opinion were hostile to the "truth" about the South.[33]: 301, 303  It was to counter these "sinister forces" and the "dangerous... menace" that Dixon and Griffiths sought "the backing" of President Wilson and the Supreme Court.[33]: 296 

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) protested at premieres of the film in numerous cities. According to the historian David Copeland, "by the time of the movie's March 3 [1915] premiere in New York City, its subject matter had embroiled the film in charges of racism, protests, and calls for censorship, which began after the Los Angeles branch of the NAACP requested the city's film board ban the movie. Since film boards were composed almost entirely of whites, few review boards initially banned Griffith's picture".[88] The NAACP also conducted a public education campaign, publishing articles protesting the film's fabrications and inaccuracies, organizing petitions against it, and conducting education on the facts of the war and Reconstruction.[89] Because of the lack of success in NAACP's actions to ban the film, on April 17, 1915, NAACP secretary Mary Childs Nerney wrote to NAACP Executive Committee member George Packard: "I am utterly disgusted with the situation in regard to The Birth of a Nation ... kindly remember that we have put six weeks of constant effort of this thing and have gotten nowhere."[90] W. E. B. Du Bois's biographer David Levering Lewis opined that "... The Birth of a Nation and the NAACP helped make each other", in that the NAACP campaign in one sense served as advertising for the film, but that it also "... mobilized thousands of black and white men and women in large cities across the country... who had been unaware of the existence of the [NAACP] or indifferent to it."[91]

Newspaper editor and activist William Monroe Trotter led a demonstration against the film, which resulted in a riot.

Jane Addams, an American social worker and social reformer, and the founder of Hull House, voiced her reaction to the film in an interview published by the New York Post on March 13, 1915, just ten days after the film was released.[92] She stated that "One of the most unfortunate things about this film is that it appeals to race prejudice upon the basis of conditions of half a century ago, which have nothing to do with the facts we have to consider to-day. Even then it does not tell the whole truth. It is claimed that the play is historical: but history is easy to misuse."[92] In New York, Rabbi Stephen Samuel Wise told the press after seeing The Birth of a Nation that the film was "an indescribable foul and loathsome libel on a race of human beings".[32]: 426  In Boston, Booker T. Washington wrote a newspaper column asking readers to boycott the film,[32]: 426  while the civil rights activist William Monroe Trotter organized demonstrations against the film, which he predicted was going to worsen race relations. On Saturday, April 10, and again on April 17, Trotter and a group of other blacks tried to buy tickets for the show's premiere at the Tremont Theater and were refused. They stormed the box office in protest, 260 police on standby rushed in, and a general melee ensued. Trotter and ten others were arrested.[93] The following day a huge demonstration was staged at Faneuil Hall.[17][94] In Washington D.C, the Reverend Francis James Grimké published a pamphlet entitled "Fighting a Vicious Film" that challenged the historical accuracy of The Birth of a Nation on a scene-by-scene basis.[32]: 427 

When the film was released, riots also broke out in Philadelphia and other major cities in the United States. The film's inflammatory nature was a catalyst for gangs of whites to attack blacks. On April 24, 1916, the Chicago American reported that a white man murdered a black teenager in Lafayette, Indiana, after seeing the film, although there has been some controversy as to whether the murderer had actually seen The Birth of a Nation.[95] Over a century later, a Harvard University research paper found that "[o]n average, lynchings in a county rose fivefold in the month after [the film] arrived."[96] The mayor of Cedar Rapids, Iowa was the first of twelve mayors to ban the film in 1915 out of concern that it would promote race prejudice, after meeting with a delegation of black citizens.[97] The NAACP set up a precedent-setting national boycott of the film, likely seen as the most successful effort. Additionally, they organized a mass demonstration when the film was screened in Boston, and it was banned in three states and several cities.[98]

Both Griffith and Dixon in letters to the press dismissed African-American protests against The Birth of a Nation.[99] In a letter to The New York Globe, Griffith wrote that his film was "an influence against the intermarriage of blacks and whites".[99] Dixon likewise called the NAACP "the Negro Intermarriage Society" and said it was against The Birth of a Nation "for one reason only—because it opposes the marriage of blacks to whites".[99] Griffith—indignant at the film's negative critical reception—wrote letters to newspapers and published a pamphlet in which he accused his critics of censoring unpopular opinions.[100]

When Sherwin Lewis of The New York Globe wrote a piece that expressed criticism of the film's distorted portrayal of history and said that it was not worthy of constitutional protection because its purpose was to make a few "dirty dollars", Griffith responded that "the public should not be afraid to accept the truth, even though it might not like it". He also added that the man who wrote the editorial was "damaging my reputation as a producer" and "a liar and a coward".[49]

Audience reaction[edit]

The scene where Flora flees into the forest (pictured) pursued by the black character Gus moved a viewer to fire shots at the screen to help her.[101]

The Birth of a Nation was very popular, despite the film's controversy; it was unlike anything that American audiences had ever seen before.[102] The Los Angeles Times called it "the greatest picture ever made and the greatest drama ever filmed".[103] Mary Pickford said: "Birth of a Nation was the first picture that really made people take the motion picture industry seriously".[104] Glorifying the Klan to approving white audiences,[105] it became a national cultural phenomenon: merchandisers made Ku Klux hats and kitchen aprons, and ushers dressed in white Klan robes for openings. In New York there were Klan-themed balls and, in Chicago that Halloween, thousands of college students dressed in robes for a massive Klan-themed party.[106] The producers had 15 "detectives" at the Liberty Theater in New York City "to prevent disorder on the part of those who resent the 'reconstruction period' episodes depicted."[107]

The Reverend Charles Henry Parkhurst argued that the film was not racist, saying that it "was exactly true to history" by depicting freedmen as they were and, therefore, it was a "compliment to the black man" by showing how far black people had "advanced" since Reconstruction.[108] Critic Dolly Dalrymple wrote that, "when I saw it, it was far from silent... incessant murmurs of approval, roars of laughter, gasps of anxiety, and outbursts of applause greeted every new picture on the screen".[101] One man viewing the film was so moved by the scene where Flora Cameron flees Gus to avoid being raped that he took out his handgun and began firing at the screen in an effort to help her.[101] Katharine DuPre Lumpkin recalled watching the film as an 18-year-old in 1915 in her 1947 autobiography The Making of a Southerner: "Here was the black figure—and the fear of the white girl—though the scene blanked out just in time. Here were the sinister men the South scorned and the noble men the South revered. And through it all the Klan rode. All around me people sighed and shivered, and now and then shouted or wept, in their intensity."[109]

Sequel and spin-offs[edit]

D. W. Griffith made a film in 1916, called Intolerance, partly in response to the criticism that The Birth of a Nation received. Griffith made clear within numerous interviews that the film's title and main themes were chosen in response to those who he felt had been intolerant to The Birth of a Nation.[110] A sequel called The Fall of a Nation was released in 1916, depicting the invasion of the United States by a German-led confederation of European monarchies and criticizing pacifism in the context of the First World War. It was the first feature-length sequel in film history.[111] The film was directed by Thomas Dixon Jr., who adapted it from his novel of the same name. Despite its success in the foreign market, the film was not a success among American audiences,[12]: 102  and is now a lost film.[112]

In 1918, an American silent drama film directed by John W. Noble called The Birth of a Race was released as a direct response to The Birth of a Nation.[113] The film was an ambitious project by producer Emmett Jay Scott to challenge Griffith's film and tell another side of the story, but was ultimately unsuccessful.[114] In 1920, African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux released Within Our Gates, a response to The Birth of a Nation. Within Our Gates depicts the hardships faced by African Americans during the era of Jim Crow laws.[115] Griffith's film was remixed in 2004 as Rebirth of a Nation by DJ Spooky.[116] Quentin Tarantino has said that he made his film Django Unchained (2012) to counter the falsehoods of The Birth of a Nation.[117]

Influence[edit]

In November 1915, William Joseph Simmons revived the Klan in Atlanta, Georgia, holding a cross burning at Stone Mountain.[32]: 430 [118] The historian John Hope Franklin observed that, had it not been for The Birth of a Nation, the Klan might not have been reborn.[32]: 430–431 

Franklin wrote in 1979 that "The influence of Birth of a Nation on the current view of Reconstruction has been greater than any other single force", but that "It is not at all difficult to find inaccuracies and distortions" in the movie.[32]: 433, 427 

Current reception[edit]

Critical response[edit]

Roger Ebert deemed The Birth of a Nation "a great film that argues for evil".

Released in 1915, The Birth of a Nation has been credited as groundbreaking among its contemporaries for its innovative application of the medium of film. According to the film historian Kevin Brownlow, the film was "astounding in its time" and initiated "so many advances in film-making technique that it was rendered obsolete within a few years".[119] The content of the work, however, has received widespread criticism for its blatant racism. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote:

Certainly The Birth of a Nation (1915) presents a challenge for modern audiences. Unaccustomed to silent films and uninterested in film history, they find it quaint and not to their taste. Those evolved enough to understand what they are looking at find the early and wartime scenes brilliant, but cringe during the postwar and Reconstruction scenes, which are racist in the ham-handed way of an old minstrel show or a vile comic pamphlet.[120]

Despite its controversial story, the film has been praised by film critics, with Ebert mentioning its use as a historical tool: "The Birth of a Nation is not a bad film because it argues for evil. Like Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, it is a great film that argues for evil. To understand how it does so is to learn a great deal about film, and even something about evil."[120]

According to a 2002 article in the Los Angeles Times, the film facilitated the refounding of the Ku Klux Klan in 1915.[121] History.com states that "There is no doubt that Birth of a Nation played no small part in winning wide public acceptance" for the KKK, and that throughout the film "African Americans are portrayed as brutish, lazy, morally degenerate, and dangerous."[122] David Duke used the film to recruit Klansmen in the 1970s.[123]

In 2013, the American critic Richard Brody wrote The Birth of a Nation was:

... a seminal commercial spectacle but also a decisively original work of art—in effect, the founding work of cinematic realism, albeit a work that was developed to pass lies off as reality. It's tempting to think of the film's influence as evidence of the inherent corruption of realism as a cinematic mode—but it's even more revealing to acknowledge the disjunction between its beauty, on the one hand, and, on the other, its injustice and falsehood. The movie's fabricated events shouldn't lead any viewer to deny the historical facts of slavery and Reconstruction. But they also shouldn't lead to a denial of the peculiar, disturbingly exalted beauty of Birth of a Nation, even in its depiction of immoral actions and its realization of blatant propaganda. The worst thing about The Birth of a Nation is how good it is. The merits of its grand and enduring aesthetic make it impossible to ignore and, despite its disgusting content, also make it hard not to love. And it's that very conflict that renders the film all the more despicable, the experience of the film more of a torment—together with the acknowledgment that Griffith, whose short films for Biograph were already among the treasures of world cinema, yoked his mighty talent to the cause of hatred (which, still worse, he sincerely depicted as virtuous).[117]

Brody also argued that Griffith unintentionally undercut his own thesis in the film, citing the scene before the Civil War when the Cameron family offers up lavish hospitality to the Stoneman family who travel past mile after mile of slaves working the cotton fields of South Carolina to reach the Cameron home. Brody maintained that a modern audience can see that the wealth of the Camerons comes from the slaves, forced to do back-breaking work picking the cotton. Likewise, Brody argued that the scene where people in South Carolina celebrate the Confederate victory at the Battle of Bull Run by dancing around the "eerie flare of a bonfire" implies "a dance of death", foreshadowing the destruction of Sherman's March that was to come. In the same way, Brody wrote that the scene where the Klan dumps Gus's body off at the doorstep of Lynch is meant to have the audience cheering, but modern audiences find the scene "obscene and horrifying". Finally, Brody argued that the end of the film, where the Klan prevents defenseless African Americans from exercising their right to vote by pointing guns at them, today seems "unjust and cruel".[117]

In an article for The Atlantic, film critic Ty Burr deemed The Birth of a Nation the most influential film in history while criticizing its portrayal of black men as savage.[124] Richard Corliss of Time wrote that Griffith "established in the hundreds of one- and two-reelers he directed a cinematic textbook, a fully formed visual language, for the generations that followed. 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." Corliss praised the film's "brilliant storytelling technique" and noted that "The Birth of a Nation is nearly as antiwar as it is antiblack. The Civil War scenes, which consume only 30 minutes of the extravaganza, emphasize not the national glory but the human cost of combat. ... Griffith may have been a racist politically, but his refusal to find uplift in the South's war against the Union—and, implicitly, in any war at all—reveals him as a cinematic humanist."[87]

Accolades[edit]

In 1992, the U.S. Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.[125] The American Film Institute recognized the film by ranking it #44 within the AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list in 1998.

Historical portrayal[edit]

The film remains controversial due to its interpretation of American history. University of Houston historian Steven Mintz summarizes its message as follows: "Reconstruction was an unmitigated disaster, African-Americans could never be integrated into white society as equals, and the violent actions of the Ku Klux Klan were justified to reestablish honest government".[126] The South is portrayed as a victim. The first overt mentioning of the war is the scene in which Abraham Lincoln signs the call for the first 75,000 volunteers. However, the first aggression in the Civil War, made when the Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in 1861, is not mentioned in the film.[127] The film suggested that the Ku Klux Klan restored order to the postwar South, which was depicted as endangered by abolitionists, freedmen, and carpetbagging Republican politicians from the North. This is similar to the Dunning School of historiography which was current in academe at the time.[128] The film is slightly less extreme than the books upon which it is based, in which Dixon misrepresented Reconstruction as a nightmarish time when black men ran amok, storming into weddings to rape white women with impunity.[109]

The film portrayed President Abraham Lincoln as a friend of the South and refers to him as "the Great Heart".[129] The two romances depicted in the film, Phil Stoneman with Margaret Cameron and Ben Cameron with Elsie Stoneman, reflect Griffith's retelling of history. The couples are used as a metaphor, representing the film's broader message of the need for the reconciliation of the North and South to defend white supremacy.[130] Among both couples, there is an attraction that forms before the war, stemming from the friendship between their families. With the war, however, both families are split apart, and their losses culminate in the end of the war with the defense of white supremacy. One of the intertitles clearly sums up the message of unity: "The former enemies of North and South are united again in defense of their Aryan birthright."[131]

The film further reinforced the popular belief held by whites, especially in the South, of Reconstruction as a disaster. In his 1929 book The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln, Claude Bowers treated The Birth of a Nation as a factually accurate account of Reconstruction.[32]: 432  In The Tragic Era, Bowers presented every black politician in the South as corrupt, portrayed Republican Representative Thaddeus Stevens as a vicious "race traitor" intent upon making blacks the equal of whites, and praised the Klan for "saving civilization" in the South.[32]: 432  Bowers wrote about black empowerment that the worst sort of "scum" from the North like Stevens "inflamed the Negro's egoism and soon the lustful assaults began. Rape was the foul daughter of Reconstruction!"[32]: 432 

Academic assessment[edit]

The American historian John Hope Franklin wrote that not only did Claude Bowers treat The Birth of a Nation as accurate history, but his version of history seemed to be drawn from The Birth of a Nation.[32]: 432  Historian E. Merton Coulter treated The Birth of a Nation as historically correct and painted a vivid picture of "black beasts" running amok, encouraged by alcohol-sodden, corrupt and vengeful black Republican politicians.[32]: 432  Franklin wrote as recently as the 1970s that the popular journalist Alistair Cooke in his books and TV shows was still essentially following the version of history set out by The Birth of a Nation, noting that Cooke had much sympathy with the suffering of whites in Reconstruction while having almost nothing to say about the suffering of blacks or about how blacks were stripped of almost all their rights after 1877.[32]: 432 

The character of Congressman Stoneman in the film is similar to Thaddeus Stevens (pictured).

Veteran film reviewer Roger Ebert wrote:

... stung by criticisms that the second half of his masterpiece was racist in its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan and its brutal images of blacks, Griffith tried to make amends in Intolerance (1916), which criticized prejudice. And in Broken Blossoms he told perhaps the first interracial love story in the movies—even though, to be sure, it's an idealized love with no touching.[132]

Despite some similarities between the Congressman Stoneman character and Rep. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Rep. Stevens did not have the family members described and did not move to South Carolina during Reconstruction. He died in Washington, D.C. in 1868. However, Stevens's biracial housekeeper, Lydia Hamilton Smith, was considered his common-law wife, and was generously provided for in his will.[133]

In the film, Abraham Lincoln is portrayed in a positive light due to his belief in conciliatory postwar policies toward Southern whites. The president's views are opposite those of Austin Stoneman, a character presented in a negative light, who acts as an antagonist. The assassination of Lincoln marks the transition from war to Reconstruction, each of which periods has one of the two "acts" of the film.[134] In including the assassination, the film also establishes to the audience that the plot of the movie has historical basis.[135] Franklin wrote the film's depiction of Reconstruction as a hellish time when black freedmen ran amok, raping and killing whites with impunity until the Klan stepped in is not supported by the facts.[32]: 427–428  Franklin wrote that most freed slaves continued to work for their former masters in Reconstruction for the want of a better alternative and, though relations between freedmen and their former masters were not friendly, very few freedmen sought revenge against the people who had enslaved them.[32]: 427 

The depictions of mass Klan paramilitary actions do not seem to have historical equivalents, although there were incidents in 1871 where Klan groups traveled from other areas in fairly large numbers to aid localities in disarming local companies of the all-black portion of the state militia under various justifications, prior to the eventual Federal troop intervention, and the organized Klan continued activities as small groups of "night riders".[136]

The civil rights movement and other social movements created a new generation of historians, such as scholar Eric Foner, who led a reassessment of Reconstruction. Building on W. E. B. DuBois' work, but also adding new sources, they focused on achievements of the African American and white Republican coalitions, such as establishment of universal public education and charitable institutions in the South and extension of suffrage to black men. In response, the Southern-dominated Democratic Party and its affiliated white militias had used extensive terrorism, intimidation and even assassinations to suppress African-American leaders and voting in the 1870s and to regain power.[137]

Legacy[edit]

Film innovations[edit]

In his review of The Birth of a Nation in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, Jonathan Kline writes that "with countless artistic innovations, Griffith essentially created contemporary film language... virtually every film is beholden to [The Birth of a Nation] in one way, shape or form. Griffith introduced the use of dramatic close-ups, tracking shots, and other expressive camera movements; parallel action sequences, crosscutting, and other editing techniques". He added that "the fact that The Birth of a Nation remains respected and studied to this day—despite its subject matter—reveals its lasting importance."[138]

Griffith pioneered such camera techniques as close-ups, fade-outs, and a carefully staged battle sequence with hundreds of extras made to look like thousands.[10] The Birth of a Nation also contained many new artistic techniques, such as color tinting for dramatic purposes, building up the plot to an exciting climax, dramatizing history alongside fiction, and featuring its own musical score written for an orchestra.[37]

Home media and restorations[edit]

For many years, The Birth of a Nation was poorly represented in home media and restorations. This stemmed from several factors, one of which was the fact that Griffith and others had frequently reworked the film, leaving no definitive version. According to the silent film website Brenton Film, many home media releases of the film consisted of "poor quality DVDs with different edits, scores, running speeds and usually in definitely unoriginal black and white".[139]

One of the earliest high-quality home versions was film preservationist David Shepard's 1992 transfer of a 16mm print for VHS and LaserDisc release via Image Entertainment. A short documentary, The Making of The Birth of a Nation, newly produced and narrated by Shepard, was also included. Both were released on DVD by Image in 1998 and the United Kingdom's Eureka Entertainment in 2000.[139]

In the UK, Photoplay Productions restored the Museum of Modern Art's 35mm print that was the source of Shepard's 16 mm print, though they also augmented it with extra material from the British Film Institute. It was also given a full orchestral recording of the original Breil score. Though broadcast on Channel 4 television and theatrically screened many times, Photoplay's 1993 version was never released on home video.[139]

Shepard's transfer and documentary were reissued in the US by Kino Video in 2002, this time in a 2-DVD set with added extras on the second disc. These included several Civil War shorts also directed by D. W. Griffith.[139] In 2011, Kino prepared a HD transfer of a 35 mm negative from the Paul Killiam Collection. They added some material from the Library of Congress and gave it a new compilation score. This version was released on Blu-ray by Kino in the US, Eureka in the UK (as part of their "Masters of Cinema" collection) and Divisa Home Video in Spain.[139]

In 2015, the year of the film's centenary, Photoplay Productions' Patrick Stanbury, in conjunction with the British Film Institute, carried out the first full restoration. It mostly used new 4K scans of the LoC's original camera negative, along with other early generation material. It, too, was given the original Breil score and featured the film's original tinting for the first time since its 1915 release. The restoration was released on a 2-Blu-ray set in the UK and US by the BFI and Twilight Time, alongside a host of extras, including many other newly restored Civil War-related films from the period.[139]

In popular culture[edit]

I've reclaimed this title and re-purposed it as a tool to challenge racism and white supremacy in America, to inspire a riotous disposition toward any and all injustice in this country (and abroad) and to promote the kind of honest confrontation that will galvanize our society toward healing and sustained systemic change.[143]

Negative reaction[edit]

  • In 2019, Bowling Green State University renamed its Gish Film Theater, which was named for actress Lilian Gish, after protests alleging that using her name is inappropriate because of her role in Birth of a Nation.[146]

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ Runtime depends on projection speed ranging 16 to 24 frames per second

References[edit]

