Independent Films, Drama

The Birth of a Nation
by CharlieChaplin

The most successful and artistically advanced film of its time, The Birth of a Nation has also sparked protests, riots, and divisiveness since its first release. The film tells the story of the Civil War and its aftermath, as seen through the eyes of two families. The Stonemans hail from the North, the Camerons from the South. When war breaks out, the Stonemans cast their lot with the Union, while the Camerons are loyal to Dixie. After the war, Ben Cameron (Henry B. Walthall), distressed that his beloved south is now under the rule of blacks and carpetbaggers, organizes several like-minded Southerners into a secret vigilante group called the Ku Klux Klan. When Cameron's beloved younger sister Flora (Mae Marsh) leaps to her death rather than surrender to the lustful advances of renegade slave Gus (Walter Long), the Klan wages war on the new Northern-inspired government and ultimately restores "order" to the South. In the original prints, Griffith suggested that the black population be shipped to Liberia, citing Abraham Lincoln as the inspiration for this ethnic cleansing. Showings of Birth of a Nation were picketed and boycotted from the start, and as recently as 1995, Turner Classic Movies canceled a showing of a restored print in the wake of the racial tensions around the O.J. Simpson trial verdict.

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Details

Language: Silent

Year of production: 1915

Length: 3 hr 7 min

Country: United States

Suggested by:
Baxter Martin

Directors:

D.W. Griffith

Producers:

D. W. Griffith Inc. / Epoch Producing Corporation

Actors:

Henry B. Walthall
Miriam Cooper
Mae Marsh
Lillian Gish
Robert Harron
Ralph Lewis

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Film reviews for The Birth of a Nation

Baxter Martin

Birth of a Nation (1915, USA, DW Griffith)

The birthing process is a notoriously difficult ordeal with what he hope results as the seed to greatness. Before we can get to the fruit, there must be a seed, and before we can get to the seed we must have the processes of creation, the pangs. The Birth of a Nation is a film that reminds us of how young the United States is and undertakes the task of attempting to show us, in a semi-historically minded way, some of the pangs we have encountered along the way. The Birth of a Nation is also a film at the very infancy of national and international cinematic history. At both 100 years after the secession of the 13 United States from England, and 50 years after that, the country had found itself with its first real test of adversity. And the issue was black and white, plain as day for all to see. Not too much grey in there. A Mason-Dixon line formed and a cataclysmic event took place that would lead to a new and improved idea of our country.
DW Griffith was already a Civil War short film veteran by the year 1915 as well as the son of a Confederate vet, and the experience and knowledge would no doubt help as he undertook the by far the longest (almost 180 minutes), most expensive ($110,000), most grandly elaborate, in sets and scenes, and perhaps the most monstrous, in size and tone, film to date. There are a handful of films throughout cinematic history that can be pointed to as landmarks and this is one. This is an epic film with some truly fantastic battle scenes, even more so given the advances of computer in film. However, its gradiosity in scale is matched by the magnitude of decidedly racist tones that are pervasive throughout. Actors in black face, supposedly for the scenes interacting with white women only, ‘mulatto’ face actors and black actors combine to show the apparent antagonistic presence. This is the story of how the south may have lost the war but they would not lose their integrity under the rule of the blacks. Of course, we are forewardned by the opening dialogue card: the film has “…taken the liberty to show the dark side of wrong that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue.” And the introduction to the second half of the story, the reconstruction: it is “…a historical presentation…not meant to reflect on any race or people of today.” Hmmmmmm.
There are gross examples of the racism in this film. After the blacks get elected to a sweeping majority of seats in the first legislature of South Carolina after the war, they are drinking during their sessions from bottles beneath their books, putting their bare feet up on desks; they even have to pass a law to mandate wearing shoes to the sessions and a law saying all “whites must salute a negro soldier.” Gone are the days when the blacks were getting “two hours of lunchtime” to enjoy their dancing-in-the streets, happy-go-lucky, livin-it-up lifestyle. And so the film shows us the birth of the KKK, which has apparently risen from shame to rescue the south once again. The south can agree to not have slaves anymore but that’s it and maybe even the right idea according to this film.
In any event, you may utter a “wow” or two when the movie is done. The characters are simply vehicles to tell their story and do their part in this epic film and it may be hard to feel any empathy for anyone in this film, other than the black community as a whole. Birth of a Nation is worth watching for any film buff, it is a living piece of our history, even though it is the dark underbelly of it.
Big Bad Bald Bastard

