1915 - The Birth of a Nation, directed by D.W. Griffith

"Truth--What is Truth?"-- Griffith quoting Pilate in a 1930 prelude to The Birth of a Nation

"We have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities"-- Griffith, from The Birth of a Nation's opening Plea for the Art of Motion Picture

Silhouetted figures clash against red flames--and then we see the dead soldiers' bodies piled one on top of the other. But this is not an anti-war film. A black man is brutally killed and left on the doorstep of the provisional government seat in Piedmont. But this is not an anti-hate film. Two friends, separated by place and uniform die in the same instant in each other's arms. But this is neither a film about love nor compassion. It is a film about the powderkeg of feeling and pure emotion that arise out of war, hate, and love. It moves us to pity, to anger, and patriotism. We feel many clashing and conflicting things, and this is because The Birth of a Nation is a combination of fact and fiction, past and present--addressing issues as divisive today as they were during the hellish years it attempts to illustrate and illuminate.

The experience of watching The Birth is predictable. First, it is intriguing, then revolting. The first part, which focuses on the war, seems plausible and convincing, because Griffith first seems to treat the topic with objective distance. We see the story of two families, one Northern and one Southern. The Camerons live on a large plantation in South Carolina with their slaves. The Stonemans live in Washington D.C., as the father, Austin Stoneman is a Congressman. Eventually, love sparks between the two families, despite their differences. As the war begins, we see the boys of each family enlist, and eventually we see all but the oldest sons of each family die. The eldest Cameron, Ben, becames a Colonel, as does the eldest Stoneman, Phil. At the battle of Petersburg are forced to face each other. As the first half of the film comes to an end, things are finally looking up. But then, in an amazing recreation of Lincoln's assassination, there is a foreshadowing of great trouble ahead. The Camerons immediately realize they have lost "their only friend." After the intermission, we begin a new story--the need for and founding of the Ku Klux Klan.

In the preamble to the film, A Plea for the Art of Motion Picture, Griffith acknowledges the affect that the burgeoning art form may have on its viewers, and attempts to use this power to a positive end. Many times, Griffith's title cards send a clear anti-war message. This is still topical. He shows an effusively positive portrayal of Abraham Lincoln (the "great heart"). This view is still held. And yet, if there is a message to be gained by Birth of a Nation, it is that the unity of North and South is eventually cemented only through a great desire that transcends political squabbles. It is the recognition that North and South are of the same stock--not just Americans, but WHITE. Griffith unapologetically supports the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, with its murders--and eventually the disenfranchisement of blacks.

Of course, this seems unthinkable today. But remember the time, and imagine the task. This was before the concept of integration or equal rights were in the popular vocabulary. When The Birth of a Nation was released in 1915, only fifty years had passed since America's Civil War. And America's relationship to its violent past was still very sensitive. The wartime population, and its sons and daughters, were still living. By comparision, almost 100 years now separate us from The Birth of a Nation. And this film is an amazing example of how perceptions of history change over time. At one time, The Birth was the most-seen film in America, and the most revered. And yet, seeing The Birth today, we are transported to a unpleasant and tumultuous time of racial intolerance and inescapable pro-South propaganda. D.W. Griffith, a Southerner, and son of a Southerner, attempted to tell the story of the Civil War and reconstruction in every gory and unfortunate detail, and the result is an intensely personal statement of what the era was like for Southern whites.

Griffith took the greatest event in America's history and created a film from it. He achieved this by expanding the length and scope of the motion picture to make way for the epic. And yet, despite the considerable length of Nation, one gets the feeling that in its 3 hours, it doesn't even scratch the surface of the emotions brought up by the war and the period of Reconstruction. Griffith made the decision to option Thomas Dixon's The Clansman as his focus in order to humanize the events of the war--showing the fall and then the rise of a Southern family during the war and reconstruction. The fall comes with the war, and rise with the birth of the Ku Klux Klan. Today, it would be impossible to create a Civil War film based on such a white-supremacist slant. But, at the time, just as the war was only a half century old, so was the abolition of slavery. Relations between blacks and whites had a long way to go.

Directly and indirectly, The Birth ignores the horrors of slavery, while making it the focus through its conspicuous absence. From the beginning, The Birth asserts that slavery was the root cause of the war. There is a humble, if perfunctory view of blacks enslaved, and the the passion of the Northern abolitionists. And yet, Griffith will eventually repeat the act of silencing and enslaving the blacks throughout the picture. He does this by minimizing their roles and their characterizations, and by presenting them in stereotype and mockery. The main black characters are all played by whites in blackface. And so, we have many layers of separation between the world of the film and the possibility of reality. But reality is not what is important, The Birth of a Nation is important because it presents with a Southerner's view of the facts, and leads us to Pilate's inexorable condition.

And it is not only the blacks who are given the short shrift. The Northerners, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln are also almost universallly presented as naive or simply villainous. Even the "heroine," Elsie Stoneman, though courageous enough to become a nurse, spends her time placidly strumming a banjo. The ignorance of the Northerners is reflected by their "blindness" to the "threat" of the blacks. While the Southerners, represented mostly by the plantation-owning Camerons, are always presented as wise in their race relations by maintaining a kindly master-slave relationship with their slaves, their Northern friends the Stonemans, as well as the Union army, with its scalawags and carpetbaggers, almost always ignore or exploit the blacks' ignorance. The only blacks in the picture who aren't shown as sexually perverse or morally malleable are the slaves of the Cameron family. And their main function is as comic relief, or unfortunate martyrs. They speak in a ridiculous pidgin and castigate "uppity Northern niggers." Almost every other black character is presented in a negative way--perverse, or perverted by the North's revenge. Stoneman's maid, Miss Brown rips her clothes and convulses on the floor for no apparent reason. Most disturbing is the vengeful Gus, a Union trained soldier, who is presented as a ignorant barbarian, and is given many threatening closeups before he receives his comeuppance.

I find it interesting that the majority of the Northerners also seem blind to the humanity of the slaves, and I wonder if this may not be historically valid. While a Northerner and son of a abolitionist congressman, when Phil Stoneman visits his chum Ben Cameron on the Cameron plantation in South Carolina, he completely ignores the plight of the slaves, and laughs as they cakewalk and eat watermelon. And the Union army enlists blacks only to sack and terrorize their former masters, a theme revisited in Glory, which would later attempt to reveal the racism of the North. Yet, it is the South's systematic terrorizing of blacks in the guise of the Ku Klux Klan that is shown to be most pragmatic and reasonable. Eventually, the Stonemans (Austin included) learn that giving power to the blacks was a "great weakness." Every black placed in a position of even limited power had betrayed the confidence of the North, or at least made a mockery of the Nation.

My only advice to a viewer of this film is to withhold judgement, though it may be difficult, and try to discriminate between the film as an amazingly rich artistic treasure, and a fantasy of Reconstruction built from the still smoldering ashes of the war and slavery. The Birth of a Nation contains beautiful images, a fluidity of acting, and stylized "authentic" scenes recreated from drawings and photographs, as well as a tight structure of cross-cutting which builds dramatic tension. However, The Birth of a Nation is as blind to the horrors of slavery and segregation as it is self-conscious in its revolutionary technical craft. It is a progressive document, but one that reveals how slowly we progress.