  1. ^ "D. W. Griffith: Hollywood Independent". Cobbles.com. June 26, 1917. Archived from the original on August 24, 2013. Retrieved July 3, 2013.
  2. ^ "The Birth of a Nation (U)". Western Import Co. Ltd. British Board of Film Classification. Archived from the original on March 5, 2016. Retrieved August 20, 2013.
  3. ^ Jump up to:a b Hall, Sheldon; Neale, Stephen (2010). Epics, spectacles, and blockbusters: a Hollywood history. Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television. Wayne State University Press. p. 270 (note 2.78). ISBN 978-0-8143-3697-7. In common with most film historians, he estimates that The Birth of Nation cost "just a little more than $100,000" to produce...
  4. ^ Jump up to:a b Monaco, James (2009). How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, and Beyond. Oxford University Press. p. 262. ISBN 978-0-19-975579-0. The Birth of a Nation, costing an unprecedented and, many believed, thoroughly foolhardy $110,000, eventually returned $20 million and more. The actual figure is hard to calculate because the film was distributed on a "states' rights" basis in which licenses to show the film were sold outright. The actual cash generated by The Birth of a Nation may have been as much as $50 million to $100 million, an almost inconceivable amount for such an early film.
  5. ^ "Thomas Dixon Dies, Wrote Clansman". The New York Times. April 4, 1946. p. 23.
  6. ^ The Birth of a Nation. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved August 1, 2022.
  7. ^ "The Birth of a Nation (1915)". filmsite.org. Archived from the original on September 3, 2011.
  8. ^ Jump up to:a b Niderost, Eric (October 2005). "'The Birth of a Nation': When Hollywood Glorified the KKK". HistoryNet. Retrieved June 7, 2021.
  9. ^ Hubbert, Julie (2011). Celluloid Symphonies: Texts and Contexts in Film Music History. University of California Press. p. 12. ISBN 978-0-520-94743-6.
  10. ^ Jump up to:a b Norton, Mary Beth (2015). A People and a Nation, Volume II: Since 1865, Brief Edition. Cengage Learning. p. 487. ISBN 978-1-305-14278-7.
  11. ^ "Souvenir. The Birth of a Nation" (PDF). 1915. Retrieved April 5, 2019.
  12. ^ Jump up to:a b Slide, Anthony (2004). American Racist: The Life and Films of Thomas Dixon. Also on Project MUSE: http://muse.jhu.edu/book/10080. University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-2328-8. Archived from the original on January 6, 2017. {{cite book}}: External link in |others= (help)
  13. ^ Rampell, Ed (March 3, 2015). "'The Birth of a Nation': The most racist movie ever made". The Washington Post. Retrieved June 7, 2021.
  14. ^ "MJ Movie Reviews – Birth of a Nation, The (1915) by Dan DeVore". Archived from the original on July 7, 2009.
  15. ^ Armstrong, Eric M. (February 26, 2010). "Revered and Reviled: D.W. Griffith's 'The Birth of a Nation'". The Moving Arts Film Journal. Archived from the original on May 29, 2010. Retrieved April 13, 2010.
  16. ^ Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense. Beacon Press. 2017. p. 81. The Birth of a Nation was an instant success across the nation, grossing more than any prior motion picture ... white audiences throughout the nation enjoyed the romantic depiction of the Old South.
  17. ^ Jump up to:a b "The Black Activist Who Fought Against D. W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation"". The New Yorker. Retrieved March 11, 2022.
  18. ^ "Top Ten – Top 10 Banned Films of the 20th century – Top 10 – Top 10 List – Top 10 Banned Movies – Censored Movies – Censored Films". Alternativereel.com. Archived from the original on May 12, 2012. Retrieved July 3, 2013.
  19. ^ "Complete National Film Registry Listing". Library of Congress. Retrieved May 19, 2020.
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  25. ^ Griffith followed the then-dominant Dunning School or "Tragic Era" view of Reconstruction presented by early 20th-century historians such as William Archibald Dunning and Claude G. Bowers.Stokes 2007, pp. 190–191.
  26. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e Stokes 2007
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  32. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w Franklin, John Hope (Autumn 1979). "The Birth of a Nation: Propaganda as History". Massachusetts Review. 20 (3): 417–434. JSTOR 25088973.
  33. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f Dixon, Thomas Jr. (1984). Crowe, Karen (ed.). Southern horizons: the autobiography of Thomas Dixon. Alexandria, Virginia: IWV Publishing. OCLC 11398740.
  34. ^ Lynskey, Dorian (March 31, 2015). "Still lying about history". Slate. Retrieved February 27, 2018.
  35. ^ Jump up to:a b Crowe, Karen (1984). "Preface". In Crowe, Karen (ed.). Southern horizons : the autobiography of Thomas Dixon. Alexandria, Virginia: IWV Publishing. pp. xv–xxxiv. OCLC 11398740.
  36. ^ Merritt, Russell (Autumn 1972). "Dixon, Griffith, and the Southern Legend". Cinema Journal. 12 (1): 26–45. doi:10.2307/1225402. JSTOR 1225402.
  37. ^ Jump up to:a b c Stokes, Melvyn (2007). D.W. Griffith's the Birth of a Nation: A History of "the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time". Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. pp. 105, 122, 124, 178. ISBN 978-0-19-533678-8.
  38. ^ Jump up to:a b c Eagan, Daniel (2010). America's film legacy: the authoritative guide to the landmark movies in the National Film Registry. National Film Preservation Board (U.S.). New York: Continuum. pp. 42–44. ISBN 9781441116475. OCLC 676697377.
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  40. ^ Seelye, Katharine Q. (June 10, 2002). "When Hollywood's Big Guns Come Right From the Source". The New York Times.
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  42. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Hickman 2006, p. 77.
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  45. ^ Jump up to:a b Marks, Martin Miller (1997). Music and the Silent Film: Contexts and Case Studies, 1895–1924. Oxford University Press. pp. 127–135. ISBN 978-0-19-536163-6.
  46. ^ Qureshi, Bilal (September 20, 2018). "The Anthemic Allure Of 'Dixie,' An Enduring Confederate Monument".
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  48. ^ Capps, Kriston (May 23, 2017). "Why Remix The Birth of a Nation?". The Atlantic. Retrieved February 28, 2018.
  49. ^ Jump up to:a b Lennig, Arthur (April 2004). http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A138527522/GPS All the online versions are missing the 8 illustrations in the printed version. "Myth and Fact: The Reception of The Birth of a Nation". Film History. 16 (2): 117–141. doi:10.2979/FIL.2004.16.2.117. Archived from the original on December 22, 2014. Retrieved June 16, 2019. {{cite journal}}: External link in |others= (help)
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  73. ^ This includes the one at the Internet Movie Archive [1] and the Google video copy [2] Archived August 13, 2010, at the Wayback Machine and Veoh Watch Videos Online | The Birth of a Nation | Veoh.com Archived June 9, 2010, at the Wayback Machine. However, of multiple YouTube copies, one that has the full opening titles is DW GRIFFITH THE BIRTH OF A NATION PART 1 1915 on YouTube
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  77. ^ McEwan, Paul (2015). The Birth of a Nation. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 16. ISBN 978-1-844-57659-3. Retrieved June 24, 2019 – via Google Books.
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  95. ^ Gallen, Ira H. & Stern Seymour. D.W. Griffith's 100th Anniversary The Birth of a Nation (2014) pp. 47f.
  96. ^ "A Tarnished Silver Screen: How a racist film helped the Ku Klux Klan grow for generations". The Economist. March 27, 2021. Retrieved April 1, 2021.
  97. ^ Gaines, Jane M. (2001). Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 334.
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  102. ^ McEwan, Paul (2015). The Birth of a Nation. London: Palgrave. p. 12. ISBN 978-1-84457-657-9.
  103. ^ Rylance, David. "Breech Birth: The Receptions To D.W. Griffith's The Birth Of A Nation" pp. 1–20 from Australasian Journal of American Studies, Volume 24, No. 2, December 2005, p. 1.
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  108. ^ Rylance, David. "Breech Birth: The Receptions To D.W. Griffith's The Birth Of A Nation" pp. 1–20 from Australasian Journal of American Studies, Volume 24, No. 2, December 2005, pp. 11–12.
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  113. ^ Kemp, Bill (February 7, 2016). "Notorious silent movie drew local protests". The Pantagraph. Archived from the original on February 8, 2016. Retrieved April 11, 2016.
  114. ^ Stokes 2007, p. 166
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  117. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Brody, Richard (February 15, 2017). "'C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America', a Faux Documentary Skewers Real White Supremacy". The New Yorker. Retrieved February 26, 2018.
  118. ^ "Essay: The Ku Klux Klan". Southern Poverty Law Center. Retrieved February 15, 2020.
  119. ^ Brownlow, Kevin (1968). The Parade's Gone By.... University of California Press, p. 78. ISBN 0520030680.
  120. ^ Jump up to:a b Ebert, Roger (March 30, 2003). "The Birth of a Nation (1915)". RogerEbert.com. Archived from the original on February 24, 2011. Retrieved August 5, 2019.
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  122. ^ "Birth of A Nation Opens". history.com. A+E Networks. Archived from the original on November 29, 2016.
  123. ^ "100 Years Later, What's The Legacy Of 'Birth Of A Nation'?". NPR. February 8, 2015. Retrieved February 26, 2018.
  124. ^ "What Was the Most Influential Film in History?". The Atlantic. March 2017. Retrieved February 26, 2018.
  125. ^ "'The Birth of a Nation' Documents History". Los Angeles Times. January 4, 1993. Retrieved April 22, 2020.
  126. ^ Mintz, Steven. "Slavery in film: The Birth of a Nation (1915)". Digital History. Archived from the original on December 12, 2005. Retrieved November 18, 2018.
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  129. ^ Stokes 2007, p. 188.
  130. ^ "The Birth of a Nation: The Significance of Love, Romance, and Sexuality". Weebly. March 6, 2015. Archived from the original on December 8, 2015. Retrieved August 22, 2015.
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Bibliography[edit]

  • Addams, Jane, in Crisis: A Record of Darker Races, X (May 1915), 19, 41, and (June 1915), 88.
  • Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (1973).
  • Brodie, Fawn M. Thaddeus Stevens, Scourge of the South (New York, 1959), pp. 86–93. Corrects the historical record as to Dixon's false representation of Stevens in this film with regard to his racial views and relations with his housekeeper.
  • Chalmers, David M. Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (New York: 1965), p. 30
  • Franklin, John Hope. "Silent Cinema as Historical Mythmaker". In Myth America: A Historical Anthology, Volume II. 1997. Gerster, Patrick, and Cords, Nicholas. (editors.) Brandywine Press, St. James, NY. ISBN 978-1-881089-97-1
  • Franklin, John Hope, "Propaganda as History" pp. 10–23 in Race and History: Selected Essays 1938–1988 (Louisiana State University Press, 1989); first published in The Massachusetts Review, 1979. Describes the history of the novel The Clan and this film.
  • Franklin, John Hope, Reconstruction After the Civil War (Chicago, 1961), pp. 5–7.
  • Hickman, Roger. Reel Music: Exploring 100 Years of Film Music (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006).
  • Hodapp, Christopher L., and Alice Von Kannon, Conspiracy Theories & Secret Societies For Dummies (Hoboken: Wiley, 2008) pp. 235–236.
  • Korngold, Ralph, Thaddeus Stevens. A Being Darkly Wise and Rudely Great (New York: 1955) pp. 72–76. corrects Dixon's false characterization of Stevens' racial views and of his dealings with his housekeeper.
  • Leab, Daniel J., From Sambo to Superspade (Boston, 1975), pp. 23–39.
  • New York Times, roundup of reviews of this film, March 7, 1915.
  • The New Republica, II (March 20, 1915), 185
  • Poole, W. Scott, Monsters in America: Our Historical Obsession with the Hideous and the Haunting (Waco, Texas: Baylor, 2011), 30. ISBN 978-1-60258-314-6
  • Simkins, Francis B., "New Viewpoints of Southern Reconstruction", Journal of Southern History, V (February 1939), pp. 49–61.
  • Stokes, Melvyn (2007). D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation: A History of "The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time". New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-804436-9. The latest study of the film's making and subsequent career.
  • Williamson, Joel, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina During Reconstruction (Chapel Hill, 1965). This book corrects Dixon's false reporting of Reconstruction, as shown in his novel, his play and this film.

Further reading[edit]

External links[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to The Birth of a Nation.
Wikisource has original text related to this article:

===

The Birth of a Nation (disambiguation)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Birth of a Nation may refer to:


===

The Birth of a Nation (2016 film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Birth of a Nation
The red stripes on the American flag consist entirely of painted figures of slaves and slave owners parallel to each other, running and wielding weapons, and the film's title replaces the white stars on top of the blue corner.
Theatrical release poster
Directed byNate Parker
Screenplay byNate Parker
Story by
  • Nate Parker
  • Jean McGianni Celestin
Produced by
Starring
CinematographyElliot Davis
Edited bySteven Rosenblum
Music byHenry Jackman
Production
companies
  • BRON Studios
  • Phantom Four
  • Mandalay Pictures
  • Tiny Giant Entertainment
  • Novofam Productions
  • Follow Through Productions
  • Infinity Entertainment
  • Oster Media
  • Point Made Films
  • Juniper Productions
  • Hit 55 Ventures
  • Creative Wealth Media Finance Corp.
Distributed byFox Searchlight Pictures
Release dates
  • January 25, 2016 (Sundance)
  • October 7, 2016 (United States)
Running time
120 minutes[1]
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$8.5 million[2]
Box office$16.8 million[2]

The Birth of a Nation is a 2016 American period drama film written and directed by Nate Parker in his directorial debut. It is based on the story of Nat Turner, the enslaved man who led a slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831. The film stars Parker as Turner, with Armie Hammer, Mark Boone Jr., Colman Domingo, Aunjanue Ellis, Dwight Henry, Aja Naomi King, Esther Scott, Roger Guenveur Smith, Gabrielle Union, Penelope Ann Miller, and Jackie Earle Haley in supporting roles. Parker also petitioned financiers to invest in the film, ultimately getting an $8.5 million production budget, and started filming in May 2015 in Georgia. The film's title is an ironic callback to the 1915 KKK-focused silent film.

The Birth of a Nation premiered in competition at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, where Fox Searchlight Pictures bought worldwide rights to the film in a $17.5 million deal (at the time the largest deal at the festival), and won the Audience Award and Grand Jury Prize in the U.S. Dramatic Competition. The film was theatrically released in the United States on October 7, 2016, and grossed $16 million, receiving positive reviews from critics, with praise for its directing, acting, soundtrack, and cinematography.

Because The Birth of a Nation attracted increased attention during its festival run, there was significant press coverage of a 1999 alleged rape that Parker and co-story writer Jean McGianni Celestin were accused of having committed, and the fact that the accuser committed suicide in 2012.[3][4][5] While Parker was acquitted and Celestin was not retried after his conviction was overturned on appeal, the controversy surrounding the alleged rape and Parker's initial responses to the controversy cast a shadow over the film.[6]

Plot[edit]

In 1809, on a plantation in Southampton County, Virginia, Nat Turner is a pre-teen slave boy. The adult slaves have little food for their children, and Nat's father Isaac slips out one night to steal something for his son to eat. On the road, Isaac is caught by a posse led by slave-catcher Raymond Cobb. When Cobb tries to execute him, Isaac turns the tables, kills one member of the posse, and flees. He then returns home, tells his family what happened and says that he has to leave immediately, but not without speaking to Nat once more, insisting that Nat is "a child of God" and has a purpose. When Cobb arrives and questions Isaac's family about his whereabouts, nobody says anything and Benjamin Turner, the owner of the farm, intervenes and drives Cobb off before he turns violent.

When Elizabeth Turner, Benjamin's wife, notices that Nat has basic reading skills, she starts to teach him reading, hoping that he can be helpful in the household with his knowledge. Most of her lessons center around the Bible. Elizabeth even goes so far as to have Nat read Scripture during church gatherings. But shortly before Benjamin dies, presumably of tuberculosis, he orders his wife to stop teaching Nat and send him to work as a farmhand.

Now an adult, Nat is still picking cotton, but he also preaches and reads Scripture for his fellow slaves on the plantation. Samuel Turner, Benjamin's son, inherits ownership of the plantation. During a slave auction, Nat is immediately smitten by one of the female slaves for sale, Cherry. He convinces Samuel to buy her as a wedding gift for Catherine Turner, Samuel's sister. Nat and Cherry fall in love, marry, and conceive a daughter.

Since the economic situation in the South has turned and prices for crops are poor, many slave owners have problems feeding their slaves and fear revolts. Reverend Walthall makes Samuel an offer: several plantation owners will pay good money if Samuel will travel to their farms with Nat and have Nat preach to the slaves to pacify them and convince them that the Bible requests them to endure their situations. Samuel, needing the money, reluctantly agrees. During their visits, Nat and Samuel witness emaciated and desperate slaves and, in some locations, horrifying treatment of the slaves by their owners.

When his grandmother dies, Nat decides that he will rise up against the slaveholders. He holds a secret night meeting with some trusted fellow slaves, among them one boy from another plantation, and prepares them for the uprising. He also talks with Cherry, who still has not recovered from the beating, about the uprising and she gives him her blessing.

During the night, Nat and a fellow slave enter the house of their owners and kill Samuel and the manager. They then ask the other slaves of the plantation to follow them, which most of them do. During the night, they take over several other plantations and kill the slave owners. During one of the takeovers, they notice that the boy has disappeared. A short time later, they are attacked by a group of white men who had been alerted by the boy, and they have to retreat.

In the morning, they enter the town of Jerusalem to loot it for weapons. They are confronted by a group of white men, again led by Cobb, but they manage to defeat the group, with Nat personally stabbing Cobb to death. But when they enter the arsenal, they notice that it is empty. They are immediately ambushed by soldiers who kill every slave except for Nat, who flees.

When Nat manages to secretly meet Cherry once more, she tells him that innocent slaves have been murdered in retaliation and more will be as long as Nat is on the run. Nat turns himself in and is condemned to death. During the hanging, Nat notices the slave boy who betrayed the group in the crowd but Nat does not seem to harbor ill will towards him. The film ends with a fade of the boy's crying face into the face of an adult soldier who presumably is the same boy, grown up and fighting for the Union Army in the American Civil War.

Cast[edit]

Nate Parker wrote, produced, and directed the film, and portrays Nat Turner.

Title[edit]

The 2016 film uses the same title as "D. W. Griffith's 1915 KKK propaganda film in a very purposeful way", said The Hollywood Reporter.[8] Parker has said his film had the same title "ironically, but very much by design".[9] He told the magazine Filmmaker:

Griffith's film relied heavily on racist propaganda to evoke fear and desperation as a tool to solidify white supremacy as the lifeblood of American sustenance. Not only did this film motivate the massive resurgence of the terror group the Ku Klux Klan and the carnage exacted against people of African descent, it served as the foundation of the film industry we know today. I've reclaimed this title and re-purposed it as a tool to challenge racism and white supremacy in America, to inspire a riotous disposition toward any and all injustice in this country (and abroad) and to promote the kind of honest confrontation that will galvanize our society toward healing and sustained systemic change.[10]

Production[edit]

I kind of sold this project to investors and cast on legacy. I honestly think this is a film that could start a conversation that can promote healing and systemic change in our country. There's so many things that are happening right now in 2015—100 years after the original Birth of a Nation film, here we are. I'd say that is what I hope sets my film apart, is that it's relevant now—that people will talk about this film with the specific intention of change.

Nate Parker, 2015[11]

The Birth of a Nation was written, produced, and directed by Nate Parker, who also stars as Nat Turner. Parker wrote the screenplay, which was based on a story he co-wrote with Jean McGianni Celestin.[7] Parker learned about Turner from an African-American studies course at the University of Oklahoma. He began writing the screenplay for a Nat Turner film in 2009 and had a fellowship at a lab under the Sundance Institute. While he got writing feedback from filmmakers like James Mangold, he was told that a Nat Turner film could not be produced. The Hollywood Reporter said:

But what he heard instead were all the reasons a movie about Nat Turner wouldn't work: Movies with black leads don't play internationally; a period film with big fight scenes would be too expensive; it was too violent; it wouldn't work without a big box-office star leading it; Turner was too controversial—after all, he was responsible for the deaths of dozens of well-off white landowners.[8]

After Parker finished his acting role in Beyond the Lights in late 2013, he told his agents he would not continue acting until he had played Nat Turner in a film. He invested $100,000 of his money to hire a production designer and to pay for location scouting in Savannah, Georgia. He met with multiple financiers, and the first to invest in the film were retired basketball player Michael Finley (who had previously invested in the film The Butler) and active basketball player Tony Parker (no relation). Parker eventually brought together eleven groups of investors to finance 60% of the production budget, and producer Aaron L. Gilbert of Bron Studios joined to cover the remaining financing.[8]

In November 2014, development was underway, and Armie Hammer joined the cast.[12] By April 2015, Aja Naomi King and Gabrielle Union joined the cast.[13] In subsequent months, Penelope Ann Miller, Jackie Earle Haley, and Mark Boone Junior also joined.[14] Filming took place in Georgia (including at Myrtle Grove Plantation)[15] in May 2015 and lasted 27 days.[8] Parker used the a cappella choir from Wiley College on the soundtrack. Parker had previously been part of a cast that portrayed historical figures from Wiley, in The Great Debaters.[16]

Music[edit]

Main article: The Birth of a Nation: Original Motion Picture Score

Release[edit]

The Birth of a Nation premiered in competition at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival on January 25, 2016.[8] Before it screened, the audience gave a standing ovation to the introduction of Nate Parker.[17] Afterwards, Variety said it "received the most enthusiastic standing ovation at this year's Sundance Film Festival so far".[18] Following The Birth of a Nation's Sundance premiere, Fox Searchlight Pictures bought worldwide rights to the film in a $17.5 million deal. Competing deals also came from The Weinstein Company, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Netflix. Variety said Fox Searchlight's deal was "the richest in Sundance history".[19]

A teaser trailer for the film was released in April 2016,[20] followed by an official trailer on June 21, 2016.[21] On July 6, the UK release date of January 20, 2017, was announced.[22] It was actually released in the UK on December 9, 2016. A film poster with Parker in a noose made from an American flag was released on July 15.[23]

20th Century Fox canceled the planned 2017 release of the film in Japan, Switzerland, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Austria, and Latin America following the disappointing results at the U.S. box office, which damaged the overall distribution budget for the film.[24]

Rape allegations against Parker[edit]

In August 2016, media attention surrounding the film resurfaced 1999 alleged rape charges against Nate Parker and co-writer Jean McGianni Celestin. While students at Pennsylvania State University, Parker and Celestin were accused of raping a female student.[25] The woman went to a doctor, who concluded that she had been sexually assaulted, and local authorities taped a phone conversation between her and Parker in which Parker confirmed that it was he and Celestin who had sex with her.[26] Parker and Celestin denied the accusations and said that the sexual encounter was consensual. Parker was acquitted of all charges in 2001; Celestin was convicted of sexual assault, but the conviction was overturned on appeal in 2005.[27] A subsequent retrial did not take place.[28]

In a formal complaint filed against Penn State in 2002, the woman also stated that she was harassed by Parker and Celestin following her allegation; the harassment allegedly "included Parker and Celestin hiring a private investigator to publicly expose her as the accuser, and continued bullying by Parker and his friends outside buildings where she had class".[26][29] The university settled the complaint with the woman for $17,500.[30] The woman committed suicide in 2012, with her death certificate noting that she suffered from "major depressive disorder with psychotic features, PTSD due to physical and sexual abuse, polysubstance abuse".[25]

Because The Birth of a Nation attracted increased scrutiny due to possible Oscar nominations, and the film itself depicts a fictional, brutal rape that does not appear in historical records,[31] there was significant press coverage[3][4] about damage control by Fox Searchlight Pictures, the studio releasing the film.[32] Interviews in Variety[33] and Deadline[34] were a focus, as was Parker's response to the event in an impassioned Facebook post.[35] The studio reportedly took a wait-and-see approach before marketing to church groups, college campuses, and Hollywood figures.[36]

Gabrielle Union co-starred.

