Movie Review: Birth of a Nation

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

I could seriously see a semester long college course built around this movie and I'm gonna try to review it with one post? Yep, try being the operative word.

90% of my TV viewing comes in 15 – 30 minutes chunks as I'm getting ready for work and eating breakfast every morning. When working my way through this 3 hour plus monster I found that the movie is such a study in contrasts that at times it was as if I were watching a different movie each day. I watched the last 45 minutes yesterday mostly in one sitting and watching in in smaller chunks probably helped me make it all the way through since it's a bit hard to digest in larger pieces.

This may be the most influential and important film of the 20^th century. It was the first Hollywood epic historical film. At the time it was made it boasted the longest running time and the highest budget. It set attendance records even though theaters were charging 3 and 4 times the normal admission price to see it. It may have been directly responsible for the revival of the KKK. I can't think of another movie that had such an impact on both the industry AND society.

It continues to have an impact on people today. The librarian at the bookmobile said that she didn't dare check it out herself for fear of what her bosses would think of her.

The movie itself is an odd mess. Even with it's high final production cost, it was still done on a shoestring. To recreate famous battles they only had one field with one trench. They just shot from different angles and relied on lots of smoke bombs and careful placement of actors and set pieces.

Every shot but one was done in one take. Griffith did some test filming of sets and costumes ahead of time to make sure he had the right set up. The actors weren't given scripts, Griffith just narrated the story to them and after a walk trough rolled the cameras. This gives a lot of scenes a realistic spontaneous feel.

It's an interesting snapshot of theater in 1915 The women look much more like everyday women than Hollywood stars. The acting styles vary wildly with some using the over dramatic gestures common on stage at this time, while others have already learned to tone things down for film. The man playing the villain could get work today with no problems.

Some sequences work really well and are good storytelling. Others are very badly done and I laughed out loud at them. Still others are just disturbing in their unvarnished hatefulness.

1915 was the 50^th anniversary of the end of the Civil War. It was to the people of that time as close as WWII is to us today. There were still people alive who remembered the time and it's fascinating to compare how it is presented in this movie with later efforts. This was the Saving Private Ryan of it's day. Gritty reality, extensive research, and a heart tugging story.

Well, reality as far as recreating certain scenes directly from photographs. Relatively realistic depiction of combat as long as you over look the absence of blood. But social reality and plot reality take a bigger and bigger hits as the movie goes on.

It starts out as a pretty straight forward war movie with cliches that were cliche even then. But this was based on a novel called The Clansmen and it's not about “The Birth of a Nation” it's really about the birth of the KKK or at least a fantasy version of it. Once the war is over we get down to depicting reconstruction and how it made a group like the Clan inevitable. That is to say events are slanted in such a way as to try and force the audience into accepting the Clan as not only inevitable, but good.

In order to make the Clan and it's members noble they made any blacks who didn't keep to a subservient role seem either stupid, villainous, threatening, or all of the above. The final catalyst for the forming of the KKK occurs when a black militia Captain asks a young White girl to marry him and she throws herself off a cliff. Her brother founds the group to hunt him down.

The whole sequence is very contrived and is very badly staged. The deeper we get into the pro Clan story the less tightly Griffith kept control of the plot and the more outrageous the depiction of all the Black characters becomes. I found myself alternately laughing at it and cringing from it.

This has been on my list of things to watch in the name of cultural literacy for a long time. I'd recommend others watch it for the same reason but even now that it's public domain I'd hate for it to make any more money so check it out from the library.