Now, at the tail end of Black History Month, with the son of a Kenyan immigrant the frontrunner in the Democratic presidential race, seems like an odd time to be dredging “Birth of a Nation” out of the cultural morass of the past. Why do it? Because the film has served as a template not only for the propaganda films that followed it, but also for the racial alarmism of the American right-wing that survives to this day, and is, in thinly veiled form, being used against Senator Obama.

“Birth of a Nation” is perhaps the most infamous movie in the history of film. Almost universal is the notion that the movie is technically brilliant, but abominably racist. D.W. Griffith is acknowledged as a great innovator in camera work and narrative techniques, and as the originator of the film epic, but the poison of the source material, Reverend Thomas Dixon’s novel and stage melodrama, “The Clansman”, lends the movie a taint that was apparent at the movie’s premier. Perhaps the best review of the film was Francis Hackett’s piece in “The New Republic”, dated March 20, 1915. Hackett sums up the film with this scathing observation:

"Whatever happened during Reconstruction, this film is aggressively vicious and defamatory. It is spiritual assassination. It degrades the censors that passed it and the white race that endures it."

Hackett’s review can be found on the web, and is essential reading for anyone approaching this film.

Well, as for my take on the film, needless to say, the following paragraphs will be a poor substitute for Hackett’s piece.

“Birth of a Nation” starts, in a fashion odd to modern viewers, with a First-Amendment based demand for “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”. Griffith surely claims some lofty company- God and the Bard, indeed. Another title card before part two of the film disingenuously claims that the film is “not meant to reflect in any way on any race or people of today." To anyone aware of the historical context of the film’s release, and the film’s subsequent role in the resurgence of the Klan, this protest can only be seen as a sham.
The film proper is divided into two parts, originally shown with an intermission.

The first part of the film deals with the vicissitudes faced by the Northern Stonemans and Southern Camerons, two households both alike in dignity, immediately before, and during, the Civil War. The Stoneman patriarch is a member of the House of Representatives from the great state of Pennsylvania, with a “mulatto” lover (a “weakness that is to blight the nation”), two sons, and a daughter. The daughter is played by the ethereal Lillian Gish, whose angelic face, framed by golden “boing-boing” curls, possesses an almost unearthly beauty. The Camerons hail from Piedmont, South Carolina, “where life runs in a quaintly way that is to be no more.” Ah, the quaintly way of the bullwhip and the shackle, the forced labor of a captive people… but I digress. The Cameron clan boasts two fine sons (the elder being referred to as “The Little Colonel”, and taking on the role of protagonist in Part Two) and two daughters. School ties among the boys of the two families connect Stoneman and Cameron. The film ably encompasses family drama, both epic and intimate, and the sort of deus ex machina coincidences common to much of 19th Century serialized literature. The acting is the typical florid emoting common to many silent films, the titles sparsely scattered among the scenes. This portion of the film is not too jarring to modern sensibilities, although certain distasteful elements surface at times to presage the caustic material to come.

By way of introduction to the bucolic gentility of Piedmont, we are treated to an odd, coarse comic vignette, at four minutes and fifty-five seconds into the film, we see a young black child fall off a wagon, and another seemingly knocked off the wagon by the pole-wielding driver… a black man walks by and picks the children up as if they were cords of wood.
At six minutes and twenty-five seconds into the film, the Cameron paterfamilias is described as “The Kindly Master of Cameron Hall”. This description is followed a minute later by another bizarre scene as this "kindly" old man drops a cat onto a puppy resting under his chair. This would seem to pass for kindliness in a southern planter.