Writing in Variety, the sister of Parker's alleged victim expressed particular distress at the film's imagined rape scene, saying, "I find it creepy and perverse that Parker and Celestin would put a fictional rape at the center of their film, and that Parker would portray himself as a hero avenging that rape. Given what happened to my sister, and how no one was held accountable for it, I find this invention self-serving and sinister, and I take it as a cruel insult to my sister's memory."[37]

Gabrielle Union, a rape survivor and one of the main stars in The Birth of a Nation, wrote in the Los Angeles Times to express her concern over the allegations, particularly the lack of affirmative consent: "Even if she never said 'no', silence certainly does not equal 'yes'. Although it's often difficult to read and understand body language, the fact that some individuals interpret the absence of a 'no' as a 'yes' is problematic at least, criminal at worst."[38]

After having suffered significant negative publicity for his response to the past rape allegation, Parker chose to deflect the questions about his past legal problems while doing press for The Birth of a Nation at the Toronto International Film Festival.[39] Shortly thereafter, Parker and his handlers chose to cut press interviews short when similar questions came up about his involvement with the alleged rape and its impact on the marketing of the film.[40]

In an open letter, former members of the Penn State student body and staff who were present during Celestin and Parker's trial defended both men's innocence of the 1999 accusations. The group made allegations of police intimidation and a hostile racial climate on campus at the time; both Parker and Celestin are black while their accuser was a white female. The group wrote in The Root:

Misinformation suggests that a spiral into depression was triggered by the alleged incident in 1999. However, court records and testimony by medical professionals revealed a history of chronic depression that dated back to childhood and the use of antidepressant medication that preceded this event.[41]

Actor Hal Holbrook wrote a letter to The New York Times praising the film and defending Parker.

Nine celebrities came out in support of Parker, including Harry Belafonte,[42] Chadwick Boseman,[43] Hal Holbrook,[44] Mel Gibson,[45] Kevin Hart,[46] Harvey Weinstein (who was later embroiled in a sexual assault scandal),[47] Al Sharpton,[48] Anthony Anderson,[49] and Sheryl Underwood.[50]

Holbrook wrote a letter to The New York Times defending Parker and the film.[44] Holbrook praised The Birth of a Nation as "an exceptional piece of artistry and a vital portrait of our American experience in trying to live up to ideals we say we have" and suggested that owing to the film's critique of racism, Parker and his film were being held to a different standard than what Holbrook characterized as other "directors and actors who have rather public indiscretions, and who have in some cases been acquitted of them".[44]

Prior to the film's release, it received several hundred one-star ratings on IMDb, possibly as a result of the controversy surrounding the allegations.[51] As of 13 July 2018 it holds an IMDb rating of 6.4/10.[52]

Reception[edit]

Box office[edit]

In the United States and Canada, The Birth of a Nation was projected to gross around $10 million in its opening weekend. It opened to $7.1 million, finishing sixth at the box office. African-Americans made up 60% of the first weekend audience.[53] In its second weekend the film dropped 61.2%, grossing just $2.7 million and finishing tenth at the box office.[54]

Though making nearly twice its budget, the film was considered a financial disappointment.[55][56] In assessing the mediocre[57][58] opening weekend of The Birth of a Nation, The Washington Post reported, "While some moviegoers may have been put off by the controversy, middling reviews for the movie itself probably didn’t help. Meanwhile, historic dramas can be a hard sell: It's possible a lot of multiplex visitors just plain weren't interested."[58] Adding to the film's problems, "Several prominent feminists decried Parker's defiant response to the [rape] scandal and pledged to boycott the film, which drew a protest vigil at Hollywood's ArcLight Cinemas."[58][59]

Gabrielle Union, who appeared in the film, told Essence that she understood why some film-goers were avoiding the film and stated that she, as a rape survivor, could not sell it to anyone who chose to avoid the film due to the controversy.[60] She said, "As a rape survivor and as an advocate, I cannot shy away from this responsibility because the conversation got difficult. I don’t want to put myself above anyone's pain or triggers. Every victim or survivor, I believe you. I support you. I support you if you don't want to see the film. I absolutely understand and respect that. I can't sell the film."[61]

Critical response[edit]

On the review website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 73% based on 268 reviews, with an average rating of 6.70/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "The Birth of a Nation overpowers its narrative flaws and uneven execution through sheer conviction, rising on Nate Parker's assured direction and the strength of its vital message."[62] Metacritic gave the film a normalized score of 69 out of 100, based on 49 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[63] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.[64]

Justin Chang at Variety compared The Birth of a Nation to 12 Years a Slave, saying: "Parker's more conventionally told but still searingly impressive debut feature pushes the conversation further still: A biographical drama steeped equally in grace and horror, it builds to a brutal finale that will stir deep emotion and inevitable unease." He concluded, "The Birth of a Nation exists to provoke a serious debate about the necessity and limitations of empathy, the morality of retaliatory violence, and the ongoing black struggle for justice and equality in this country. It earns that debate and then some."[7]

The Hollywood Reporter's Todd McCarthy said, "The film vividly captures an assortment of slavery’s brutalities while also underlining the religious underpinnings of Turner's justifications for his assaults on slaveholders." He added, "The film offers up more than enough in terms of intelligence, insight, historical research and religious nuance as to not at all be considered a missed opportunity; far more of the essentials made it into the film than not, its makers' dedication and minute attention are constantly felt and the subject matter is still rare enough onscreen as to be welcome and needed, as it will be the next time and the time after that."[65]

Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune was critical of Parker's direction, saying, "one of the drawbacks, ironically, is Parker's own performance. Even the rape victims of the screenplay have a hard time getting their fair share of the screen time; everything in the story, by design, keeps the focus and the anguished close-ups strictly on Parker. He's a good actor, but not much of a director; the visual style and approach of The Birth of a Nation tries a little of everything, and often too much of everything."[66]

In its October 10 issue, The New Yorker ran two reviews, "The Cinematic Merits and Flaws of Nate Parker's The Birth of a Nation", by Richard Brody,[67] and "The Birth of a Nation Isn't Worth Defending", by Vinson Cunningham.[68]

Accolades[edit]

List of awards and nominations
AwardDate of ceremonyCategoryRecipient(s)ResultRef.
African-American Film Critics AssociationFebruary 8, 2017Top 10 FilmsThe Birth of a Nation6th place[69]
Austin Film Critics AssociationDecember 28, 2016Best First FilmThe Birth of a NationNominated[70][71]
BET AwardsJune 25, 2017Best MovieThe Birth of a NationNominated[72]
Best ActressGabrielle UnionNominated
Black Reel AwardsFebruary 16, 2017Outstanding ActorNate ParkerNominated[73]
Outstanding DirectorNate ParkerNominated
Outstanding Screenplay, Adapted or OriginalNate ParkerNominated
Outstanding EnsembleThe cast of The Birth of a NationNominated
Outstanding Breakthrough Performance, FemaleAja Naomi KingNominated
Outstanding Original ScoreHenry JackmanNominated
Directors Guild of America AwardsFebruary 4, 2017Outstanding Directing – First-Time Feature FilmNate ParkerNominated[74]
NAACP Image AwardsFebruary 11, 2017Outstanding Motion PictureThe Birth of a NationNominated[75]
Outstanding Actor in a Motion PictureNate ParkerNominated
Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Motion PictureAja Naomi KingNominated
Outstanding Independent PictureThe Birth of a NationNominated
Outstanding Directing in a Motion PictureNate ParkerNominated
Outstanding Writing in a Motion PictureNate ParkerNominated
Satellite AwardsFebruary 19, 2017Best Film EditingSteven RosenblumNominated[76]
Sundance Film FestivalJanuary 29, 2016Audience Award: U.S. DramaticNate ParkerWon[77][78]
U.S. Grand Jury Prize: DramaticWon

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ "The Birth of a Nation (15)". British Board of Film Classification. August 11, 2016. Retrieved August 11, 2016.
  2. ^ Jump up to:a b "The Birth of a Nation (2016)". Box Office Mojo. Retrieved March 10, 2017.
  3. ^ Jump up to:a b Briquelet, Kate; Nestel, M.L. (August 16, 2016). "Inside the Nate Parker Rape Case". The Daily Beast. Retrieved August 19, 2016.
  4. ^ Jump up to:a b Morales, Wilson (August 17, 2016). "Wilson Morales: Nate Parker Outrage Doesn't Pass the Smell Test (Guest Column)". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved August 19, 2016.
  5. ^ Setoodeh, Ramin (August 12, 2016). "'The Birth of a Nation' Star Nate Parker Addresses College Rape Trial".
  6. ^ "Boiseweekly.com".
  7. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r Chang, Justin (January 25, 2016). "Sundance Film Review: 'The Birth of a Nation'". Variety. Retrieved January 26, 2016.
  8. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e Ford, Rebecca (January 20, 2016). "'Birth of a Nation': The Slave-Revolt Movie That Will Have Sundance Talking". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved January 25, 2016.
  9. ^ Brown, Emma (April 21, 2014). "Nate Parker's Future Past". Interview. Retrieved January 25, 2016.
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  13. ^ McNary, Dave (April 9, 2015). "Aja Naomi King Joins Armie Hammer in Nat Turner Biopic". Variety. Retrieved January 24, 2016.
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  43. ^ Chadwick Boseman speaks on Nate Parker. Birth of a Nation. October 10, 2016. Retrieved October 10, 2016 – via YouTube.
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  45. ^ Mel Gibson (December 8, 2016). "Mel Gibson Doesn't 'Think It's Fair' That Nate Parker's Rape Accusation Cast a Shadow Over 'Birth of a Nation'". IndieWire. Retrieved December 8, 2016.
  46. ^ "Kevin Hart 'Salutes' Nate Parker, Plans to See 'Birth of a Nation'". AtlantaBlackStar.com. October 14, 2016. Retrieved October 14, 2016.
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  51. ^ Raftery, Brian. "IMDb Voters Are Tanking Indies Before They're Even Released". WIRED. Retrieved March 9, 2017.
  52. ^ The Birth of a Nation at IMDb
  53. ^ "Hurricane Matthew Doesn't Slow 'Girl On The Train', But Overall Ticket Sales Lower Than Jonas; Controversy Conquers 'Nation'". Deadline Hollywood. October 10, 2016.
  54. ^ "The Accountant Calculates $24.7M Opening; Max Steel Rusts". Deadline Hollywood. October 17, 2016.
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  58. ^ Jump up to:a b c Gibson, Caitlin. "The big debate over 'The Birth of a Nation' is over: Audiences just weren't interested". Washington Post.
  59. ^ "Filmmaker's Controversial Past Takes Its Toll On 'Birth Of A Nation' At The B.O." Deadline Hollywood. October 8, 2016.
  60. ^ "Gabrielle Union on 'Birth of a Nation': 'I support you if you don't want to see the film'". UPI.
  61. ^ "Gabrielle Union on Birth of a Nation Boycotts: 'I Support You If You Don't Want to See the Film'". Vulture.
  62. ^ "The Birth of a Nation (2016)". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango Media. Retrieved April 25, 2021.
  63. ^ "The Birth of a Nation Reviews". Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved December 24, 2016.
  64. ^ "CinemaScore". cinemascore.com.
  65. ^ McCarthy, Todd (January 25, 2016). "'The Birth of a Nation': Sundance Review". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved January 25, 2016.
  66. ^ "'The Birth of a Nation' review: Nate Parker's powerful, problematic film about Nat Turner". Chicago Tribune. Retrieved October 9, 2016.
  67. ^ Brody, Richard (October 9, 2016). "The Cinematic Merits and Flaws of Nate Parker's 'The Birth of a Nation'". The New Yorker. Retrieved December 11, 2016.
  68. ^ Cunningham, Vinson (October 10, 2016). "'The Birth of a Nation' Isn't Worth Defending". The New Yorker. Retrieved December 11, 2016.
  69. ^ Nordyke, Kimberly (December 12, 2016). "'Moonlight' Named Best Picture by the African American Film Critics Association". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved December 12, 2016.
  70. ^ Anderson, Erik (December 15, 2016). "Austin Film Critics Association (AFCA) Nominations: The Handmaiden Lands Top Mentions, Trevante Rhodes Double Nominated". AwardsWatch.com. Retrieved December 15, 2016.
  71. ^ Miller, Neil (December 15, 2016). "2016 Austin Film Critics Awards Nominees, 'Moonlight' and 'Arrival' lead the way in AFCA's 2016 nominations". Medium.com. Archived from the original on June 22, 2017. Retrieved December 15, 2016.
  72. ^ "Beyoncé and Bruno Mars lead 2017 BET Awards nominations". Channel. Retrieved May 16, 2017.
  73. ^ Davis, Clayton (December 14, 2016). "Black Reel Award Nominees – 'Moonlight' Leads with 13 Nominations". AwardsCircuit.com. Archived from the original on December 17, 2016. Retrieved December 15, 2016.
  74. ^ Hipes, Patrick (January 11, 2017). "DGA TV Awards Nominations: 'Stranger Things', 'Westworld' & 'Atlanta' On List; Docus Include 'OJ: Made In America'". Deadline Hollywood. Retrieved January 11, 2017.
  75. ^ Hill, Libby (December 14, 2016). "'Moonlight,' 'Birth of a Nation' and 'Loving' score big with NAACP Image Award nominations". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved December 14, 2016.
  76. ^ Kilday, Gregg (November 29, 2016). "Satellite Awards Nominees Revealed". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved November 29, 2016.
  77. ^ Chang, Justin (January 30, 2016). "Sundance: 'The Birth of a Nation' Sweeps Top Prizes". Variety. Retrieved February 27, 2016.
  78. ^ "THE BIRTH OF A NATION". Sundance Film Festival. January 30, 2016. Archived from the original on May 7, 2021. Retrieved February 27, 2016.

External links[edit]

Wikiquote has quotations related to The Birth of a Nation.

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Assured performance … Nate Parker, centre, director and star of The Birth of a Nation.
Review

The Birth of a Nation review – biblical passion and cheesy emotion

Nate Parker’s heartfelt account of Nat Turner, the slave who led a rebellion in 1830s Virginia, is conventionally paced but achieves a dark and sinuous poetry

Nate Parker’s fervent movie about the slave uprising led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 pointedly gets its title from the silent black-and-white classic by DW Griffith, who claimed hero status for the Ku Klux Klan, and whose own adored father Jacob “Roaring Jake” Griffith had been a slaveholder in Kentucky and a confederate colonel in the civil war. Parker ultimately finds his own meaning in the title by linking the boys who witnessed Turner’s eventual hanging with the generation who went on to fight for the north.

No feature film has been made before on Nat Turner; the subject is new, the style very much less so. It is pretty conventionally paced, directed and scored, almost cheesy in its emotional effects, without the radical attack and visual flair of Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave and without the depth of that movie’s performances. Parker has said that Turner is “not so far removed from an African-American version of Braveheart’s William Wallace”. His reference is to the historical figure, not the film, but the comparison is interesting, and with its sentimentalised vision of a personal angel on the gallows, Parker’s film does incidentally look a little like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. There is comparable conviction and force.

Parker himself plays Turner and his own performance is assured and heartfelt, though without the light and shade that another director might have brought out of him. As a boy, he intimately witnesses the ugly racist cruelty of the ruling white class, in the form of hired hand Cobb, played by Jackie Earle Haley. Infant Nat shows a prodigious talent for literacy and book-learning, which delights the mistress, Elizabeth Turner (Penelope Ann Miller), who encourages his Bible-reading and lets him live in the big house – a privilege icily rescinded by her husband on his death bed. Going back to being a field hand is a humiliation that contributes to Nat’s later insurrection.

Hollywood, sometimes the truth is better than fiction
Catherine Shoard
Catherine Shoard
Read more

But the new master, Samuel (played competently by Armie Hammer) is forced to concede the adult Nat’s brilliance at preaching, and he is persuaded by a cantankerous local reverend to let Nat make a tour of neighbouring plantations, preaching the virtues of turning the other cheek, generally pumping out Christian propaganda to make the slaves docile. Nat makes a happy marriage to fellow slave Cherry (Aja Naomi King) and his existence seems relatively comfortable. But he becomes increasingly horrified and disgusted by the savagery of the slavemasters and by his own role in shoring up their vicious rule. And he is to be radicalised by white men raping his wife and other slave women – an atrocity that the film sees only from the male perspective. Parker evinces a blazing new biblical passion for vengeance and justice.

The Birth of a Nation comes alive when it quotes scripture; it achieves a dark and sinuous poetry of impending violence. The rest of the time it is hemmed in. It cautiously acknowledges the jihadi intensity of Turner’s mission with a single image showing the visions he had. A corncob is mysteriously seeped in blood. But it reaches something like psychological complexity only when the hour of justice is at hand, and Nat comes into Samuel’s bedroom, intending to kill him. Samuel wakes, sees the terrifying figure of Nat, and half-asleep and numbed with anxiety says: “Dad?” There is a queasy, almost black-comic brilliance to that moment. The uprising itself is staged like a military skirmish leading to a big Braveheart-style battle in a kind of farmyard enclosure, which is plausibly managed but weirdly anticlimactic: it doesn’t have the thrill of horror and transgression that Turner’s act of revolutionary insurrection really needed.

Nate Parker at the Film Independent Spirit Awards, February 2016.
Nate Parker: director with a back story
Read more

As for this rest, The Birth of a Nation is naturally trying for something very different from Tarantino’s Django Unchained: its one flourish of satirical audacity is in the title. It is closer in spirit to movies such as Amistad or Glory or even the first TV episode of Roots in the 70s, that bold drama that broke the silence on the subject and attempted a grand narrative, linking slavery to the contemporary African-American experience. Parker’s film feels weirdly inhibited, possibly by a sense of its own seriousness and mainstream credentials. This is a film that moves with a careful, self-conscious tread.


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The Worst Thing About “Birth of a Nation” Is How Good It Is

The Worst Thing About “Birth of a Nation” Is How Good It Is

The release of “Django Unchained,” and the discussion surrounding it, have brought “Birth of a Nation”—D. W. Griffith’s disgustingly racist yet titanically original 1915 feature—back to the fore. The movie, set mainly in a South Carolina town before and after the Civil War, depicts slavery in a halcyon light, presents blacks as good for little but subservient labor, and shows them, during Reconstruction, to have been goaded by the Radical Republicans into asserting an abusive dominion over Southern whites. It depicts freedmen as interested, above all, in intermarriage, indulging in legally sanctioned excess and vengeful violence mainly to coerce white women into sexual relations. It shows Southern whites forming the Ku Klux Klan to defend themselves against such abominations and to spur the “Aryan” cause overall. The movie asserts that the white-sheet-clad death squad served justice summarily and that, by denying blacks the right to vote and keeping them generally apart and subordinate, it restored order and civilization to the South.

“Birth of a Nation,” which runs more than three hours, was sold as a sensation and became one; it was shown at gala screenings, with expensive tickets. It was also the subject of protest by civil-rights organizations and critiques by clergymen and editorialists, and for good reason: “Birth of a Nation” proved horrifically effective at sparking violence against blacks in many cities. Given these circumstances, it’s hard to understand why Griffith’s film merits anything but a place in the dustbin of history, as an abomination worthy solely of autopsy in the study of social and aesthetic pathology.

