The Birth of a Nation

(1915) dir. D.W. Griffith
viewed: 02/16/08

The Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith’s magnum opus, one of the most significant films in American film history, not merely controversial, even today, almost 100 years after its creation, is no simple film to approach.  The fact is that I’d never seen it until last night.  I’d seen Intolerance (1916) in my first film class, long, long ago, and had learned about Griffith and The Birth of a Nation at the time.  In my graduate studies in cinema, I saw Griffith’s Broken Blossoms (1919) which floored me with its beauty.  It’s a stunning, stunning film.  It’s taken me a long time to get to his first feature film, his most controversial and influential.

The Birth of a Nation tells the story of the American Civil War and the Antebellum South from a tradtional Southern perspective, one which Griffith portrays as simple and good, before the Civil War destroyed it.  And most controversially, he portrays the birth of the Ku Klux Klan as a savior of the South, protector of morals, and righter of wrongs.  It also takes a particularly skewed and irresponsible interpretation of history, portraying great sympathy for oppressionists and terrorists and snide and grotesque racism toward African Americans and most critically and brutally on mixed race characters, mulattos.

Though there are a number of actual African Americans in the film, filling out the crowd scenes and occasionally taking the frame, many of the significant roles of African Americans are played in blackface, presumably for some specific reasons…I haven’t read up enough to fully comment on this.

Flatly, the second half of the film, the Reconstruction, is the more reprehensible of the two parts of the film.  The lead up to the Civil War and the War itself are depicted in a less problematic tone.  The content of the film, the praising of the Klan, is more than problematic: it’s offensive.  It’s revisionist history and completely irresponsible.  The truth of the Reconstruction is a dark and ugly period in American history, with most of the South completely destroyed.

It’s too much for me to comment on fully, so I won’t go into my understanding of the true history other than to say, that the view of Griffith and The Birth of a Nation is not merely a “perspective”, but a naive and misleading interpretation of history.

But the film’s notoriety is not simply its inherently problematic content, but it’s mastery and innovation in cinematic narrative.  Before this film, cinematic narratives were nowhere as complex and involved.  Griffith invented so much of what became American cinematic narrative, techniques of intercutting, using such complex narrative devices…it’s almost invisible to a modern eye to understand how much he developed and innovated right here in this film.

And it’s not merely techniques, tools, mechanical features, but his storytelling is epic and masterful.  The battle sequences are tremendously effective and grand.  His use of compound images, the burning of Atlanta hovering above the streaming evacuees, is dramatic and artistic.  His vision and ability to construct a film of great passion and drama is immense.  And one of the reasons that in my first film class we ended up seeing Intolerance is probably because you don’t confront the problematic content and can appreciate the artistry.

To praise The Birth of a Nation or to criticize it alone lacks the breadth of complexity at work in the film.  Not simply Griffith’s morals, racism, revisionism.  Not simply Griffith’s contributions to the language of cinema and the poetry of his storytelling.  It’s the complexity of American history, the complexity of a nation filled with brilliant people, horrifically ignorant people, and the broad range of intermingling of those aspects of humanity.  It’s not a simple thing.  The film is perhaps one of the greatest snapshots of the American experience.  Not what it depicts as realism, but of the vision and belief, true or false, of a particular artist, truly American, if only one of a multitude of beliefs.  It does not validate his beliefs to understand what this film says or what it tries to say.  It is, in essence, a very revealing understanding, one that would be best served in the context of understanding the history of the American Civil War and its aftermath, and the history of American cinema.

In fact, seen in the proper context, I would think, like reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, perhaps seeing The Birth of a Nation should be mandatory viewing for all Americans.  Not for the truth it tries to portray, but the truths that are revealed in its interpretation of events, the interpretation itself.