The plot begins with a visit by the Stoneman brothers to Cameron Hall. The younger brothers of the two families have a relationship which, to the modern viewer, seems to have a weird sort of grab-ass fratboy homoeroticism. This homoeroticism, which most likely results from the need for emotive acting in the absence of dialog, will resurface in a more poignant, mature fashion thirty-nine minutes into the film, in a melodramatic battlefield death scene. The elder Stoneman and the elder Cameron daughter have a quiet, dignified idyll in a cotton field, marred only by the presence of slaves laboring at the harvest. These slaves are portrayed as deferential, untainted by scalawag influence. In the course of their wanderings, the elder Stoneman presents Ben Cameron with a portrait of his glorious sister, igniting the flames of love. A later scene has Stonemans and Camerons enjoying a dinnertime hoedown, courtesy of grinning, dancing slaves. The slaves in the scene are portrayed as bowing, scraping yokels with bad posture who “know their place” as they dance for their high-born patrons before resuming their twelve-hour workday.

This being an epic, the forces of history will intervene. A title informs us, “The power of the sovereign states, established when Lord Cornwallis surrendered to the individual colonies in 1781, is threatened by the new administration.” Here’s a possible clue as to the choice of the title “Birth of a Nation” (although some aver that the title refers to the genesis of the Ku Kux Klan, also known as “The Invisible Nation”).

The war scenes, while overshadowed by later developments in technology, and increasing budgets, must have been mind-blowing when the movie was first released. Of particular interest was the scene of the burning of Atlanta, a nightmare accompanied by the strains of Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King”, which presages the German expressionistic style of the following decade.

We are also treated to epic portrayals of battle lines, with two compelling scenes, a poignant, unwittingly homoerotic scene in which the young “chums” meet on the battlefield and die together, and a scene in which the gallant “Little Colonel” charges the Yankee line of battle, is captured, and winds up in a military hospital.

This capture sets the scene for the star-crossed romance of Lillian Gish’s Miss Stoneman and “The Little Colonel”, as Miss Stoneman is volunteering at the hospital in which Colonel Cameron finds himself. As you will recall, Cameron has already been smitten with love for Stoneman, having been presented with her portrait by her brother. One amazing feature of the hospital scenes is the presence of a lugubrious Yankee sentry with an incredible mustache, who looks longingly at Miss Stoneman as she enters the hospital. The actor has the sort of distinct physiognomy that Fellini or Leone sought out for the bit players in their films. This tiny role is inexplicably memorable.

One thing that strikes the modern viewer as disconcerting is Griffith’s positive portrayal of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln is referred to as “The Great Heart”, and is generally portrayed as a good man swept up in the vicissitudes of history, a magnanimous man willing to pardon the captured Little Colonel. While Griffith depicts Lincoln’s assassination as a terrible occurrence, and a tragedy for the South, he completely glosses over Booth’s pro-Confederacy motivation for the assassination of Mr. Lincoln. Like his disclaimer at the beginning of the film, this seems like a cop-out on Griffith’s part.
If Griffith had ended the film with part one, his reputation in the cultural pantheon would be , on the whole, positive. The racism in this portion of the film was typical of early 20th Century society, even though it rankles the modern viewer of generous disposition.
Of course, Griffith did not end the film here, and in the second half of the film, he tumbles down the proverbial rabbit hole, and ends up in a warped fantasyland of fevered race-baiting, sexual fear-mongering, violent ethnic cleansing wish-fulfillment, and the “spiritual assassination” that Hackett decried. In my next post, I will make my descent into this maelstrom of madness, this review has already dragged on for over three pages, and I think I am in need of a drink.

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