Problematically, “Birth of a Nation” wasn’t just a seminal commercial spectacle but also a decisively original work of art—in effect, the founding work of cinematic realism, albeit a work that was developed to pass lies off as reality. It’s tempting to think of the film’s influence as evidence of the inherent corruption of realism as a cinematic mode—but it’s even more revealing to acknowledge the disjunction between its beauty, on the one hand, and, on the other, its injustice and falsehood. The movie’s fabricated events shouldn’t lead any viewer to deny the historical facts of slavery and Reconstruction. But they also shouldn’t lead to a denial of the peculiar, disturbingly exalted beauty of “Birth of a Nation,” even in its depiction of immoral actions and its realization of blatant propaganda.

The worst thing about “Birth of a Nation” is how good it is. The merits of its grand and enduring aesthetic make it impossible to ignore and, despite its disgusting content, also make it hard not to love. And it’s that very conflict that renders the film all the more despicable, the experience of the film more of a torment—together with the acknowledgment that Griffith, whose short films for Biograph were already among the treasures of world cinema, yoked his mighty talent to the cause of hatred (which, still worse, he sincerely depicted as virtuous).

Griffith’s art offers humanly profound moments, whether graceful and delicate or grand and rhetorical, that detach themselves from their context to probe nearly universal circumstances, such as the blend of shame and pride in the face of a returning Confederate soldier when he comes home in tatters and finds his sister in tatters as well, or the stalwart antics of a Union girl (Lillian Gish) as she sends her brothers off to war before collapsing in tears when they’re just out of view. The breathtaking shot that starts close to a huddling mother and children, high on a hillside, and then moves to the advance of Sherman’s army, seen from the family’s elevated refuge, poignantly depicts the intimate ravages of war. The shot of a former slave-owner, under siege by a posse of freedmen for his son’s membership in the K.K.K., holding his grown daughter by the hair and raising his pistol above her head—he’s preparing to kill her if the blacks breach the door—has a harrowing and exalted grandeur that surpasses the film's specific prejudices to achieve a classical moment of tragedy. The cavalry charges of the K.K.K., done with moving cameras that hurtle backward at the speed of the gallop, are visually exhilarating and viscerally thrilling, despite the hateful and bloodthirsty repression that they represent; it's the kinetic model for a century of action scenes.

Throughout the film, Griffith’s pro-Confederacy feelings are grossly apparent; yet his depiction of events—his representation of reality as he understands it—involves the inclusion of much that departs from his intentions. The very essence of his realism is open frames, complex stagings, and multiple planes of action, all of which suggest far more than Griffith’s descriptive title cards, and his stunted politics, would themselves allow.

For instance, a scene of slave-owners and their Northern guests amiably passing by cotton fields while slaves toil in the background presents, as if in a documentary, the obvious connection between the white Southerners’ gracious ways and the hard, enforced work of slaves that makes it possible. This was not Griffith’s intention, but it’s the effect. He shows a summary trial by the K.K.K. of a black man whose sexual advances toward a white woman induced her to leap to her death. That trial and the delivery of the victim’s corpse to the doorstep of the mixed-race lieutenant governor are meant to seem just, even heroic, but come off as obscene and horrifying. The splendid festivities to celebrate the Battle of Bull Run, intercut with the eerie flare of a bonfire, suggest a dance of death, the bonfire foreshadowing the burning of Atlanta. Despite Griffith’s beliefs, the arrival of the Klan, pointing rifles at unarmed blacks who merely seek to vote, appears unjust and cruel.

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The overall subject of the film is the original sin of the proximity of the white and black races. The opening scene, in which Africans are brought to the United States and sold as slaves, is described in a title card: “The bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion.” The problem, from the movie’s start, wasn’t slavery but the undue mixing of races—and Griffith’s original ending was to show the return of freedmen to Africa. The two great villains of the film are both described as “mulattos”: the licentious, social-climbing housekeeper of a Radical Republican congressman (based on Thaddeus Stevens, down to the bad toupee), who takes advantage of the widower’s so-called “weakness,” leading to his divisive, aggressive, vengefully carpetbagging version of Reconstruction; and the conniving, contemptuous politician whom the congressman imposes as South Carolina’s lieutenant governor. The crisis that sparks the revolt of Southern whites is the blacks’ claim (asserted with a hungry leering) to the right of intermarriage. The very notion of racial purity (or what one title card calls the “Aryan birthright”) is at the core of the film. Yet the essence of the movie’s aesthetic power—and of its enduring significance—is its intrinsic heterogeneity.

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The movie’s perspective on the events of the plot is rich, broad, and deep enough to provide the material for its own contradiction. That’s the very definition of Griffith’s realism, the founding of a cinematic manner that flourishes to this very day, in a wide range of varieties and refractions, and that reflects filmmakers’ confidence that filmic representations, however artificial or contrived, make direct contact with the world of their experience. Griffith doesn’t hide behind interpretive ambiguities or assume that the facts speak for themselves; he makes a world after his own mind, stoking the events vigorously and skewing them decisively with the equivalent of a first-person voice (as in the title cards, adorned with his signature, throughout). He filmed a world that was made to embody his point of view—but the detail and scope that he considered necessary to simulate the reality of that vanished world was inherently multitudinous and polysemic. (And the scenes that aren’t—such as those, in the state legislature, depicting black legislators as leering slobs—are ridiculous and cartoonish.) The one-word definition of Griffith’s realism—and of the best of the generations of movie realism that followed in its wake—is “more.” Despite his best (or, rather, worst) efforts, his movie escaped him.

What “Birth of a Nation” offers, even more than a vision of history, is a template for the vast, world-embracing capabilities of the cinema. It provided extraordinarily powerful tools for its own refutation. The real crime was not Griffith’s, but the world’s: the fact that most viewers knew little about slavery and little about Reconstruction and little about Jim Crow and little about the Klan, and were all too ready to swallow the very worst of the movie without question. They saw only what Griffith wanted to say but not what the movie showed, and, upon seeing what Griffith showed, were ready to take up arms in anger. Ambient and accepted racism left viewers ignorant of the facts and prone to accept Griffith’s racist version as authentic—and denied other filmmakers the chance to appropriate and even to advance Griffith’s methods and make movies offering historically faithful accounts of the same periods and events.

It took another twelve years for sync sound to come into wide use, with “The Jazz Singer.” Why was there no movie documentary in which former slaves bore witness to their experience—no cinematic equivalent of the interviews in “Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project,” which were done in the mid-thirties? Griffith’s work could have given rise to a resounding cinematic response, anticipating the mode of “Shoah,” regarding slavery. It could have been the basis for visits by former slaves or their descendants to the sites of their sufferings. It could have provoked a full and classic drama about the agonies of slaves in the prewar South, and the full measure of horrific exactions by the Klan and the decades of Jim Crow. Such films weren’t made—couldn’t be made—because those who produced films didn’t allow them to be made—and because whites in the South would certainly not have let them be made.

Yet directors who looked more clearly at the history and the modern circumstances of blacks in America (starting with Oscar Micheaux, in the silent era) have done so, however paradoxically and however infuriatingly, on the basis of Griffith’s cinematic vision, which was far more enduring and more significant than his benighted historical vision. The legacy of Griffith is simultaneously that of the medium’s colossal artistic force and its power for demagogy—of the potential to bring a world to life onscreen and the potential to turn that world into the big lie, whether with sincere or cynical intentions.

Tarantino claims to have made “Django Unchained” as something of a response to “Birth of a Nation.” His depiction of the brutality and the horror of slavery is meant as a belated corrective to Griffith’s falsified record. Yet Tarantino offers nothing of Griffith’s polysemy, nothing of his sense of being in the actual presence of history; the cartoonishness of Griffith’s worst scenes is “Django”’s basic mode. Tarantino, in his cinema-centric skein of references, suggests precisely the lack of confidence that he’s filming anything like actual experience—even though the ardent righteousness of the movie’s emotional affect suggests that he’s filming something close to his thoughts and feelings. Tarantino has spoken of his awareness of filming on actual historical sites where slaves lived, yet nowhere in the film is there the frame-breaking gesture that suggests a recognition of his own presence in the history that he appropriates. Tarantino has distinguished between the kind of violence that “can be fun” and the kind that’s “hard to take” (and that he takes seriously)—yet “Django Unchained” often blurs the distinction between the two, suggesting mainly that the director gets off on filming violence to any end whatsoever.

As for the fantasies of vengeance that he offers, there may yet have been no K.K.K. in the antebellum South that Tarantino depicts (he calls his bag-headed marauders the “Regulators”), but the violence by blacks against whites in which Tarantino exults is the obverse of Griffith’s retrospective paranoia. It wouldn’t be a stretch to dissolve from the flames of Tarantino’s Candieland to Griffith’s Confederate veteran, on a hillside, giving birth to the idea of the hooded Klan, or to cut from a title card with Django’s famous line (“Kill white people and get paid for it? What’s not to like?”) to one of Griffith’s scenes of Klansmen suiting up for action. Despite Tarantino’s virtuous intentions and sympathies, his crude and childish view of revenge renders them as regressive as Griffith’s own.

P.S. “Birth of a Nation” isn’t the only work of repugnant propaganda that suggests a cinematic subconscious far more expansive than its director’s intentions. I’ve written here and here about “Jew Süss,” an anti-Semitic propaganda drama made in Germany in 1940. Its director, Veit Harlan, is nowhere near an artist of Griffith’s originality or aesthetic sense, but he is enough of a director to have made a similarly effective work of propaganda on the basis of its amplitude. It’s no stretch to see beyond the prejudices to the elements in the film that contradict its obvious intentions.



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A Film Divided Against Itself: D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915)

180

D. W. Griffith died on July 23, 1948. To commemorate this seminal figure in cinema history, we repost BLFJ regular Gordon Thomas’s deep dive, which first appeared in 2016, into the complexities of Griffith’s most controversial work.

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“What a strange contradiction was D. W. Griffith.”

– Kevin Brownlow, We Can Never Censor the Past, BFI booklet

“Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard its spots?”

– Thomas Dixon, pull quote on cover of his novel The Leopard’s Spots

“She had gathered, also, that some of the free negroes were getting quite insolent.”

– Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind.1

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A Difficult Birth

Over the years, boutique labels like Britain’s BFI and the U.S.’s Kino International can’t seem to stop issuing video editions of The Birth of a Nation because, apparently, they sell – perhaps not like hotcakes – but for a 100-year-old silent film, I’m guessing, very well indeed.

Yet, arguably, Birth of a Nation has never ceased being the most reviled film in the history of cinema, with Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) running a close second. As the question of race in America refuses to yield any answers in the 21st century, Birth’s vision of the Reconstruction era and the creation of the KKK becomes increasingly difficult to take in, justify, or simply ignore – in spite of D. W. Griffith’s vivid, exciting filmmaking and the decades of his recognition as a cinema pioneer.

So then. Does the film sell simply because it is controversial? Or because it has historical importance, that is, value as a perennial reminder of our everlasting racial divide? Or, more plausibly, does it sell because people somehow – even as most recognize and abhor its primitive racist polemic – enjoy it?2

I’ll admit it: I enjoy The Birth of a Nation. How do I manage that? Be assured, it’s complicated. After watching BFI’s new release, it became clear that any pleasure I take in this film involves an increasingly troublesome process, a maneuvering of my sensibilities and aesthetics around and about my social awareness and historical perspectives, however narrow and limited these latter two may be. And what role does my race (Caucasian) play in my ability to enjoy it? I doubt that many African Americans, lacking the ability to dodge or compartmentalize the film’s racism, can enjoy, respect, admire Griffith’s achievements in Birth.

image005Released in November, 2015, BFI’s deluxe, two-disc edition is a generous, even lavish package. Disc one features the film itself in a brand new restoration scanned mostly from “an original 35mm nitrate print of the 1921 reissue, tinted and toned,” with some missing sections filled in with scans from an original negative held in the Library of Congress.3 Conducted by John Lanchbery, the original orchestral score by John Carl Breil accompanies the 4K transfer.4 The results are both visually and aurally stunning – the film has never been better served on home video.

Disc two carries a plethora of extras. Some, like the prologue and intermission introduction for the 1930 sound reissue of Birth, featuring Griffith and Walter Huston holding forth in defense of the film, have been featured on earlier releases. But BFI goes further by offering four other silent films with Civil War themes, including a feature, The Coward (1911), and, the most revealing of the bunch, a Biograph short by Griffith, The Rose of Kentucky (1911), of which we’ll speak more later on.

Any celebration of the film’s centenary becomes tempered, however, by the edition’s commentary, which comes in the form of essays within the accompanying booklet, a 33-minute “roundtable discussion filmed at the BFI Southbank,” and a 20-minute filmed interview by scholar Melvyn Stokes on Thomas Dixon’s play The Clansman and Griffith’s Birth. Perhaps inevitably – considering the never-ending racist times we Americans live in (whether or not said racism is overt, institutional, or hiding beneath a benign liberal veneer) – the written and filmed analysis mostly holds its focus on Birth’s survival as a spectacle of virulent racism. The discussion group, held on June 25, 2015 as part of a conference, is particularly damning of the film.

Not mentioned anywhere in the release is exactly what kind of event made up this conference, other than, I assume, a showing of the film, with this roundtable perhaps following it. Speaking in BFI’s Southbank in London, Linda Williams of the University of California, Berkeley, makes the point that the film could not currently be shown publicly in the US without attracting protest in the form of demonstrations or even violence – a stricture that has held fast for decades. Indeed, the only way anyone in this country can see Birth these days is on home video.

Williams also reminds her colleagues at the table that just the week before, the 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof, had massacred nine African Americans at the Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina (the state in which Birth takes place). Addressing one of his victims, he prefaced his murder spree with this disclaimer, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country.”

Fifteen full decades after the end of the Civil War, Roof’s statement succinctly sums up the justification for the Ku Klux Klan’s emergence as it’s depicted in Birth. Based freely on Dixon’s novels The Clansman and The Leopard’s Spots (and the play based on the former), the second half of the film depicts an ultra-radicalized Reconstruction in the wake of the Civil War. By politically disfranchising Southern whites in favor of now enfranchised blacks, the activist Republican senator Austin Stoneman (Ralph Lewis) places the conquered white South under “the black heel.” Thereby emboldened with far-ranging entitlements, including the right to intermarry, newly freed black male slaves revert to an animal/jungle state and seemingly want nothing more than to mate with white women. Faced with the South’s political humiliation and the rape of its womanhood, the Little Colonel (Henry B. Walthall) forms the Klan as a militant response.

Within the context of the current climate of race in the US and the still raw news of Roof’s murders, none of the speakers defends any intent or portion of the film; the all too brief discussion focuses mainly on the film’s reflection of the country’s racism then (1915), since, and now. Paul McEwan of Muhlenberg College says he’s currently less involved with the film itself, which he dislikes, than with the legacy of Birth. Author Melvyn Stokes, who chairs the discussion, apparently doesn’t just dislike Birth; he calls it an “evil film.”

Yet, as the discussion ends with a very brief Q&A, conciliatory notes arise cautiously in answers to the question, “If the film is evil, how can we enjoy it?” Clearly, someone in the audience has responded to Stokes’ dubbing Birth “evil” just minutes before and wonders what it might mean if he/she ends up enjoying such a film. Without just coming out with it, the audience member has asked the pundits: Is it okay to like this film?

Stokes attempts to answer the query first, but not in the sense of his allowing anyone to go ahead, forget yourself, forget the racism, dig the film. Stokes relates showing Birth in class and watching students, as the film begins setting up characters and locale, squirm and check their phones; he wonders how they’re going to navigate the entire 3-hour-plus silent movie, but when “the narrative kicks in,” they give it their rapt attention. “It is, after all, an action-packed film,” he admits. In other words, Stokes offers a description of how they enjoy it, by submitting to its “action.” The film, I guess, remains evil. Stokes offers no reassurances to those who have allowed pleasure to disarm their resistance to Birth’s malignancies.

But then, Linda Williams’ response does seem to grant permission – but with a condition. “Of course you should enjoy it,” she says, before adding, “you should think about it afterwards.” Where Stokes describes his students as millennials who can only be coaxed from their phones by an action-packed film, Williams speaks in a tone of parental admonishment to those less thoughtful in the audience. She’s right, of course, but she’s demanding a given. I’m not sure about millennials, but most people in the US who see this film today (and enjoy it or not) will do a lot of thinking afterwards without any finger-wagging prompting. Has any other film in the history of the medium caused more thinking? And BFI’s edition gives us a goodly, worthwhile sample of current critical thinking about Birth.

In the set’s accompanying booklet, Kevin Brownlow contributes an essay entitled “We Can Never Censor the Past,” in which he posits that the film’s attitudes toward race were not only those of Griffith and the source novels/play’s author Dixon but also those of the white population at large in 1915. Brownlow ends his piece with a brief mention of Birth’s “irresistible technique” and its far-ranging influence among later directors like Abel Gance and John Ford. Maybe, he wonders, we can admire Griffith’s pacifist anti-war stance in Birth’s first part, which after all, came solely from Griffith’s imagination, not Dixon’s.

By simply allowing Griffith and his film context, Brownlow makes solid points here, and I find myself not only agreeing with them but proceeding to enlarge upon them in this article.

But Melvyn Stokes, Reader in Film History at University College London, would likely categorize the 78-year-old film historian’s critical take on Birth as old school. Stokes’ 2008 monograph D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of the Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time spends many pages detailing the efforts of the NAACP, beginning the year of the film’s release, to either prevent showings of it or encourage local or state governments to ban it outright. Stokes presents how, as the decades slid by, and white society’s attitudes toward racial equality changed incrementally, the NAACP grew more successful in its goal to prevent public showings.

At the same time, Stokes writes, critical assessment of Birth eventually took a different turn as well, especially after the civil rights struggles of the ’50s and ’60s. Initially, and well into the 1920s, Birth had proved overwhelmingly successful with audiences, becoming a box office juggernaut of unheard-of proportions. Few of the mostly white people who initially flocked to the film understood the fuss made by the NAACP, who staged innumerable protests, and the few (white) liberal journalists who supported that organization’s activism. With few exceptions, newspaper reviews of the time had only praise for the newly released Birth, with little or no room to accommodate views on Dixon and Griffith’s take on Reconstruction history or the film’s depiction of blacks.

But by the 1960s, the civil rights movement had exposed how little had changed in the South since the Reconstruction era – especially with nation-wide coverage of incidents like the murder of Emmett Till. Resulting shifts in awareness forced the then blossoming academic discipline of film criticism to address the ugly aspects of Griffith’s film. This they did, but only, as Stokes puts it, by separating much of Birth’s racist content from its cinematic form, which they lionized as pioneering and game changing, much in the manner of Brownlow as he expresses his admiration of Griffith’s technique in the booklet.

Even in 1915, Stokes points out, the NAACP had “recognized [the film] as ‘a most clever combination of spectacular and musical art,’”5 but its contention, as the organization’s protests grew more eloquent as the years went by, was that you shouldn’t, actually couldn’t, split Griffith’s virtuosity from its message.6 Stokes’ monograph summarizes the trend, from perhaps the 1980s onward, of film criticism seemingly catching up with that necessity and thereby altering its tack. No longer could it examine and critically evaluate Griffith’s film technique apart from its treatment of racist ideology.7 But then, taking an analogy from Stokes’ text, neither could/should any film historian (or any viewer for that matter) excise those scenes of Birth mired in retrogressive racism from those portraying a broader, kinder humanism.

In 1999, the Directors Guild of America decided to rename their D. W. Griffith Award (first instituted in 1953) to the DGA Lifetime Achievement Award, explaining that Birth had “helped foster intolerable racial stereotypes” and thereby had made the director’s name inappropriate to front its award. Somewhat officially then, Griffith, once the Father of Film, had become demoted to nothing more than an inveterate racist8 owning a powerful filmmaking technique with which to poison hearts and minds.

In Fighting Back: Responding to The Birth of a Nation – the opening essay in BFI’s booklet – “film curator” Ashley Clark shares the thrust of Stokes’ book by summarizing the NAACP’s decades-long protest before closing with mention of the blasting critical response to Birth by two current black filmmakers, Spike Lee and Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky).9

More recently and perhaps in recognition of Birth’s centenary, another black filmmaker mocks the film, albeit obliquely. Premiering at Sundance in January 2016, Nate Parker’s film about the slave insurrection leader Nat Turner carries, with maximum, billboarding irony, the title Birth of a Nation.

Articulate conference member Robert McEwan contends that Birth’s 100-year survival (it’s never been out of circulation in some form) offers the rare opportunity to examine, at any given point within that century, how Americans felt about this single, uniquely controversial film over such a span of time. As Birth went from being considered solely a product of a moneymaking business, to a form of art, and, nowadays, as a form of art that is inseparable from its racist political message, societal conditions and attitudes also mutated over the decades. It’s true that the overwhelmingly negative manner in which we assess the film today provides a savvy comparison to the current state of American race relations.

As of this writing in June 2016, race relations in the US are not good – the progression of racial equality appears to have stalled, or is even revolving backward. As mentioned above, Linda Williams refers to Dylann Roof’s Charleston rampage directly, but only after deftly summarizing – using the concept of melodrama – how Griffith, in his outlandishly successful epic melodrama, had adapted, streamlined, and delivered the sectional Southern writer’s racial melodrama – and with it the old, perverse Romance of the Old South – into national consciousness.

Credibly, Williams positions Northern whites as being largely disinterested and clueless, then and now, of the realities of the Reconstruction era and thereby susceptible to Griffith’s powerful, but myth-engendered, storytelling. By virtue of widespread Northern ignorance and backward Southern regionalism, Birth extended into the 20th century the legend of a gallant antebellum South overseen by an elite of benign landowners, who had presided protectively over their slaves with kindness and forbearance. The South’s enduring myth of the Civil War and its aftermath – the Lost Cause – imagines a pastoral paradise eradicated by the war and subsequent radical Reconstruction, with the North’s deceitful manipulation of childlike blacks, who turned bestial and rapacious when freed. Implicit in Williams’ comments is that Birth’s malign vision, however now thoroughly discredited as a history lesson, had helped to promulgate a version of the Southern Lost Cause myth that is with us still. Quoting Roof’s statement, Williams ends her comments by gloomily asserting that not only Mr. Roof, but the entire country, remains engaged by this retro-Southern melodrama of race.

