David Wark “D.W.” Griffith's controversial 1915 masterpiece, “The Birth of a Nation,” occupies, on some level, similar stature in film scholarship as its subject matter does in American history. Like slavery's vile stain on the memoirs of a constitutionally egalitarian nation, Griffith's ode to Anglo supremacy and the plight of the White South represents the worst of artistic cinema through racist, exploitative, historical revisionism. Both film and subject are reviled, rightly so, for their unforgivable turpitudes. Of course no singular work of art can be equated in its comparatively limited impact to one of the world's great sins — subjugating and dehumanizing an entire people, stripping them of their unalienable human rights. But even as D.W. Griffith's explicitly anti-African American work, contrary to its title card, bears the stench of residing on the wrong side of history, “The Birth of a Nation” is as revered as it is reviled. Its unparalleled innovation and audacity, technically and narratively, coupled with its unprecedented cultural impact, makes it perhaps the single most important film ever made.
The epic “Birth,” the longest film ever at the time of its release at over three hours, adapts Thomas Dixon's novel and play “The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan,” chronicling the rising racial, economic, political and geographic tensions leading up to and including the Civil War, The Emancipation Proclamation, Abraham Lincoln's assassination by John Wilkes Booth, and the tumultuous Southern Reconstruction period that was the genesis of the Ku Klux Klan. The dramatic saga of two star-crossed families hewn asunder by the bloodiest of America's wars, the Camerons from South Carolina, and the Stoneman's from an unnamed North, anchors the narrative.
The first half of the film, while treating both families as ostensible equals (with the exception of the later demonized Austin Stoneman, a proxy for real-life abolitionist, Thaddeus Stevens) quickly tasks itself with painting the pre-Civil War American South as victims of a shamelessly cruel and lawless North. A black militia ransacks the Cameron estate only to be vanquished by heroic Confederate soldiers. The eldest and noble Cameron boy, Ben, is wounded as he does battle with the unreasonable and savage North and receives the affectionate nickname, “the Little Colonel,” for his heroism. Griffith's picture even has the audacity to claim known abolitionist, Abraham Lincoln, as a champion of the Confederacy's cause who would have been sympathetic to the South during Reconstruction had he not been assassinated at Ford's Theater. Instead, “Birth” argues that with his cowardly act, assassin John Wilkes Booth, paved the way for Stoneman and his reviled “mulatto” understudy, Silas Lynch, to inflict all manner of unjust punishments on the South. It is upon these premises of a virtuous and heroic Confederacy molested by a radical, unscrupulous North that Griffith constructs his support for a natural and inevitable rise of the Ku Klux Klan in the film's latter half.
Read Full Article »