How many film students have seen this movie?
Since it hit the first movie theaters a little over a century ago,
how many students have been taught to admire the editing,
admire the scale,
admire the nail-biting final chase scene?
Where a white family is beset on all sides by bestial black soldiers
played by white actors in blackface
to be saved at the last second by the film's heroes,
the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
The standard story goes that "Birth of a Nation" was also the birth of the feature film
that it set the standards of Hollywood filmmaking,
Hollywood's storytelling for the coming century.
This film, which depicts Black America as an existential threat to white America.
Where a Black man played by a white actor attempts to rape a white woman and drives her to suicide.
Where this same Black man is lynched by white men in white hoods, which is framed as heroic.
This film, which inspired a reinvigorated Ku Klux Klan
and led to countless lynchings of Black Americans in real life,
*this* film is required viewing?
David Wark Griffith's three-hour epic looms large in film history.
It may seem like trying to teach that history without "Birth of a Nation" is futile.
But what if we try?
Is it possible to rewrite film history?
First a disclaimer:
it's a common fault when telling film history to give credit to popularization rather than innovation.
Innovation is the true driving force of human artistic endeavor
and often those who claim to innovate merely…
popularize.
This argument isn't meant to erase the film nor pretend it never happened, nor that it had the impact it did
Rather, it's meant to cut through the hype and the press of the first blockbuster
and recontextualize it.
After all "Birth of a Nation" was a masterpiece not only of filmmaking,
but of hype.
And this WAS hyped.
Griffith played up the premiere.
He hired the LA Philharmonic to perform the score–unheard of at the time.
And famously, It was the first film to be screened at the White House.
Though in some ways that seems only natural.
President Woodrow Wilson was college buddies with Thomas Dixon
who wrote the novel upon which "Birth of a Nation" was based.
And the film quotes directly from Wilson's "History of the American People."
President Wilson famously said of it:
"It's like writing history with lightning."
Hell of a pull quote if you want to market your film.
And even before "Birth," Griffith proved himself a master at hyping his own accomplishments.
After spending five years at the Biograph Company,
Griffith put out an ad for himself in the New York Dramatic Mirror,
listing his many film credits and several innovations of his.
Included in the innovations which he introduced and which are now generally followed
by the most advanced producers are:
the large or close-up figures, distant views as represented first in "Ramona,"
the "switchback," sustained suspense, the "fade out,"
and restraint in expression, raising motion picture acting to the higher plane,
which has won for it recognition as a genuine art.
There's plenty in here that's exaggerated.
Especially that part about the close-up.
It's shockingly difficult to scan through Griffith's early work and come up with a single close-up.
Edison shot what we might call a close-up here.
But credit for the close-up should really go to George Albert Smith,
who used this shot of a kitten to contrast with the wider view in 1903.
And yes, we have been making cute cat videos since the technology was available.
The "switchback" or more commonly called "cross- cutting," usually gets attributed to Edwin S. Porter,
who experimented with cutting from the interior action of this rescue scene to its exterior action.
The rest (from the fade out to nuanced acting)
um...
It's tough to say given the breadth of early filmmaking and how much of it has been lost to history.
But one thing he definitely didn't invent was the feature film.
Here's one from Australia, dated 1906.
Here's one from Italy, dated 1912.
And from 1913, out of Sweden is this film "Ingeborg Holm,"
with bold staging and acting as nuanced and delicate out of anything by Griffith.
But if you really want to understand the magic and melodrama of early filmmaking, look to the films of…
D.W. Griffith.
Not the big dumb racist action flicks,
the shorter sleeker one-wheelers that Griffith made for Biograph.
These quick melodramas display as much if not more innovations
than his more famous three-hour hate crime.
Sure, there's plenty of Civil War apologia on there,
but if you're curious watch "The Musketeers of Pig Alley," a proto-gangster film
or watch "A Corner in Wheat," which like "Birth of a Nation" has parallel action and storytelling,
but without bringing all the lines of action together by the end.
But it does end with a millionaire being buried in wheat, so that's cool.
These were the two films that my graduate programs screened for us
and arguably it's this period of Griffith's career which was truly worthy of studying.
This is the period in which narrative film really began to take shape.
All "Birth of a Nation" did, cinematically speaking,
was take those same techniques and give them a big budget with a cast of thousands.
Admittedly, it's tough to talk about other directors of the time
simply because so much work from that era has been lost.
The work of directors, men, women, countless films made outside of the Hollywood system
simply lost to time.
And even that which survives is often overlooked,
so we miss out on gems like "Cabiria,"
or the films of this woman, Lois Weber.
How often do you hear film teachers gush about her wildly inventive shot composition
or her pioneering use of the split screen?
But no.
We all tend to focus on Griffith,
and so Griffith's work survives,
and of course,
"Birth of a Nation" survives.
It was a huge hit after all
and a huge controversy.
The earliest incarnation of the NAACP led boycotts against the film.
A Boston publisher named William Monroe Trotter led the charge,
forming some of America's first mass acts of civil disobedience against the film,
demanding tickets to see it in areas where it wouldn't be shown to non-white audiences.
In the history of American film, Trotter, much more than Griffith, deserves to have his name praised.
As does Oscar Micheaux, the director of the earliest surviving film by an African-American,
"Within Our Gates," itself a direct response to "Birth of a Nation,"
the first shove in a long artistic pushback against glorified hatred.
A pushback that we've been pushing for over a century.
We keep showing "Birth of a Nation," even as we keep denouncing it.
[Audience in film booing]
Audience member: Oh! Those poor women!
And here is why you should watch it.
It's easy to forget, or rather, hard to remember
that in 1915, the version of history displayed in "Birth of a Nation" was accepted fact for white Americans,
North and South.
That such a hatred of Black America burned so hot, so openly, for so many.
The truly shocking thing about Griffith's racism was how normal it was at the time.
The real accomplishment of Griffith was to capture every hideous facet of white supremacist ideology on film.
From it's terrible psychosexual preoccupation with Black male sexuality and fears of mixing the races,
to its portrayal of Blacks in political life as a threat to democracy
showing some as either too stupid to understand democracy
or wily enough to bend the law to their insatiable lusts.
In this scene, newly elected Black congressmen leer at white women
as they pass legislation legalizing interracial marriage.
Even after the much-lauded chase scene in the final beat of the movie,
where merely the sight of Klansmen is enough to send potential Black voters running scared
and to know how many ways that the American right-wing have tried to suppress
the votes of American citizens,
to see it practiced here with such naked contempt for democracy and humanity is…
eye-opening.
"Birth of a Nation" SHOULD be remembered not as a great piece of filmmaking,
but as a document of normalized hatred,
as the clearest expression of American white supremacism in the 20th century.
It should be remembered as the national trauma which we've had to undergo,
as the psychosis we've yet to eradicate.
It should be remembered because generations of Americans actually believed its hateful message.
And on some level
many still do.
And that,
as ugly as it sounds,
is why you should watch it.
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