Poem on the Lost Cause (undated; from the Library of Congress)

Poem on the Lost Cause (undated; from the Library of Congress)

Yet how much of a responsibility for current racist mindsets can we offload onto the shoulders of this one, very old film? Of course Williams doesn’t go as far as to assign Birth sole blame for 21st-century race relations, but by linking the film to Roof’s rationalization for murder, she doesn’t let it off the hook, either. (Although you might wonder whether the stratum of Southern white males who really believe that blacks are primarily out to rape white women hasn’t shrunk since 1865 (or 1915).) But Williams makes a vivid point by quoting Roof’s other fear: that blacks are taking over the country. Fear of a racial other subsuming the country – whether the threat be from African Americans or immigrating Muslims – is very much in the air in sections of white America.

As BFI’s commentators rightfully decry Birth’s racist content and legacy, they constantly place it in context with an acknowledgment of Griffith’s filmmaking prowess – and this linking is necessary, because that prowess is the major factor in the film’s initial popularity and, finally, its endurance. Yet except for Brownlow’s essay, there’s little discussion in BFI’s edition as to what the director’s technique actually achieves throughout, other than pointing out the somewhat inevitable exhilaration provided by the Klan’s climactic ride to save the besieged defenders of chivalrous Southern rectitude.10

Any socially aware American viewer, in feeling the excitement of the Klan’s ride, must pay the price of thinking about it. That is, in the wake of the film, he or she would have to consider what it means to be a 21st-century US citizen cheering – however inward and silently – a horse-mounted army of white-sheeted vigilantes that calls to mind repulsive but culturally embedded images of massed Klan marches like the one in Washington, DC, in 1928.

Today, shown elsewhere than in the US, the film’s race to the rescue would likely be received differently, to say the least, and with less post-screening soul-searching. In the discussion Williams recalls a recent, non-controversial public showing of Birth in Italy – no protests feared there – where the audience sprang to its feet at the Klan’s ride and gave it an ovation. In the US, you’d have to screen the film to an audience of white supremacists to get that kind of reaction.

Italy has its own societal woes, of course, and most likely within these its own varieties of racism, but it doesn’t share America’s unique racial legacy. So, if a few of their citizens are willing to take in a screening of a 191-minute, century-old silent film and end up enjoying it without self-examination, it’s because they need not process, as any US viewer must, how they experience Birth’s racial polemic. What we must necessarily view as hateful, demagogic propaganda, a non-US audience can accept as the background for a tale of epic sweep in which racist dynamics are merely fuel for the film’s thrill machine.

Early filmmakers the world over, not just Griffith, understood the need for an “action-packed” story. Facing degradation or death, young women must be rescued, and as the pulse of the narrative quickens on the way to its final payoff, so does the viewer’s. For time immemorial novels, plays, ancient myth – Perseus reaches the enchained Andromeda just in time – had set entertainment methods. By 1915, Griffith’s already finely honed filmmaking skills provided plenty of such excitement in what we now must consider the first feature-length film to exploit with such power this ageless manner of storytelling – of gathering tension, then releasing it.

But if The Birth of a Nation had been, during its 100 years before us, simply a delivery system for its melodramatic thrills, or for a racist ideology, we’d not be discussing it now. The film survives as something far more complex and compelling than either of these elements would allow. Griffith, man and artist, was complicated, too. Placing the confusion of Griffith’s ambitions, inner struggles, and intuitive vision alongside the ideological and aesthetic turbulence of his film only deepens our perceptions of it.

Polarities

As reported by Stokes, Griffith was imagining how to film the Klan’s ride as soon as he’d read Dixon’s play and said his adaptation would be “‘the chase movie to end all chase movies. Instead of saving one Nell … his ride was to save a nation.’”11 These quotes might sum up one of Griffith’s guiding aims and greatest strengths – his belief in and (then) unparalleled skill at providing cinematic thrills – and one of his recurring goals and weaknesses – his drive to embed his melodramatic thrills within a broadly defined context of history. Interviewed, Griffith might describe his historical films as “researched” and “accurate,” when, in considering the latter qualification, they are usually anything but. At the time of filming Birth – and its follow-up Intolerance (1916) – Griffith believed cinema should teach as well as entertain; he saw a future where historical films like Birth would replace history books in libraries and homes.12

griffith-birth-posterAny close viewing of The Birth of a Nation becomes a study in the film’s, and its maker’s, polarities, and here we have two impulses – one to entertain, one to educate – that, in Griffith’s films anyway, are often an awkward fit. The narrative Griffith has chosen to adapt already comes with enough embedded dualisms to worry over: the Old South and Reconstruction; the North and the South; the Northern family and the Southern family; the free then oppressed whites and the enslaved then freed blacks. As Griffith attempts to contain this vast canvas of colliding events and ideologies – with all their political, social, and individual forces in play – which of the dueling impulses motivates him the most? What excites him more, I wonder, the chase to save Nell or the chase to save a nation?

The Biograph short included in BFI’s package, The Rose of Kentucky, may not fully answer this question, but it might nudge us toward concluding that Griffith thought firstly of saving Nell. In The Rose of Kentucky – not one of the filmmaker’s better Biographs – the Klan are featured as villains, not the good guys. There are no African Americans present, but the hero, a white plantation owner, must shoot a couple of them to save the day (and the woman). After the gunfight, those Klan members still standing agree with the hero that they’ve done wrong and promise they’ll now go straight. In his video discussion of Birth and Dixon’s fiction, Melvyn Stokes conjectures that the appearance of the Klan here reflects its later 20th-century iteration, a form of the organization that neither Dixon nor Griffith approved of (the novelist called its members “renegades”).

Their aversion to the later Klan is one thing, but the movement’s second blossoming didn’t occur until 1915,13 and The Rose of Kentucky appeared in 1911, leading us to conjecture that Griffith, having assigned them as rogue villains that year, made an about face and filmed them as avenging saviors of Southern honor a mere three years later, partially (but not only) because he’d found a property with a good clinching climax.

To give an audience a damn good race to the rescue was certainly Griffith’s priority, here and elsewhere in his career, but the director seemed hard-wired to want historical films like Birth to simultaneously, along with the thrills, operate as agents of enlightenment or of cultivation. To him this was how motion pictures entered the realm of high-toned works of art, those, that is, deemed worth of enduring, unlike those that merely offered coarse entertainment.

But however Griffith may have had foresight in his view of film as an art form, he was utterly delusional about feature film – especially his own – providing any kind of fine-toothed, objective education in something as profoundly complex, and regionally contested, as American history. Of all his films, as we view them now, Birth suffers the most from this delusion – because with it he had so squarely hit the nerve in the American body politic most sensitive to touch since the era of the civil rights movement – the racial divide that arose from a fledgling country’s economic reliance on the practice of slavery.

Entering the Griffith classroom, you occasionally encounter the blackboard, where the filmmaker has scrawled a moment in history he wishes to force-feed us. Sprinkled throughout the film, these take the form of brief segments labeled as “facsimiles” that, based, tableau-like, on paintings or vintage photographs, illustrate, mostly, important Civil War events, such as Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, which features Donald Crisp as a cigar-chomping Ulysses S. Grant. Playing his own role of a responsible educator, Griffith always presents an intertitle citing the source from which a given facsimile is drawn. In one Reconstruction era facsimile, however – showing barefooted, clownishly costumed blacks eating fried chicken and generally behaving badly as newly elected members of the South Carolina legislature – the filmmaker appears to misleadingly qualify the veracity of its source by citing something called “The Columbia State.” According to Kevin Brownlow in his BFI essay, the sequence’s imagery was based on that of a political cartoon. Griffith omits this detail.

The best “facsimile” doesn’t play like the others. The remarkable re-enactment of Lincoln’s assassination takes place in a studiously rendered replication of the Ford Theater interior, with actors on the stage engaged in a performance of what might be an accurate approximation of a setting of Our American Cousin. Because we witness it via the point of view of Elsie and Phil Stoneman (Lilian Gish and Elmer Clifton), the sight of John Wilkes Booth (Raoul Walsh) leaping from the Lincolns’ box onto the stage (with Walsh credibly miming the breaking of Booth’s ankle) has a spooky feel of you-are-there realism. It’s as if we’re seeing the actual filmed artifact upon which Griffith would have based a facsimile of the event had one magically existed. By placing two of the story’s characters within the reenacted event, Griffith takes it beyond a heavy-handed schoolroom, illustrational stance.

But the filmmaker’s image-making, which chronically achieves mythopoetic dimensions, is a bracingly effective delivery system with both positive dramatic results on one hand and negative ideological backfires on the other, and each of these are almost neatly divided between the film’s two parts. History lessons based on regional legends are one thing, but an entertainment vehicle, as successive generations judge it, can suffer even more from sustaining a political message, especially one that goes hand in hand with that spurious history. Seeing the entertainment possibilities within Dixon’s enflamed narrative, Griffith was suddenly at arms against his own better angels. Once Lincoln is shot and Reconstruction begins in part two, Griffith’s adaptation of Dixon’s ugly sectarian viewpoint comes at us with as much conviction and power as part one’s deeply felt vision of war and what it does to people.

In part two’s treatment of the country’s most devastating schism, the Reconstruction era, you encounter Griffith’s divided self as a dramatist. Griffith’s earliest creative struggles were those of an aspiring man of the theater. As a young man he began a career as an actor before the turn of the 20th century, then, shortly thereafter, tried his hand at playwriting. He failed in both disciplines, but his experiences in both gave him a grounding in the mechanics and devices of 19th-century theater that never left him. Nearly all the films he made contained examples of them. Into Griffith’s cinematic mix, these brought melodramatic plot structures, denouements – double weddings in Birth and Way Down East – and sometimes the broad gestural acting styles that had partly been a time-out-of-mind method to project large emotions to an audience from the distance of a stage.

Yet Griffith learned early on in his career – in his short films for Biograph – that motion picture acting, as captured by the camera’s lens, must rely less on gesture and exclamatory facial expressions (and in silent film, none at all on theater acting’s modulating speech). Instead, in an intimate, naturalistic exchange, it emanates from within the actor, who can project emotion, or even a delicate process of thought, through the eyes and onto the film’s emulsion. From over a century of the movies, it’s a mode of performance that’s second nature to us, and one that, even in 1915, Griffith understood and produced with skill and consistency.

Griffith and Thomas Dixon

image014Conveniently, if we’d like to compartmentalize its effects, the stagy acting that appears dated, even outright ridiculous, occurs mostly within Griffith’s adaptation of Thomas Dixon’s fiction, much of which takes place in the second part of Birth. Suddenly it’s as if you’re watching old-timey theatrics from a forgotten play – such as a stage adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

And mention of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is pertinent to the genesis of The Birth of a Nation. Dixon, as a Southern white supremacist, had been so offended by Stowe’s novel that he planned a trilogy of novels to counter it, or actually nullify it, a frustrated ambition, of course. In these – and in the play he developed from the second, The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan – he offered a deliberate racial reversal of Stowe’s polemic. Instead of the blacks abused and victimized as property in Stowe’s antebellum South, Dixon wrote of whites being subjugated and brutalized by freed blacks during Reconstruction.14

Once taken as a firebrand call to reform when published in 1852, the novel and play of Uncle Tom’s Cabin became so embedded in US culture by the 20th century that a Little Rascals short in the 1930s could ridicule its sentimentality, creaky stage mechanics (most memorably, the ice floe sequence and Eva’s ascent to heaven) and crude villain/victim dialectic.

Griffith had likely been exposed to stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin early and often – not to mention 1903 and 1910 silent film adaptations – and he probably took their theatrics quite seriously. The ice-floe/waterfall sequence in Way Down East may well have been inspired by Eliza’s escape across the ice that he’d seen in one of those plays or films. Beyond Dixon’s vitriolic designs on Stowe’s themes, the melodramatic hypertension of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is all to the point when discussing Griffith’s descent into similar theatricality in Birth’s second half – perhaps the most bizarre display of it in his career in its simplistic melodrama of villainy (Radical Reconstruction) versus victim (the defeated South).

But some of the worst excesses of such theatricality crop up in part one, in a group of scenes involving Austin Stoneman’s housekeeper/mistress, Lydia Brown (Mary Alden). These sequences set the stage for part two’s melange of sex, violence, and racist comeuppance.

Thaddeus Stevens

Thaddeus Stevens

Dixon and Griffith intend Austin Stoneman to be a thinly veiled version of the historical Thaddeus Stevens, an activist member of the House of Representatives during the Civil War and Reconstruction, who did indeed have a mulatto housekeeper named Lydia with whom he was rumored to have had a sexual relationship.15 Whatever role this relationship might have played in Stevens’ radical directives during Reconstruction, the fictional Stoneman’s dalliance with Lydia poisons his mind to the extent that he’s blind to the evils of miscegenation, which prompts him to encourage legislation allowing interracial marriage in the South (or at least in South Carolina), a bit of lawmaking that I’m assuming is a fantasy born in Dixon’s fiction.

Sex, don’t we know it, figures big-time in Griffith’s Reconstruction. As played by the corked-up Alden, Lydia’s growing sense of sexual and political entitlement in part one makes for challenging viewing; naturalistic acting goes right out the window as, dropping to the floor and tearing her dress off one shoulder, she writhes with erotic distemper after being treated with contempt by visiting senator William Seward. Lydia comes hard-wired with entitlement because, as a mulatto, she is born of corrupted seed and has entered the world debased. Alden ramps her performance up with the kind of semaphoric gesture – even eye-rolling – that plays as ludicrous today.

We meet The Clansman’s Silas Lynch in part two of Birth. As a politicized mulatto and male counterpart to Lydia, he lusts after Northern congressman Austin Stoneman’s daughter, Elsie (Lilian Gish), a white woman he feels entitled to marry if only to satisfy that lust.16 Lynch (George Siegmann), acting as Austin Stoneman’s henchman under the guise of Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina, brutalizes the entire town of Piedmont with a marauding mass of black militia, while simultaneously chasing the hysterical Elsie Stoneman around his lodgings. Although placed in power by Stoneman, Silas Lynch inherits a baseline of evil via the dreaded interbreeding of whites and blacks.

Under its burnt cork, the most Siegmann’s performance projects is a kind of manic glee as he anticipates sex with Elsie via a hastily arranged “forced marriage,” to which Elsie reacts with unrestrained horror. Since Silas Lynch operates not as a character but as a symbol, there’s no opportunity for Siegmann to give a camera-friendly performance. He’s a fraudulent, stagy presence throughout, but never more so than when the story reaches its climax. Here Lynch blossoms into the kind of stock melodramatic villain who places a virtuous heroine in physical danger because she refuses to submit to his lecherous demands; but instead of a lashing to the railroad tracks, Elsie faces a legalized rape that looks to arrive as precipitously as any oncoming locomotive.

Dixon’s fiction offers more than one actual rape, but Griffith, for the purposes of his grand rescue finale, only allows its threat, which has the effect of softening Dixon’s dedicated polemic by making the film adaptation concerned more about entertainment than avenging Stowe’s book and Reconstruction, a need not shared by the average moviegoer, even in 1915.

Mae Marsh

Flora (Mae Marsh)

In The Clansman, a Southern mother and daughter are attacked and raped in their home by a small gang of blacks, whereupon they both commit suicide rather than live in shame. In Birth, however, it’s Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh), the young sister of the Little Colonel, who commits suicide – but not because she’s been raped. Inspired by state legislation that legalizes interracial marriage, a renegade black militiaman named Gus (Walter Long) naturally assumes that the first adolescent white girl he sees – Flora – will want to mate with him. But like his Silas Lynch, Griffith’s Gus wants to marry a white woman, not simply violate her where she stands (as Dixon’s does), and, in spite of chasing her, shows some physical forbearance. (At least he shows more than Lynch, who binds and gags the recalcitrant Elsie.)

Gus proposes marriage timidly – he seems a bit mentally challenged – but at the very suggestion of such a thing, Flora, who’s been surprised by him as she’s out in the woodland feeding a favorite squirrel, runs off in a panic through the pine barrens with Gus close on her heels. Catching up with her on a rocky promontory, Gus assures Flora he has no intention of hurting her, but intuiting, supposedly, that Gus can only act on his race’s bestial impulses, she jumps to her death rather than submit to them.

Given that Gus never shows a clear intention to rape, is it possible to view Flora’s reaction as overreacting? Granted, Flora is a sheltered, adolescent girl and Gus, a large man with something on his mind, should not have run after her, but, still, the forced tragic solution to her dilemma seems dramatically overripe.

Flora’s death inspires Ben Cameron to form the Klan. Decidedly, the War is not over, the Lost Cause persists, and so does Dixon’s regressive polemic in the film. But it’s the girl’s leap through “the opal gates of death” that provides the fuel for Birth’s exciting climax, the very element that inspired Griffith to adapt Dixon’s fiction in the first place. In spite of her occasional, jittery overacting, Mae Marsh is very affecting as Flora, and, as much as her rash act may seem silly and dramatically retrograde today, her character’s sudden death remains shocking – a sucker punch to our gut-level sympathy with the character. As she comes to age in part one of Birth – and is first to greet the Little Colonel in his homecoming from the war – we’re made to feel as protective toward little Flora as does her older brother.

Thus, if, like mine, your defenses are down, Ben Cameron’s rage – very well projected as it’s underplayed by Walthall – can feel quite righteous, which leads to a uniquely strange, two-level viewing experience as Cameron hastily conceives the Night Riders to enact justice upon Gus. (Conveniently, by the time Cameron and his compadres have taken the Scottish Oath of Klan brotherhood, Gus has killed a white man in a bar fight and now carries indefensible guilt for that on top of the unbearable crime of harassing a white girl.).

Within minutes of screen time, Gus is caught, “tried,” and, though not shown, executed by the Klan. Swept along by Griffith’s splendidly visceral cross cutting, you might not pause to consider the abhorrence of the proceedings until the mounted, robed riders toss Gus’s corpse onto Silas Lynch’s front porch like a sack of meat. It’s perhaps the ugliest moment in the film – the real climax of the story’s racial hatred – and for anyone who attempts to admire the film, the toughest to negotiate. And it’s a climactic juncture that Griffith encourages us to forget in the gathering heat of the final rescue.

Gus (Walter Long)

Gus (Walter Long)

Why is it then that, until that final, sordid gesture, Gus’s capture and murder can operate as gripping entertainment even as another part of our brain realizes we’re watching a lynching? There’s the excitement generated by the action, yes, but another distancing element is Gus’s appearance as a black man. If possible, it’s even less convincing than Lynch’s. Under his makeup, Walter Long remains resolutely Caucasian, as of course do all the white actors playing supporting roles as African Americans.

It’s understandable why Griffith never considered casting blacks in these roles. As Kevin Brownlow points out in his essay, blacks – at least in the South – could not legally share the stage with white women; additionally, in the theater (and by analogy on the screen), the blacking-up of white actors had to be obvious in its artificiality, much like what you’d have seen in minstrelsy where the effect was played for song, dance, and comedy.

But beyond acknowledging these period strictures and conventions, it’s illuminating to imagine the difference in the Flora/Gus sequence and in the lynching scene if Gus had been played by an actual African American. As these scenes stand, the black-faced Walter Long places a scrim of deliberate, theatrical fakery over the action – until Gus’s body hits the porch.

But put a large, muscular black man in Lang’s place and suddenly Gus’s actions toward Flora – and their consequences for him – take a mighty leap toward a confrontational reality that Dixon might have appreciated seeing, but for which movie audiences across the country were not prepared. Flocking to the biggest entertainment phenomenon of the decade, they wanted a grand, immersive evening of diversion and gratification, not coming face to face with their country’s darkest aberration.

Elsie (Lillian Gish)

Elsie (Lillian Gish)

In his monograph, Stokes conjectures that, if some African Americans managed to see Birth upon its release in 1915 and, like the white audience, were entertained, even awed, by the experience – despite the film’s depiction of blacks – it may have been because the sight of whites playing blacks “emphasize[d] the film’s character as fictionalized entertainment.”17 Stokes goes on to wonder if blacks may have discounted the relevance of the events they saw on screen because they depicted those from a distant past.

In spite of its action-laced pace – there are no longueurs in The Birth of a Nation – the pervasive silliness of part two’s dramatic contrivances may also have made its over-the-top racism easier for yesterday’s cineaste to frame as bygone entertainment, in that what’s dated and/or hateful is all placed intriguingly within innovative, ahead-of-its-time filmmaking. For this writer, the absurdity of part two’s dramaturgy still has this effect.

And so much of the filmmaking plays exactly right. Griffith knew how, with maximum authenticity, to dress his sets, stage battle scenes, direct a thrilling parade of gallant Confederate soldiery, but when, for example, he stocks interior scenes with liveried house slaves that look like nothing but minstrel clowns about to buck and wing, he loses his grip on the sobriety of his “race to save a nation” along with his “Nell.”

Of course, there are two Nells to save. In a two-pronged mission, the Klan rides first to extricate Elsie from Lynch’s clutches while others arrive at a remote and tiny cabin surrounded by a raging tide of rabid black militia. Here the victims/defenders are a diverse group: among them, the cabin’s inhabitants (a pair of cashiered-out Union soldiers), Phil Stoneman, Dr. Cameron, the Faithful Ones (slaves loyal to former owners), and, most preciously, a daughter of the South, Margaret Cameron. In this grand birthing of the new nation, Yankees, Southerners, and faithful blacks unite to stave off the deceived, misled Negro attackers, who appear to have a gross advantage in guns and numbers. With the situation becoming ever more dire, Dr. Cameron has his pistol readied over the head of Margaret, willing to kill his daughter, if need be, to save her from defilement.

But once securely in the hands of the night riders, all move swiftly to a victory parade through the main street of Piedmont (the rescued women in front). Griffith’s coda comes next, and it’s a tonally mixed affair in which we first see a sour vignette showing the next local election where a row of mounted Klan in full regalia scare off skittish Negroes from voting.18 Then we have the melodrama’s cadence – a satisfying double honeymoon of the principal lovers – which also serves as the symbolic restored unity of North and South.

Topping it all is a utopian vision, seemingly sprung from the mind of Ben Cameron (the Klan’s Grand Dragon, in case we’ve forgotten) of a world without war. Here religious kitsch invades the filmmaker’s pacifist plea. Overseen by an awkwardly superimposed image of The Christ that floats like a bad Sunday school memory, happy folk (in antique dress) celebrate the joys of peace as they prance about in a high-toned, formal landscape. We’re not surprised to see that this happy place appears to exclude African Americans.

birth-jesus

It’s a poor image, less expressive of Griffith’s truest intentions as an artist than an example of a forced, uplifting sentiment from a self-promoter reaching for prestige and recognition. It’s also possible that Griffith wished to distance himself a bit more from the darkness inherent in the narrative he derived from Dixon’s novels. Both author and filmmaker forge a new “nation” as the two reconciled North/South couples marry, but Griffith wants to raise the endgame higher with his final image of a pacifism ordained by Jesus. The final sequence of Intolerance offers a similar pacifist imagining, in which soldiers drop their guns on the battlefield and cannons go silent, children play with flowers, and a big cross imprints itself in the sky.

In Birth, Griffith’s anti-war sentiments struggle for prominence over those crying for the survival of the Lost Cause, something I’m betting Thomas Dixon cared a lot about. The filmmaker’s pacifist stance seems more sincere, better expressed, and certainly better integrated in the battle sequences of part one – these to be discussed later – but in part two, the sugary religiosity of the anti-war coda only acts to gum up the exhilaration provided by the Klan’s victory and the concluding warmth brought on by the weddings. Why not send the audience home gratified with these two clinching wrap-ups?

The filmmaker’s confusion of intent in part two – and its uneasy squaring of entertainment values – has raised other questions. There’s little doubt that Griffith revered and treasured both the legend of the Old South on one hand and the Klan as guardians of Southern honor and womanhood on the other, but did he truly feel the need, like Dixon, to proselytize these beliefs and ideals, or, for him, was the greater need to make a successful, important film? And in that regard, did he realize that too much fidelity in adapting Dixon’s didactic – and not universally popular – fictions might prove problematic for moviegoers nationwide, even in 1915?

Sharing the Responsibility: Selznick’s Gone With the Wind

In 1936, when David O. Selznick bought the film rights to Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind – before it was published – he knew full well what the public was prepared for, and what they would consider a grand night’s entertainment. And by then, the realities of Reconstruction, fully disregarded by an indifferent nation at large, were even further in the past.

The studio system, an industrial, factory approach to moviemaking, had been in place at least since MGM’s emergence in 1925, killing off independent filmmaking for decades to come. And Griffith had been an independent, more so than Selznick, who certainly attempted to act like one, but who was held in place by what the American public expected, especially in the adaptation of a nationally revered novel, which needed to be, as a completed film, a nearly one-to-one equivalent of Mitchell’s text.

gone-with-the-wind-ad

In 1915, I imagine very few of Dixon’s readers anticipated a faithful film adaptation of his fiction, but, regardless, D. W. Griffith filmed what and how he wanted because, as Richard Schickel has observed, he believed he controlled and molded the tastes of the moviegoing public. Whether such an attitude, in 1915 anyway, was hubris or not is up for debate, but when buying the rights to GWTW, the seasoned, studio-trained Selznick understood, in spite of his headstrong ways, that public taste ruled the movies, not vice versa.

As he began work on Birth, Griffith believed he was still inventing what a movie could and should be, and while entertainment was uppermost in this burgeoning definition, Griffith the pioneer, the self-proclaimed cinema artiste, had those other qualifications in mind when imagining an epic historical film like Birth: education, edification, and the truisms of history.19

Adapting another book whose Southern characters are caught in the same mesh of war and defeat as The Birth of a Nation, Selznick played it safe. Birth may have been a cautionary tale for him. Although Mitchell’s romantic historical brought the author a Pulitzer instead of notoriety, the producer, before commencing principal photography, vetted the screenplay with black leaders to eliminate possible offenses. Among these was reportedly the use of the “n” word – although it seems unlikely a major film of its time would use the term anyway.20

More intently considered, perhaps, was the novel’s detailed depiction of Reconstruction inequities toward the white population. Mitchell’s text views the KKK as having been the necessary response to Northern oppression, and puts Rhett Butler in a Yankee jail because he’s killed a black man who was being “uppity to a white woman.” The adaptation smooths these sharp edges, reducing the injustices of Reconstruction to brief vignettes featuring carpetbaggers and scalawags and placing Rhett in jail because of war profiteering. The KKK is never mentioned by name.

In the novel, Scarlett O’Hara (Vivian Leigh), like Flora, is threatened with rape after the war, but the film adjusts this sequence so that it becomes a plot point not meant to underline the horrors Southern women must face from newly freed, oversexed blacks. In both book and film, Scarlett’s attack arises from her carelessness as a too headstrong female (having ridden her carriage unaccompanied past a dangerous “shantytown”), but in Selznick’s adaptation her attacker is a white hobo, intent first on robbing but then on taking lustful advantage of the incautiously solitary Scarlett, who faints at the prospect. Scarlett’s white attacker is accompanied by a black man, who merely aids and abets by controlling Scarlett’s horse – like a servant or slave – while the other salaciously goes in on the unconscious woman. In the film as edited, the black’s participation is hardly noticeable.21

In the novel the sequence is far more loaded. Although the poor white is still in charge of the attack, it’s the black man, under the guise of robbing her, who goes to sexually assault Scarlett, and his actions are a more explicit attempt at rape, with some bodice ripping actually accomplished before Scarlett is rescued.

As in the novel, Ashley and other Southern gentleman see womanhood threatened, decide it’s time to clean out the shantytown, and ride out into the night. But their actions (not shown onscreen) only suggest a disguised version of a covert Klan mission. In the novel, it’s called for what it is, a Klan operation, and was likely high on the list as a provocative element to be elided for the film. Side-stepping all specific mention of the KKK, these events only move the plot forward and add to the viewer’s perception of Scarlett’s net worth as an independent woman, which continues to seesaw up and down all the way to Rhett’s “I don’t give a damn.”

Griffith, too, had a sense, if one falling short of realities, that some of Dixon’s source material was inflammatory; he eliminated the rapes, for example, and he doesn’t show Gus’s execution, whatever that might have involved. But Selznick reflected his time as much as Griffith did his and went further to soften racist elements. Born of Lithuanian Jewish extraction in Pennsylvania, Selznick is said to have had liberal attitudes regarding African Americans, while Atlanta native Mitchell, unlike Mr. Dixon, had had no intention of using her fiction to settle old scores with Harriet Beecher Stowe.

In her novel, and the film, the events of the Civil War and Reconstruction function more as dramatic hurtles over which Scarlett O’Hara must jump in her run for survival than the propagandistic signposts of regional racist belief that Griffith mixes in with his 19th-century melodramatic stagings in Birth’s part two. The film of GWTW places its focus squarely on its (somewhat anti-) heroine, not the white South under the black boot.

But as much as the film Gone With the Wind may appear to distance itself from The Birth of a Nation, it still talks the same talk of Southern victimhood. Indeed, Selznick’s GWTW, as much or more as Birth, helped extend the legend of the Old South and the exquisite pathos of its demise – all of which Mitchell’s novel had honored wholeheartedly – into the middle of the 20th century and beyond. The film also retains Mitchell’s version of slavery as the same beneficent institution we see in Birth.

After the grand proclamation of GWTW’s title and over a slow, actually quite poignant, wordless choral rendering of Dixie arranged by Max Steiner, a banner of text unfurls: “There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind …”22

All this sounds nonsensically misty-eyed now – maybe even a bit half-hearted – but, with all the Technicolor extravagance Selznick could summon, it’s what the film immerses us in for the first half hour or so: a lovely somnolent vision of old plantation life. A scene where prepubescent slave girls fan the recumbent white flesh of Southern child-women as they take their postprandial nap goes down a lot sweeter than it should. When Ashley (Leslie Howard) leads Melanie (Olivia de Havilland) from a darkened room onto a balcony overlooking a sunlit lawn of brightly festooned, promenading guests, you’re dazzled by the finely calibrated effect. Selznick’s Old South is much more pumped with extras and excess than the comparatively modest version of it Griffith gives us in Birth.

All of this scene – William Cameron Menzies’ production design, Leslie Howard’s measured patrician delivery, and Steiner’s wistful underscore – could make you, back in the day, forget the maudlin resolve in the opening title quoted above, prompting us to mourn the vanishing of this society of knights and ladies, of master and slave. Now, in 2016 – however you might have swallowed them in 1939 or 1960 – you can’t help but choke, if briefly, on those three words, master and slave, in the context of regretting their passing.

Mammy (Hattie McDaniel)

Mammy (Hattie McDaniel)

All the black characters in GWTW are played by actual African Americans, yet as characterized by Mitchell and placed on the screen, you could see them as merely upgraded versions of Griffith’s nameless “faithful ones,” played by black-faced white actors. Thus, on one hand, like Birth, GWTW extends what is likely another retro-blurring of how slaves had actually been treated in the antebellum South. But within this mirage of the Old South, the ’39 film offers a considerable advancement in allowing black actors – especially Hattie McDaniel, whose detailed and moving performance overrode her part’s stereotyping (and garnered for her an Academy Award) – to come across as actual human beings. Where Griffith’s faithful ones, including a rotund Mammy figure, act in shadows and in long shots, McDaniel shares scenes with the principals upfront and throughout, and often in close-up.

Currently book and film still enjoy wide-ranging popularity. Any surviving repertory theater can screen GWTW without fear of angry demonstrations. In 2011, Scribner issued a 75th anniversary edition of Mitchell’s novel, with a new preface by author Pat Conroy, who claims that GWTW inspired him to become a writer. How many high-profile filmmakers today would voice the same soft spot for Griffith’s film? And in 2016, there are more people watching GWTW on Blu-ray than BFI’s new edition of Birth.

As gargantuan an experience as GWTW was (and still is) – with an indefinable magic emanating from the performances of Vivian Leigh, Clark Gable, Olivia de Havilland, and, equally, Hattie McDaniel – it was (and still is) “just a movie,” a studio product. Griffith knew he was involved in a business venture, but envisioned his Birth as not just an object of commerce but also as a work worthy of breathing the same rarefied air of great art. Selznick may have imagined a long run for GWTW but not necessarily immortality. By the 21st century, both films may well have achieved something like eternal life in the world of cinema, but Griffith was the one aiming for it from the beginning, for ill (hateful and spurious history lessons) and good (human verities emerging from struggle).

The Camerons at Home

With an intertitle expressing the same sentiment as GWTW’s opening banner, Griffith’s part one introduces us to the home of the Cameron family, who live a peaceful antebellum existence in the fictional town of Piedmont, South Carolina. But Birth’s intertitle is much pithier and less high-flown than Selznick’s purple text; simply put, life for the Camerons “runs in a quaintly way that is to be no more.” No cavaliers or knights are mentioned, but neither are masters and slaves.

The Camerons at home

The Camerons at home

In these opening scenes of Birth (after a brief preamble showing the introduction of slavery to America as “the seed of disunion”), slaves are – unlike Mammy in GWTW – matter-of-factly in the background, with their masters in the foreground. The first half hour or so of the film is an introduction of two families: one Southern, the Camerons; one Northern, the Stonemans. This is the setup that Stokes reported had sent his students to checking their smart phones. But for anyone paying attention these initial scenes show Griffith at his best, as they set the foundation for the narrative sweep of part one. Until the evils of Reconstruction arrive, the story functions, not as a melodrama, but as something closer to a drama in a classic sense, in which individual lives and families surrender to forces greater than themselves.

In the first scene, Billy Bitzer’s camera is in observation mode, taking in key members of the Cameron family as they relax on their front porch. Here the performances are at their most naturalistic. Top-hatted and dressed like a dandy, Ben Cameron arrives, chats with a passing carriage, and still smoking a cigar, plays with his little sister, Flora, while the master of the house, Dr. Cameron (Spottiswoode Aitken), reads the paper with a cat on his lap and puppies at his feet. The elder sister Margaret (the prepossessingly beautiful Miriam Cooper) is a serene, steady presence amongst the group, as she is for the rest of the film. Not half the actress Lilian Gish was, Cooper in Birth might be seen as faring better than the lovely 19-year-old Gish, who as Elsie must scream, faint, and generally project a defenseless maiden’s hysteria in part two.

Griffith excelled at scaled-down dramas centering on domestic life, as seen in the troubled integration of the victimized Anna Moore into the Bartlett family in Way Down East (1920), or the daily threat of starvation in post-WWI Germany to the Polish family in Isn’t Life Wonderful? (1924).

A long shot has established the Cameron family manse on a dusty, small-town street, which appears the home shares with neighboring houses on adjacent lots. How this apparently densely settled street with its smallish lots allows for the Cameron plantation to open up in the back to slave quarters and acres of cotton fields is never adequately allowed continuity. Similarly, the front of the Camerons’ house, although parading a row of substantial Ionic columns, appears to be a modest affair that barely allows for a second story, yet entering it, we see a lavish sitting parlor with a high ceiling accommodating a second floor, reached by a central grand staircase.

Even with their grand staircase, the Camerons appear to be living within less than aristocratic means – unlike the planters in GWTW – and there is no grand barbecue planned when the Stoneman brothers arrive for a visit. It’s all very low key as the Northerners are shown about the slave quarters and the cotton fields, which gives the film an opportunity to insert displays of benevolence and good cheer between the Camerons and their slaves. These self-congratulatory demonstrations of affection between owner and slave – so important to the film as a reveal of the arcadia soon to be lost – are mercifully brief but long enough to elicit groans, or laughs, from a contemporary audience.

As the war engulfs both families, there are young people in love, but no love triangle. Part one has its climax – the aforementioned assassination of Lincoln – and as for the disaster of the Civil War itself, in terms of massive, wholesale death on both sides, Griffith underlines it with images of scattered corpses, some piled on top of each other, in the wake of the battle of Petersburg – these shots being very much reminiscent of corpse-littered battlegrounds captured by photographer Matthew Brady.

Additionally, to bring the film’s characters up close to the fighting, there are two sequences in which the younger and elder sons of each family meet in battle. In contrast to the Brady-like images, these scenes are couched in the theatrical, sentimental device made popular by 19th-century Romantic fiction, in which separated and far-flung relatives, lovers, or friends meet in highly coincidental and often ironic circumstances. In such meetings, emotional coals theretofore banked in distance and longing suddenly flare.

In the first, the Union’s Tod Stoneman (Bobby Harron), fleeing a skirmish, encounters a wounded Confederate sprawled at his feet. Just before finishing him off with his bayonet, he recognizes the soldier as his Southern friend Duke Cameron (Maxfield Stanley) and joyfully greets him. But when Tod receives a bullet in the back, the reunion is cut short. Falling prostrate alongside his friend and with his face nestled against Duke’s, the sight may suggest the homoerotic to contemporary audiences, especially as Tod reaches, just before he expires, to tenderly cup the jaw of the already departed Duke.

Stepping back, though, we know the image is intended as only one of a close male friendship, a closeness, one imagines, more acceptable among men of the 19th century than those of today, and Griffith – something of a 19th-century man himself – doesn’t shy from picturing it. The sequence stays in the mind as something authentic to Civil War-era social sensibilities. It’s important to keep in mind that Griffith was born a mere ten years after Appomattox and two years before the end of Reconstruction, with a father a full colonel in the Confederate States Army, who, in Griffith family folklore anyway, was wounded five times in the war.23

Later in the film, during, as an intertitle puts it, “the last gray days of the Confederacy,” another mirroring happenstance occurs when the elder brothers of each family meet in the battle of Petersburg. Ben Cameron’s spirited but hopeless charge against a well-defended Union entrenchment is one of the best-ever filmed visualizations of the adrenaline-rush of combat, especially when the camera, for just a few seconds, tracks backward as Ben Cameron runs toward it with the Confederate standard, which, with death-defying fervor, he plunges into a cannon’s open maw. After this desperate gesture, the wounded Little Colonel collapses into the arms of a Yankee officer, who just happens to be his best friend, Phil Stoneman.

Once again, Victorian sentimentality is layered all over the pathos of two friends meeting as enemies, with Stoneman holding the limp unconscious Cameron in a kind of battlefield pietà. Like the image of the younger brothers, the brief visual of Ben and Phil in a pose of fraternal ardor comes ready-made to garner the same kind of response you’d get from hearing an old Civil War song, like “Break the News to Mother” or “For the Dear Old Flag I Die.” The sentimental, period flavor of these images meshes surprisingly well with the realism of Griffith’s battle scenes, perhaps partly because it was the kind of war in which two friends might indeed meet on the battlefield.

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The dramatic plea of these battleground meetings may have the flavor of 19th-century theater or fiction, but Griffith largely keeps part one free of what Linda Williams, as quoted in Stokes’ monograph, calls “linking melodramatic form to the dialectic of racial pathos and antipathy.”24 The heart of this film beats truest within the modest confines of the Camerons’ front porch, which, as it faces that small-town street, begins and ends Birth’s first part.

Born on a Kentucky farm in 1875, D. W. Griffith was intensely nostalgic for his rural childhood, and many of his better films reflect memories of it. As Schickel notes, “whenever he turned to poverty, to street life, to the dusty roads of remembered childhood, the films would suddenly ring with truth.”25 As Birth begins, the Camerons are anything but poor, but they hum with close-knit affection, which, as war and Reconstruction affords them little but death and poverty, allows them to survive. The survival of families, through whatever storm or strife, is one of Griffith’s great themes. Whenever the filmmaker explores it, he’s generous with detail and nuance.

When Ben Cameron returns from the war, fragile and weak from his wounds and a long recuperation in a Northern hospital, he approaches the homestead with what appears to be trepidation. We see him, in a medium shot, on the sidewalk in the midday sun with the street empty and no life stirring from the house. As he reaches the porch, however, Flora suddenly emerges, greeting him alone because the family, fully aware he’s just outside, have planned it that way. They don’t want to overwhelm him. Confronting each other, brother and sister are reserved and tentative. Flora grins, but Ben just stares. It’s been a full four years since he’s seen his kid sister, who has since grown to nubile maturity, and he appears abashed at the development.

The siblings are reduced to commenting on the poor state of each other’s wardrobe. Ben distractedly fingers the tufts of cotton Flora has, at the last minute, decorated her homespun dress with (the best of her clothes having already been donated to The Cause), while she points to the holes in his dilapidated (bullet-hole-ridden?) officer’s hat. Finally there’s a rush of feeling between them, and the two fall into an embrace. Then as Flora leads him to the front door and enters it first, Griffith carefully composes a shot from within the porch but down its length, so that, as Ben reaches the door and hesitates before it, we see Flora’s arms and those of another unidentified female (likely the mother), her body and face unseen, extend outward from within, gather him up, and draw him into the house.

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Like much of what we see of the Camerons’ domestic life, the entire scene is delicately underplayed, but here Griffith’s direction provides the emotional realism of a returning, battle-scarred veteran who feels disoriented and weirdly detached at the long-dreamt moment of homecoming. The Little Colonel’s mind and body still inhabit the pain and fog of war; it’s up to his family to pull him into the warmth of hearth and home. With the camera keeping its medium distance, we see, not faces contorted with joy and streaming tears, but just this simple gesture of welcome and familial restoration. The economy of the image, what it leaves out – and the visual mastery of its conception – are key to its power and why it’s the crowning moment in the entire film – and possibly the finest in all of Griffith’s career.26

But is the humane, universal resonance of this image, and others in the film, enough to let us forgive the racist excess of the rest? Perhaps not, but cannot one allow for the complexities, conflicts, and contrarieties of Griffith himself? I suspect it’s hard for any of us today – including many living below the Mason-Dixon Line – to imagine why and how Southerners27 born in the wake of the Civil War clung so tenaciously to stories of the Old South and the Lost Cause.28 In 1936, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind unapologetically painted the same picture of an edenic South, with slavery an unalloyed benevolent institution, as had Griffith. Leaving the propagandist Dixon out of the question, why didn’t Griffith and Mitchell – both intelligent and sensitive people – wise up to their region’s past?

But we can also consider how unreservedly the American public at large in 1915 bought into Birth’s vision of the South. It was captivated, not horrified, by the film’s Reconstruction drama. Then again, should this surprise us? Slavery, after all, had fostered the young economy of all of America, not just the South. The entire country – whether in 1865, 1915, 1939, or 2016 – has been and is complicit in the country’s racial divide, and this goes hand in hand with a century of overwhelmingly widespread ignorance of what really went on during Reconstruction.

Scholar Eric Foner, in the preface to his Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877, explains that our revisionist view of Reconstruction – the point of view which makes the racist violence in Birth so loathsome to our eyes – didn’t emerge in any form until the publication in 1935 of W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America, which was then mostly ignored.29 The more lasting “revisionist wave” of Reconstruction scholarship didn’t occur until the 1960s and the civil rights movement.30

In the years leading up to the production of Birth (and way beyond it), scholarship was still under the spell of what Foner calls “the Dunning School,” a group of writers, gathered in the aught years of the 20th century at New York’s Columbia University, that upheld the concept of ‘negro incapacity.’” This extended, into the realm of adjudged, legitimate Reconstruction historiography, the view that blacks were essentially childlike beings “incapable of properly exercising the political rights Northerners had thrust upon them.”31 In the writings of these scholars, “blacks appeared either as passive victims of white manipulation or as an unthinking people whose ‘animal natures’ threatened the stability of civilized society.”32

Few people in 1915’s white America saw anything wrong with Gus’s lynching, the Klan’s ride to the rescue, or with the brief scene at the end of the film in which the Klan terrorize blacks out of voting. In Woodrow Wilson’s History of the American People (1901), the author had written of the need for the KKK as a “veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern Country” – a passage quoted in one of Birth’s intertitles.

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Apparently then, Wilson’s book, which predated any of the publications of the Dunning School, was part of the filmmaker’s research; if not already known to him, Dixon, who was an acquaintance of Wilson’s from his college years, would have led him to it. (Dixon used his slight friendship with President Wilson to secure Birth’s premiere at the White House.) Along with assorted “facsimiles,” the insertion of the Wilson quote was Griffith’s chief bid for Birth’s historical credibility.

But if, hypothetically, the filmmaker had gone to the library in search of a source to challenge Wilson’s viewpoint and found those of the Dunning School, he would have only encountered views on the era that largely supported those already held by Wilson, himself, and Dixon. Dixon, born in 1864, grew up during Reconstruction, but Griffith and Mitchell most likely fostered their visions of the Old South, the Civil War, and Reconstruction on tales brought to them by parents, grandparents and great aunts and uncles. Who or what in the early 20th century could have disabused these three, or the nation at large, of their racist notions? The NAACP, the lonely organ of dissent after Birth’s premiere in 1915, had at the beginning of that year a membership of a mere 5,000.33

This is not to say that one can absolve a writer or a filmmaker of inherited racism by proclaiming they didn’t know any better. The Southern author William Faulkner, born 1897 in Oxford, Mississippi, heard the same song of the Old South from his elders as did Griffith and Mitchell, and yet was able to gain some purchase on the realities of race in the South after the Civil War, which he expressed in novels like Absalom, Absalom! (1936).

What Griffith saw in Dixon’s novels were villains, victims, and heroes engaged in a struggle to redeem the Southland. What he never could see or foresee was a national self-examination of a shared racist heritage, an exercise that, until much later in the 20th century, was not only unlikely but close to impossible (and not fully achieved to this day). In the 1930s, Margaret Mitchell, in her well-plotted romantic story, knew well enough to skirt white supremacist dogma, and most readers of the novel even now accept its retention of the fable of the Old South and its reactionary take on Reconstruction as part of GWTW’s venerable status. Some would call it a great American novel. (And let’s not forget that Pulitzer.)

But Thomas Dixon’s name is forgotten and his novels no longer read. Griffith and his films may still be with us, yet the critical trend seems to view his best-known work, The Birth of a Nation, as one more of a racist polemicist than cinema pioneer. Rather than having new restorations done and deluxe Blu-ray editions like BFI’s issued, would it be best if The Birth of a Nation be consigned as a hateful artifact – like vintage slave shackles – to the National Museum of African History and Culture in Washington, DC.? With its worst sequences looped in a video played on a monitor, it need not be in high definition to make its point.

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But Birth is too alive to be shunted aside as a relic or as a reminder of how little (or how much) we’ve accomplished in race relations. It can be both these things, but Griffith, a complex, creative, and intensely motivated man, was much more than a regionalist hate monger. The full, diverse range of his films proves this, as does the diversity of intent and expression in The Birth of a Nation itself.

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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from YouTube trailers and/or the DVD(s).

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  1. Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (New York: Scribner, 2011). p. 491. [↩]
  2. Some folks, too, may have elitist, gourmet tastes for censured films like Triumph of the Will and Birth, the ugly content of which they savor as if it has a sort of inverted coolness. In the late ’70s I remember being at a party held by young art school students where a video of Riefenstahl’s film was played as visual background to the hip gaiety. [↩]
  3. Telling the story of the restoration in the edition’s booklet, Patrick Stanbury doesn’t explain why, once he realized that the LOC owned the negative, “most reels of which survived,” he didn’t then go back to base his new transfer on it. Too late to start over? Licensing issues? [↩]
  4. Although presented in 5.1 DTS HD audio, it’s unclear from the set whether the score’s recording is a recent one, or one taped back in 1993 to accompany Photoplay’s then current restoration of Birth. The booklet makes it clear, though, that Lanchberry had re-orchestrated the score, thereby increasing the orchestra’s size from Breil’s original specifications (around 40 players). Also a few of the score’s interpolations of classical works were switched to others by Lanchberry, who felt some of Breil’s original choices might sound “clichéd” to modern ears. [↩]
  5. Melvyn Stokes, D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time” (New York, Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 279. [↩]
  6. Ibid. p. 254. [↩]
  7. Ibid. p. 284. [↩]
  8. Of course Griffith was a racist, but, as Brownlow conjectures, so was much of white America in 1915. Then, as now, American racism covered a broad spectrum of attitude and intent, from white supremacist militancy to a progressive liberalism that masked its political condescension and need to control. [↩]
  9. Lee’s film The Answer was a 20-minute classroom project that almost got him expelled from the New York University film school. [↩]
  10. BFI use of a revision of Briel’s score, with expanded orchestration, pumps the exhilaration with its rendition of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries to accompany the Klan’s ride. These days, Birth’s original underscore resonates meaningfully with Coppola’s use of the same music in Apocalypse Now (1979). In that film, the character Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) explains the use of a recording of Wagner’s piece over speakers mounted on American helicopters as they commit a raid on a Vietnamese village: “It scares the hell out of the slopes.” Here the music is diegetic and complete with Valkyrie vocals, but, as in Birth, it’s accompanying an exciting sequence that’s also morally repellent, a queasy dialectic not understood by Griffith but totally intended by Coppola in his film. Kilgore’s intended use of Wagner also parallels the Klan’s use of the white sheets and hoods: that is, to terrify and disorient the enemy. [↩]
  11. Stokes, p. 79. [↩]
  12. Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996), p. 301. [↩]
  13. The original Klan, glorified by Dixon and Birth, died out after being declared a “terrorist organization” by a federal court in 1870. [↩]
  14. Stokes, p. 35-38. [↩]
  15. Steven Spielberg, in his Lincoln (2012), drops the rumor in favor of fact and shows Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) in conjugal comfort with Lydia (S. Epatha Merkerson). [↩]
  16. Schickel feels that Lynch is in fact in love with Elsie, but I don’t. Lynch is too much a signifier to have feelings, other than a base obsession to rape a white girl. [↩]
  17. Stokes, p. 224. [↩]
  18. Suffrage for the freed blacks was the most hotly contested political issue during Reconstruction (and beyond). [↩]
  19. Schickel, p. 289-90. [↩]
  20. As the novel opens in the antebellum South, Mitchell’s use of “nigger” in her novel is limited mostly to blacks speaking of fellow blacks – an interesting but uneasy parallel to its current use among African Americans in the same context. Until Reconstruction begins, the whites of Southern gentry refer to blacks consistently as “darkies.” The only whites to use the term without hesitating are poor whites. The word occurs nowhere in the film. [↩]
  21. Earlier in the film, a Union deserter, after discovering Tara is bereft of valuables, appears to have similar designs on Scarlett, but before these can be clarified, she blows a hole in his skull with a concealed pistol. Scarlett’s feistiness in the face of male violence is a nice antidote to Mae Marsh’s passive suicidal response to it. [↩]
  22. This text is the screenwriter(s)’ not Mitchell’s. [↩]
  23. Schickel, p. 23. [↩]
  24. Stokes, p. 177. [↩]
  25. Schickel, p. 120. [↩]
  26. In his monograph (p. 279), Stokes quotes Leger Grindon, who said the scene “embellishes the emotional encounter until it achieves the scope of spectacle.” [↩]
  27. During the Civil War, Griffith’s home state of Kentucky was a border state loyal to the Union, but as such, the one with “the largest number of slaveholding families – mostly small farmers engaged in mixed agriculture…” (Foner. p. 37) like Griffith’s father, who was anything but a Unionist. The state also held onto slavery more steadfastly than others in the border region (Foner. p. 38), and the Klan was much in evidence there before 1870 (Foner. p. 428). [↩]
  28. Of course, for a portion of the Southern population, the clinging has never ceased. [↩]
  29. Foner. p. xix. [↩]
  30. Ibid. p. xx. [↩]
  31. Ibid. p. xvii. [↩]
  32. Ibid. [↩]
  33. Stokes. p. 169. But the film did help the organization to double in size and quickly, reports Stokes; by December, 1915, membership had risen to 10,000. [↩]

— Gordon Thomas




Gordon Thomas, trained as a painter, is a photographer living in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts with his wife. Film has fascinated and worried him ever since, as a small child, he saw Godzilla in 1954.




















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The Birth of a Nation (1915)

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The Conventional Wisdom is Partially Right

Snow Leopard26 January 2005

The conventional wisdom about "The Birth of a Nation" is that it represents an impressive and innovative display of cinematic skill that was unfortunately wasted on a story that promotes a bizarre and disturbing point of view. While that is certainly true in a general way, it might also be something of an oversimplification.


It really is almost like two different movies. The first part, which takes place in the era before and during the Civil War, contains little objectionable material, and it deserves praise both technically and for the acting. The second part, set in the reconstruction era, contains almost all of the disturbing material, and it also is really not all that great in terms of cinematic quality.


Then also, the degree to which "The Birth of a Nation" may have influenced the development of cinema has very likely been overstated . The controversy that it generated may very well have helped it to remain better known than other films of the era that were equally innovative and/or lavish, or nearly so.


If the movie had ended shortly after the memorable and well-crafted Ford's Theater scene, the anti-war sentiment and similar themes would remain the main focus, since the effects of war on families and individuals is depicted convincingly and thoughtfully. In that case, its occasional lapses would possibly at the worst be called "dated", given the quality of the rest of this part of the movie.


The second half, though, is completely unfortunate in almost every respect. Not only does it promote a distorted viewpoint, but the story becomes labored, and the characters lose their depth and become more one-dimensional. The purely technical side, such as the photography and the use of cross-cutting, might still be good, but much of the rest of it loses its effectiveness.


Perhaps more importantly, it really seems rather difficult to justify the credit that this one film gets in the development of cinema. There had already been numerous feature-length movies, and most of the techniques that Griffith used were also in use by others. He may well have been ahead of the pack in terms of appreciating their possibilities, but that does not mean that cinema would not have developed as it did without this particular movie.


Just as one example, the Italian epic "Cabiria", from the previous year, has the same kind of lavish scale, is quite resourceful in its techniques, and is quite entertaining, without causing so much controversy.


Other early feature-length films also include some creative efforts to adapt film-making techniques to longer running times and more complex stories. Finally, many short features from the pre-Griffith era experimented with the same kinds of techniques that he later would use systematically. There's no denying Griffith's considerable technical skill, but others of the era also deserve some credit, even if they and their works were less controversial, and are now largely forgotten as a result.

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 10/10

The Birth of an Art

Cineanalyst31 July 2005

Warning: Spoilers

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 3/10

sad relic of racism

planktonrules23 May 2006

Warning: Spoilers

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Is the historical importance of this film greatly exaggerated?

bbhlthph26 April 2006

I saw this film at a small "Art House" theatre when I was a graduate student. It was supported by program notes, and reviews of the film by respected critics, these stressed Griffith was a trend setting director who had made significant contributions to modern cinema. I remember three major developments were attributed directly to him, firstly his use of a mobile camera for tracking rather than bringing events to the camera; secondly pioneering the use of close-up photography in the cinema and thirdly the incorporation of pseudo-documentary sequences (e.g. the assassination of Lincoln) into a fictional story. I therefore watched this film with great anticipation; but as something of a young idealist I was more and more sickened by what I then felt was glorification of the KKK, and afterwards I was bitterly disappointed by my evening. I decided that if I ever watched TBOAN again it would only be when I was better informed both about American history of the period and about the work of other contemporary Hollywood film-makers. It is now 60 years later and I see "The Birth of A Nation" is scheduled to be screened on TCM next month, so probably the time has come to watch it again; and perhaps comments based on my original viewing so long ago may be appropriate at this time as the impressions I now have of this film will be those that have been with me for most of my life.


Films showing conflicts must present both sides as believing utterly in the righteousness of their cause; but historical films also have at least a moral responsibility to ensure the material shown has some reasonable approximation to historical accuracy, and whenever possible the convictions of both sides should be equally fairly presented. Most of the criticisms of TBOAN on this database derive not from its sympathetic presentation of the KKK but from the fact that this is presented as the only side which is relevant. We need to remember that slavery was introduced into human society back in prehistoric times - it was usually associated with a recognised obligation on the part of the slave-owner to provide a reasonable standard of living for his slaves, and alternative mediaeval societies from which slavery had been eliminated often did not do even this for their dispossessed citizens. Members of ruling classes everywhere lived a lifestyle which required the full time labours of many slaves or underprivileged workers to maintain, and only after the invention of the steam engine did it become possible to picture a world from which slavery might eventually be eliminated. Although this then probably became inevitable, its elimination has still not been completed; and in the United States it took place in an appallingly destructive way, part of which is pictured in TBOAN. Every nation has shameful episodes in its history which have and will cause distress for many generations before they are gradually outgrown. Recognising that the American Civil War did not result only from a dispute about slavery but much more from a whole range of economic and cultural issues, I appreciate that it would be grossly improper for me as a Canadian to seize on some of the controversial aspects of TBOAN as an excuse to condemn the film. I will re-watch it as a valid and important effort to document the concerns of the group of citizens it featured (although I will still reserve the right to feel Griffith should have made more effort to also document the concerns of those with opposing viewpoints.) My concerns here are directed more to assessing the importance of TBOAN in the development of the modern cinema, and I currently find myself siding with the relatively few users who have commented that its significance seems to be greatly overrated. When I first saw this film I had seen relatively few of the important early silent films, and it was easy to accept claims that Griffith's work was of overwhelming importance. Now I have seen other contemporary works; and have also come to appreciate that all surviving copies of about 90% of these works have totally disappeared (whilst probably half of the 10% of which copies still exist are not available for home viewing even from specialist libraries as the only copies are located in inaccessible archive collections). This is not brought out clearly by most of the 200 user comments on this film listed by IMDb, and it is so important that it has led me to pen these further comments. Film-makers in the silent era were extremely productive - Griffith himself is credited by IMDb with having directed over 500 films, most of them silent, and several other directors/producers have well over 100 films credited. Since so few survive, we must recognise how far our current assessment of early directors might change if we were able to see and compare more of their works. I believe that many innovations in film technology have been exclusively attributed to Griffith primarily because of the ready availability today of copies of 'TBOAN', 'Intolerance' and 'Orphans of the Storm'. I found this feeling very strongly reinforced when I had a rare chance to see a screening of Lois Weber's 'Hypocrites'. Weber was, for a time, the highest paid director in Hollywood and received a best director award in 1916 (ahead of Griffith, just one year after he released TBOAN). All I will say at this point is that, although I am admittedly relying on rather uncertain memories, I believe 'Hypocrites' was more stimulating for its innovative cinematographic techniques than 'Intolerance'. It would be interesting to know whether other database users have had similar thoughts about this or other early works.

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Bad History

jdab28 July 2003

Anyone who thinks that this film depicts real history is seriously deluded. One commenter noted that the KKK was fighting for a good cause during Reconstruction, but not now. I guess to him good causes include killing and intimidating freed slaves who were merely attempting to exercise their rights to vote and make a living.


Griffith's portrayal of Reconstruction black politicians is not only racist, but blatantly untrue. Only in rare instances and for a short time did black representatives control any Southern legislatures, and this at a time when they were the majority of voters in many Southern states! For years teachers of Reconstruction have emphasized carpetbaggers, but have ommitted the fact that the post-Reconstruction governments were founded with the explicit purpose of disenfranchising blacks and violently enforcing their underclass status. For this reason and others, Birth of a Nation's claims to historical accuracy would be comical, if not for the horrific implications of the film.


That said, this film should be seen, mainly because it provides a document of a poisonous way of thinking that is by no means dead. It also represents the pop cultural moment when Northern and Southern whites reconciled over the memory of the Civil War, mainly to the detriment of blacks. Lastly, those who want this film burned only give ammunition to the idiots who still praise the KKK. It's better to let these jerks hang themselves with their own rhetorical ropes than to let them claim victim status.

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show it in my American History classes

Larry-421 April 1999

I am a Ph.D. candidate in American History. I show BOAN (as does most American history professors) to my undergrads. Not only is it an accurate portrait of the propaganda being written in the 1870s, but it is a primary source document on how people in the 1870s and 1910s saw African Americans. Anyone wonder why the Civil Rights movement happened, or why lynchings happened, or why ML King, Jr.was assassinated? Well, watch BOAN and you'll get an insight into that most American of institutions, racism. Why is there racial hatred today, because of the rhetoric of hate by the people who made BOAN and the people who are depicted in it. If they affect you still, shouldn't know what they said? Especially if you find it abhorrent, watch it. It is also a good reminder of how distorted history can be made to look legitimate on celluloid.

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 8/10

Great techniques and a horrible message...

AlsExGal30 July 2016

...yet I still give it an 8/10 for all of the ground that it broke.


When it was released in 1915, the Hollywood movie industry was still in its infancy as movie makers such as DeMille had only been there about a year or so. Most movies were made on the East coast and used artificial lighting which often gave the films a very flat look.


Most filmmakers would film outside until the late afternoon and then close up shop. Griffith however liked to use lighting just as the sun was going down as it gave everything a soft glow. These scenes looked better than anything you could have achieved in a set with artificial lighting in those days.


The battles scenes also looked very good, like a lot of care was taken to set them up and make them as realistic as possible. This kind of an epic was rare for the times and must have surprised most movie goes who were more used to short films that were often shot on sets with artificial lighting.


Some of the innovations of BOAN (it should be noted that while Griffith didn't originate all of the techniques used in BOAN, he was the first to integrate them all so seamlessly in a feature-length film) included night-time photography-Billy Bitzer achieved by firing magnesium flares into the night for the split-screen sequence of the sacking of Atlanta, being the first film to have an original score, the first film to employ hundreds of extras for the battle scenes, flashbacks and parallel editing, and extensive use of close-ups, long shots, dissolves, etc. to heighten the impact of the story.


It's not fair to other films and filmmakers to say this film and this film alone changed movie history but it's definitely on the short list of films that did along with DeMille's "Squaw Man" released the previous year which is remembered as Hollywood's first feature length film, even though it is not. That honor goes to Helen Gardner's "Cleopatra" made in 1912.


Then there are the features of the story that give this film a well-deserved bad rap for having revived the KKK. ' There is the Austin Stoneman character who is biracial and wants to rule the South with an iron fist. He sets himself up as some kind of alternate President during reconstruction. Where was the real president, Andrew Johnson? Locked in a broom closet? This character was supposed to be a thinly veiled caricature of Thaddeus Stevens.


Since white Confederates have their civil rights suspended during this time, the state houses of the south are shown packed with the absolutely worst stereotypes of black men, with them eating, drinking liquor, and taking their shoes off and putting their feet on their desks during the chaotic legislative sessions. They are also shown as sex-mad for Caucasian females, the biracial Austin Stoneman included. Let's just say that the story is as subtle as a sledge hammer, but when you realize that its contemporaries considered a guy in a cape with a long mustache tying virgins to railroad tracks to be high drama, the actual message of BOAN may be hogwash, but the complexity of the story telling and the sophistication of the acting is to be admired.


That's why I recommend it in spite of the point of view of the script. Sorry for the long review, but a long film often requires one.

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 1/10

No Excuses... This is Just KKK Propaganda

DirtyStarling2 February 2009

A lot of people see this film as an artistic triumph. But the fact that it's well made doesn't redeem the underlying message. You can say that it was a different time... make excuses for it... But there are some films that are best viewed as a regrettable part of American history.


This film is quite simply a justification for the genocide and subjugation of African Americans and a recruitment video for the KKK. It warps history and attempts to manipulate the audience into believing offensive racial stereotypes to justify white supremacy. It romanticizes plantation slavery in the south, when in fact it was a time of suffering for many. Most of the black characters in this movie are just white men in black-face, portraying extremely offensive racial stereotypes. It ignores the fact that many white individuals did not live this lifestyle, and lived in poverty during this time (another HUGE cause of the Civil War which is virtually ignored today)and instead tries to rally whites to it's cause by referring to it as an ideal time.


The class I watched this with ALL thought it was ridiculous and completely offensive, regardless of race and gender. Granted... in 1915, it was a different time and a different culture. They viewed this film as a piece of art. But we're in 2009. Racial relations have changed. There is still an undeniable racial divide, but it is nowhere near the levels found before the first World War. It's time we stopped making excuses for films like this. This is nothing more than well made KKK Propaganda presented under the guise of history. I give it the 1 it truly deserves as a film that still exists in our society. However, I will give it this... Despite it's problems, it is important to watch this film from an academic standpoint: the ONLY reason being to understand our artistic history and the mistakes made. It should be viewed as a marker for how far we've come, and how far we still need to go to achieve true equality.

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 1/10

It's beside the point

hughman556 September 2009

I've read a few of the 10's at this site and am a little surprised at the pass given to this monument to slavery, racist bigotry, and violence. "Birth of a Nation" is a national cinematic embarrassment. That it is well crafted is moot. If this were a movie that glorified rape or child sexual abuse, but was well crafted, well directed, and had outstanding performances in it, would we be discussing it's virtues as a fine piece of film making? I don't think so.


Consider this: Nazi Germany committed mass murder against Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs, and political enemies. The plunder and suffering inflicted against these people ripples through our culture to this day. The fact that Leni Riefenstahl's cinematography in "Triumph of the Will" was "groundbreaking" is kind of beside the point!!!


I find the intellectual airy fairy commentary in the 10's section of the reviews here to be disturbing. Frankly, I think you people should be ashamed of yourselves for promoting this disgraceful homage to slavery and murder. Slavery is at the very least murder of the soul. But we all know that was the least of it's offenses.


"The Birth of a Nation" is a bad film because it promotes a reprehensible ideology. The merits of it's production values are irrelevant. And not that it should make a difference but for the record, I am a white male southerner.

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 10/10

VISUALLY ENLIGHTENING AND SOCIALLY DISHEARTENING "BIRTH" STILL A 10.

Auburn6689 February 2004

D.W. Griffith's Civil War shorts were only a prelude to what has become one of the world's crowning cinematic achievements and one of its most painfully embarrassing moments concurrently.


To this day it still causes not only controversy but even verbal warfare amongst friends and critics. But if films were judged solely on their subject matter many of our classics would have been tossed into the garbage hamper. As being such, I will not let that taint my opinion of it.


"Birth of a Nation" succeeds on so many levels its difficult to find a place to start. Perhaps its best to say that Griffith may have considered what he may be starting hence the freedom of speech title screen at the beginning. For not shying away from controversy alone Griffith deserves his merits. His use of tinting is outstanding. Some may say (and they may be right) that Griffith is the father of the modern screenplay. His use of setup, turning point, confrontation, turning point, resolution, and conclusion is still the formula used today and is usually the formula that has graced every best picture winner at the Oscars ever since their 1927 beginnings. The catch: there was no written screenplay. Griffith made this film in his mind as he went along. THAT is genius.


The battle spectacle scenes were unequaled in their day. This wasn't another day's work. This was a big budget, Hollywood, parade of the extras, grand scale masterpiece. One gets the sense that the real war was just getting the war scenes filmed. Father of the close-up, father of the chase scene (on two fronts: individual after individual and group after group), father of showing synchronous events on two different stages, the buildup of dramatic climax, and the list goes on. Outstanding use of camera angles (the perch overlooking the valley during Sherman's march comes to mind here), and historically accurate enactments (Lincoln's assassination) score big as well. This was "Citizen Kane" a quarter of a century before there was a "Citizen Kane."


The acting is surprisingly very well done. Henry Walthall does a fine job as the star of the film but George Siegmann, Walter Long, and Ralph Lewis are three of the most villainous characters to ever grace a silent era film. And I would be amiss to not mention Lilian Gish who absolutely sizzles here. After all these years she is still one of the most charming and beautiful women I've ever seen in my life. Griffith obviously thought so as he used her in his other three masterpieces as well.


But for all of its cinematic showcasing, the film's image will forever be scarred by its outlandish racial prejudices. And make no mistake about it, its a difficult watch. As a white, its still difficult for me. As a black, I cannot imagine. It is so easy for me to sit here and say to separate its art from its viewpoint but that simply isn't realistic. Should it be required viewing? Yes. Would I blame any black for not wanting to watch it or hating it after seeing it? Absolutely not. I understand where you are coming from. The unfortunate thing is that the film could have succeeded without this viewpoint by simply making the south's new oppressors white union soldiers. It IS historically accurate to say that president Andrew Johnson did indeed want to crush the southern elite into oblivion after the war which is one of the things that led to his impeachment. But Johnson, who is strangely not even mentioned in the film following Lincoln's assassination, certainly would not have employed northern blacks to do the crushing. I understand the film was following Thomas Dixon's novel and play but to not even address how Ralph Lewis' senatorial powers overshadowed Johnson's presidential ones and those of Congress' 1866 Civil Rights Bill is proof enough that the film goes out of its way to make northern blacks the villains. Griffith's only defense, and it is a SMALL defense, is that southern blacks are still apparently our friends. Griffith was the son of a Confederate fighter which may explain some of his views. But certainly he did not want to be a hate-monger. He tried to apologize with the making of his next film, the masterpiece "Intolerance." He certainly had black friends on the set during the making of "Birth of a Nation" but this harks of the classic case of the good man who doesn't realize that some of the things he is saying are hurtful. I don't think it really dawned on him. This however is a trivial compensation at best.


But at the end of the day, D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" is still a landmark achievement not just in film but in popular culture. After its release film became a way of life for America instead of a treat you helped yourself to once in a while. Not until Hitchcock would a director ever again be the star of his own films, wielding a control and vision so unique that their name is forever welded to our memory, for the better or the worse. So many firsts. So much controversy. And controversy,ironically enough, has been Hollywood's middle name now for the last 50 years.


The nutshell: absolute required viewing for all things considered. Watch with caution and prepare to be disturbed. Not being able to watch it is easily understood. One of the 100 greatest films of all time...10/10.

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Fascinating, expensive movie.

Douglas_Holmes25 October 2002

This movie had the stockholders quaking when they saw the costs mount. It was the most expensive movie made up to that time, and it shows that silent films really COULD create spectacle on a grand scale.


One of the posters remarked on how ridiculous the Klansmen's hoods looked. Actually, the original "ghost costumes" were all homemade and there was no standardized uniform- some had spikes on the head, horns, painted faces on the masks, etc.


I myself had an ancestor who was a member of the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan, and they saw themselves as guerilla fighters against an occupying power, not as terrorists. Today we can condemn them. At the time, it must have seemed to them that the war was over, but that the battle lines were still firmly drawn.


This film is a good peek into the attitude of the general public in 1915 about Reconstruction. It became a national obsession, and probably gave impetus to Col. William Joseph Simmons's decision to "resurrect" the Klan in that year.

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 7/10

Consider--it's 90 years old!

sharkey1973 October 2005

As I read these comments on this most controversial film, what is coming across is a surfeit of emotion that any film rarely engenders. I wonder if any of our modern films will be able to evoke such passionate response 90 years from now and the fact is, I think not. Yes, the film is racist. Yes, the film is a watershed for cinema. And no matter what you think of it, it's still got people stirred up, ready to scream and yell and be appalled, disgusted, outraged, etc. Can there be any doubt as to its greatness if it still has such a life today? Its greatness certainly doesn't lie in its subject matter, but in the fact that this silent film can provoke such reactions in a generation weaned on computer graphic images, a generation that views the silents much as they view watching a parade of fossils drift by. I am literally stunned by the power of a piece of film to move so many so long after it came into the world. Perhaps its greatest lesson is the impact films have on us and our society and how powerful those moving images can really be. Something tells me that 90 more years will go by and this message board--if it's still here--will be still be getting impassioned opinions from those who have just seen Birth of a Nation. My word--what immortality!

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Good start but degrades into lurid melodrama

gkbazalo7 July 2004

I have watched this film several times over the years, and I find the second half dealing with reconstruction a little harder to watch each time. Although its racist viewpoint may have mirrored much of America in 1915, it obviously was not the only viewpoint, since America had its abolitionists in the early 1800s. Griffith endorses just about every wretched stereotype put forth by the south during and after reconstruction, namely the venality of all northerners and the baseness of all blacks who did not completely bow to whites. A good example is that the disdainful depiction of the black-run state legislature is based on a cartoon, not an actual photograph or contemporary description. Griffith's portrayal of northerners and blacks is completely from the point of view of a white southern racist. Although I greatly admire much of his work, he deserved the criticism he got for this film. Aside from the political racism, much of the second half of the film is just silly melodrama, even based on 1915 standards and other Griffith work.

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 5/10

Birth of controversy

TheLittleSongbird17 April 2020

Saw 'The Birth of a Nation' for quite a few reasons. One was that it was directed by DW Griffith, the more that has been seen of his recently he and his work became more interesting. He made a lot of very good to classic films, short and feature. Lillian Gish was one of the greatest silent film actresses, who never failed to move me, and there was a reason as to why she was a Griffith regular. Also wanted to see what caused so much controversy and still does was as bad as all that.


After seeing it, 'The Birth of a Nation' is pretty difficult to rate and review with me being so conflicted on it. While appreciating that 'The Birth of Nation' was/is ground-breaking and that it is of historical importance, the second part really ruins the promise that the first half showed so it was very difficult for me to get much out of it. It is very easy to see why the film is so controversial and why it is considered offensive. While it is one of Griffith's most historically interesting films, it is also his most divisive by far and one of his worst in my view.


'The Birth of a Nation' still looks great, Griffith's films always were extremely well made technically, some of the camera shots innovative and unlike what was seen before at the time. Gish is typically wonderful, the poignancy brought to her relatable role being quite powerful. The rest of the cast are also on fine form, especially Mae Marsh and Robert Harron.


Griffith's direction is masterful and technically more than efficient, well certainly in the first part and keeps the second from being unwatchable (along with the acting). The first part of 'The Birth of a Nation' is absolutely brilliant, very compelling and epic as well as moving.


Which is why it is so regrettable that the second part feels like a different film and difficult to sit through. It is with the rescue and from that point on that 'The Birth of a Nation' falls downhill badly, despite the production values and acting still being so top notch. It is not just one-sided, but it is also blatantly racially offensive now and even for the time, which has always been the biggest criticism directed towards the film. It takes a lot for me to be offended by a film but even when judging it for the time and accepting that racism is far from gone today, that didn't stop me from feeling uncomfortable with the portrayals of the supporting characters in the second part (African Americans portrayed negatively and a notorious group in history treated as heroes). It may be based on objectionable source material, but this was a rare example of a film that would have been much better straying away from it and not true to it.


All that being said, that is sadly not all with 'The Birth of a Nation's' criticisms with the second part. Its pacing is very pedestrian and from the rescue onwards the story is badly over-stretched even for a film intended to be epic. What started off so rivetingly became a test for endurance where the eventually excessive length was felt. The characters completely lose their dimension and go from complex to one-dimensional stereotypes and the melodrama gets very over the top and downright silly.


Overall, brilliant first part but the second is a mess. 5/10

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 7/10

Controversial, politically incorrect, but quite engaging, technically brilliant and striking in its day.

filipemanuelneto22 January 2020

This film was and will always be controversial, as the American Civil War is today. It is difficult to have a neutral analysis of the conflict and the period of reconstruction that followed, and I am not going to be the one who has not even studied US history to make this analysis. Nor did I read Thomas Dixon's "The Clansman" to find out if the film is fair in its adaptation to the screen and if the book shares the political and social vision that the film expresses. The film is divided into two parts. The first, quite consensual, follows the Civil War until Lincoln's death. The second part follows the following years and the first movements of the Ku Klux Klan.


Of course, the film is partial and is not politically correct ... expresses an opinion about the conflict and the years that followed, claiming that there were political mistakes and that too much power was given to blacks, that in a sense freedom was confused with permissiveness and that values, mentality and pride of the southern white class were little taken into account by Union policies. The birth of the Ku Klux Klan, in turn, is portrayed as a consequence, a reaction of a slice of southern white society that felt threatened by new order of things. This is what the film supports, I don't know if it was so.


In the film's script, two families portray the divided country: on the one hand the Stonemans, with a strong political influence in Washington, and on the other the Cameron, who own a plantation in South Carolina. The families have a friendly relationship, and these ties they are not broken by war. Proof of this is mutual assistance on the battlefield. Another interesting detail is to see how Lincoln, despite being the leader of the winning faction, was portrayed as someone very respected by southerners. Each family suffers losses and dangers during the conflict but it is still at war that Ben Cameron falls in love with Elsie Stoneman. In the second part of the film, Ben is an increasingly dark and worried man, and he is the one who founds the KKK to protect those he sees exposed to the abuses of the newly freed blacks. Some scenes are strong, like the attempted rape of Ben Cameron's younger sister, which ends in the worst way and is easily one of the most dramatic moments in the film. In a way, the little girl was the portrait of innocence in this film, and dies almost like a martyr.


Technically, the film is extraordinary. Whether you like the story told or not, it was a milestone in cinema with several important technical advances for art. The battles of the war are reconstructed with great realism. The cinematography and filming were particularly brilliant, as well as the historical reconstruction, done with great realism and rigor both in the costumes and the sets. Hundreds of costumes dressed up were part of this filming, which must have been an effort and marked the beginning of cinema as an entertainment industry. The music that accompanies the entire film is marked by diverse leitmotives, which were extracted from the nationalist and confederate national anthems, as well as from several well-known melodies of classical music.

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 7/10

Amazing Genius and Disturbing World View

joncheskin28 December 2021

The Birth of a Nation has pretty much established itself as perhaps the most frustrating movie ever made. I won't cover what has already been said--that this is a landmark film of astounding genius that is sadly wrecked by its racist pro-KKK ideology. I agree with the assessment and find the experience of the film very jarring.


I would rather focus on what might be useful to a potential viewer of this movie. The real question regarding this movie is whether, as a viewer, it is possible to separate out these two aspects and still have a useful experience from the film. I think the answer really varies from viewer to viewer. On the plus side, there is no question that there is some amazing genius at work here--the photography, cinematic techniques, acting, and scope were all revolutionary and very influential, the viewing of the movie is well-paced and in fact riveting. You will be fascinated for sure.


Can this fact be separated out when it becomes clear that the main protagonists of the movie are the KKK? That's the real question. In this sense, the movie becomes more instructive than entertaining. We learn a number of things--first, some important aspects of the history of technical filmmaking, which Birth of a Nation pioneered. Second, that movies always project a world-view, which can be significantly different from yours as a viewer, althuogh I think it is reasonable to point out that many people still sadly hold on to the world-view of this movie. Third, that movies will try to persuade you toward that world-view; in that sense, Birth of a Nation is a dangerous movie and had some truly bad consequences (it helped the revival of the KKK). Fourth, that the lens to the repugnant world view can actually be beneficial, a gateway to perceiving and understanding the past.


Thus, I cannot really tell you whether you personally will enjoy this movie. If you are a white supremacist, no problem. If not, you will have to compartmentalize for sure.

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 6/10

How to possibly rate this piece of (movie) history

Marcyph3r27 September 2019

This is some incredible movie making. The skill involved is simply incredible. But the racism overwhelms it during the second part. It is very hard to watch. It should not be negated or forgotten. Neither its genius nor its abhorrence.

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 9/10

Simple in appearance, but speaks volumes

mozart18212 October 2003

This is a film which every movie buff really does need to see, for two reasons. 1) It shows how far the movie making process has come, and gives us all a way to truly appreciate some of the other early films, and how far the moviemaking technology advanced between 1915 and the 1930's. and 2) It also allows us the chance to appreciate just how conflicted our society has always been, not just today. Many of the other reviewers have labeled this film as racist garbage, but it truly does represent one group's view of society at the time, and gives us a great way to understand some of the driving factors behind the race relations problems we would have later. In particular, during the Civil Rights battles that would take place during the 1950's and 60's in the deep South.


The film is the story of two families, one Northern and one Southern, and how their lives would be intertwined during and after the Civil War. It focuses on two sons who fought in the war, and the effects their fighting would have on their families, mostly focusing on how one son would go on to be the founder of what we now know as the Klu Klux Klan. What I found most interesting is that a group we now speak of in such evil tones are represented in the movie as the defenders of all that is good and holy. When put in it's historical context and we realize that President Woodrow Wilson talked about the movie in such high praise, it gives us a real appreciation for how the world we live in has changed.


In particular, though, pay attention to the battle scene in the movie. What seems to us to be extremely simple special effects, were the highest technology available at the day, and viewed by the public as an incredible work of storytelling. When taken in context, you can only be impressed by Griffith's storytelling abilities, no matter what you thought of the story.


While the movie is no great work by today's standards, and I actually found it very hard to watch considering it's simple style as compared to today's movies, I think this is a movie you definitely must see. It gives one a real appreciation for how far movie-making technology has advanced, and makes us realize just how much different our society is now than we were just one century ago.

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 9/10

Technically more than perfect, deeply racist but you know what you're watching

pesaresigiovanni12 May 2020

This mix of genres of the early cinema deserves a mention as one of the best movies in the second decade of the century. Technically, Griffith totally improves the good things made by previous directors. Acting is good, editing is crazy and the narrative structure is revolutionary. The movie offers epic war scenes just as romantic love scenes, and honestly dosen't look like a 1915 movie. The first half is highly enjoyable, the second half is racist sometimes at unbearable levels but it's part of that old mentality. If you love cinema history, this is a must watch masterpiece.

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 10/10

Yes it's racist, but it's also groundbreaking and influential

smithmjsjsmith24 January 2018

I can completely understand your frustration with this movie. It's no secret that it's a racist film and did result in the revival of the KKK. But you have to understand what life was like back then. In 1915, nobody had ever seen a movie like this. Not just in terms of production, but in terms of editing, length, casting and attention to detail. It was the first time in history where a ton of effort was ever put into a motion picture. When "The Birth of a Nation" came out, people began to take film much more seriously and wanted to see more high quality movies when it was brand new.


As for the racism, it was sadly a product of its time, but that's not to say people didn't find it offensive in 1915. Plenty of African Americans were outraged over this movie and tried to have it banned. The KKK would even use this film as a recruitment tool up until the 1970's, although this wasn't the intention of its director D. W. Griffith. He probably had no idea that people would be outraged over this movie, but I don't think he intentionally tried to offend a lot of people, he just wanted to make a movie that people would remember and hoped to impress as well as shock. He did just that, Birth of a Nation is certainly impressive and shocking.


It is offensive by today's standards and obviously a movie you could not make today. But I do believe in freedom of speech and freedom of expression and I don't believe in censorship. This film should be shown in all film classes so we can not only understand how the first big budget film was made, but to understand what racism was like in 1915. I am strongly against banning this movie because it's essentially the same as pretending the racial prejudices never existed, but the views expressed in this movie does not represent me as a person. I only appreciate the art and attention to detail that was put into this movie. It is nothing short of groundbreaking and way ahead of its time regardless of it being the most politically incorrect movie in history. You should definitely watch the movie as long as you are prepared to be shocked and see film history.

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 8/10

Hard to Separate Form from Content

Hitchcoc3 April 2006

I don't know what prompted Griffith to make this film. Ignorance abounded. The South was reeling from the post Civil War era. The book, the Klansman, was probably pretty popular, just like anti Muslim books became popular after 9/11. This in no way should make such content acceptable. As we look at historical curiosities, this film falls into that category. I bought a VHS copy of this a few years ago because I had never actually seen it (I had watched isolated clips on cinema retrospectives). My wife and I were stunned by the content, although we knew what it was about. To see it, makes it even worse. Nevertheless, since I've been educating myself about film history and craft over many years, I felt I really needed to watch it with both a critical and a societal eye. One thing I saw was masterful images of war on film made in 1915. I saw motion and shadows and all the other things the early geniuses did to separate themselves from the also rans. The editing is excellent. The acting is emotive and appropriate for the time period. I have seen other Griffith films and know that this was a mistake. He could have applied his genius to another milieu, but he didn't. I doubt that anyone takes the content of this film seriously. If it weren't so sad, it would be downright amusing. The stereotypes are so lame and over the top. But we need to place ourselves in the historical context and evaluate it that way. Mostly, however, we need to look at it as one piece in the process of the development of cinema.

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 1/10

Split Personality

harry-7627 May 2000

I see a remarkable similarity between the personality of composer Richard Wagner and the director David Work Griffith, pariticularly as it applies to "Birth of a Nation." Both have the capacity of creative technical and even emotion genius, while at the same time, a penchant for prejudice and bigotry.


What makes their work so difficult to judge is that it tends to slip in and out of sickness subtlely and surprisingly. Their genius has the power to draw one into its fold, then manipulate one's emotions to its pleasure. Having gotten the viewer hooked into its context, it weaves its clever, overpowering spell of persuasion.


Their is very little to uplift the spirits here, to make one feel good about one's self, not to mention one's fellow beings. Where is the love and celebration of life as it's to be lived? Where is the joy of this precious gift to be on this planet, enjoying its richess? Where is the embracing of each and every human being who is our brother and sister, and trying to empower them to reach their full potential?


I see none of that here, only a lugubrious attitude of hatred, superiority, and downright fear. Parallels between the work of Leni Riefenstahl and her "Triumph of the Will" and "Birth of a Nation" are not without validity.


This work will forever be a contridiction, and there is no hope in making it better. We can only strive to separate its technical achievements from its low-level mentality -- or avoid the work altogether.

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 9/10

Captivating Storytelling & Revolutionary Techniques

unclesamsavage31 December 2019

Many tout this film to be the birth of the feature film, but I believe it merely the popularization of it. There are many foreign films that came out before Griffith's historically skewed work here that tell a full-length story over several years with an equal amount of depth. Regardless of these nits and all the hype, this film is truly exceptional. It is a shame that it tells a story that is not completely grounded in reality. I am amazed at how well it holds up over a century after its initial release. I believe this is mandatory viewing for any American history class.


Here is how I came out with a rating of a 9/10:


Titles.......................................................................... 10 (out of 10) Screenplay..........................................................,...... 9 Performances............................................................ 9 Cinematography....................................................... 10 Editing......................................................................... 7 Score........................................................................... 10 55/60 =~ 9.2 (which I rounded down to a 9)

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 1/10

Birth of Cinema ?

moimoichan61 July 2006

Warning: Spoilers

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 10/10

This Film is Not Racist: It Only Reflects how Racism Was at the Time of the Civil War

Tornado_Sam10 July 2017

Warning: Spoilers

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