Reaction to Having Watched “Birth of a Nation”

As an aspiring film enthusiast, I know that it is amongst my duties to experience at least the broad spectrum of movie history. You can’t really claim to be knowledgeable about movies unless you’ve actually watched the movies you intend to chronicle. Therefore, for the past few years I have been grinding away at getting all the “important” movies under my belt, from the good, to the bad, to the ugly. Roger Ebert’s The Great Movies books have been a handy guide for narrowing down the absolute essentials, and it’s always exciting to read the corresponding essays from said books after finishing each movie.

Because every job eventually entails having to do things we won’t necessarily enjoy, I knew that someday I would have to get through a viewing of D. W. Griffith’s infamous The Birth of a Nation (1915), a film that falls squarely into the “ugly” category. Both hailed as a technical achievement that singlehandedly created the modern movie, and rightfully reviled as a contemptible piece of white supremacist propaganda, it is required viewing for film scholars, yet not something that any decent human being can bring their self to truly like. Nonetheless, I believed that I would be able to handle it… until I found out it was over three hours in length. Was it possible to sit through three hours of a sympathetic portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan and retain one’s sanity? I eventually decided that whenever I got around to it, I would tackle it one hour at a time over the course of three days, though I could never work up the enthusiasm and the whole prospect eventually fell to some remote corner of my mind.

In class last Thursday, however, I was finally reminded of the movie again when we watched the video of Stanley Kubrick receiving the D. W. Griffith award. On Friday, faced with having to stay the weekend in DeKalb and thus having the whole day to myself, I decided it was as good a time as any to “tear off the bandage”. Being public domain, the entire movie is available on YouTube for free (it’s also at the NIU library, but fuck that. I’ve no intention of getting awkward looks from whoever’s operating the checkout counter), and I had two hypotheses in my head: that the comments section was a massive flame war (as is the standard for any video of something old and offensive), or shut down altogether. I ended up pleasantly surprised to see that the comments section was still up and running, though I didn’t dare look through it.

At last, we get to the movie itself. It’s actually divided into two parts. Part one is simply a dramatization of the American Civil War without a single Klansman to be seen (as they didn’t exist yet), and is actually somewhat bearable, with only hints of racism sprinkled here and there, and I was surprised to see a few actual black actors mixed in with all the blackface actors. For the most part, you can just relax and enjoy the old-timey vibe while witnessing some of the first epic battle scenes in movie history and an early reenactment of the Lincoln assassination. I even began to wonder if the film wouldn’t be nearly as bad as its reputation indicated. After the first hour, I took a brief break, and then continued to the halfway point. After another short break, I finally decided I might as well power through the second half and get it over with. Dear Christ was I not prepared for what I was getting into.

This is where the movie attains its true infamy, and is also invaluable viewing for history buffs as an insight into how racist attitudes were maintained in the 20^th century. Here we are given a false vision of the post-Civil War reconstruction era (which many people evidently believed at the time) in which the newly freed slaves were out of control ruffians who tried to take over the country, and the Ku Klux Klan were simply a band of vigilante heroes who rose up to beat them back. One of the film’s themes, intentional or not, is essentially “this is why black people must be suppressed; they can’t handle having too much freedom”. There is also an anti- miscegenation message, with the main villains being “mulattos” who use the black people as pawns in their bid to create a “mulatto empire”. There’s even a heroic portrayal of a lynching, and during the epilogue, one of the images is of Klansmen frightening black people away from the voting booths, intended to give off a “everything is right once again” vibe. Watching the movie and realizing that some people actually believed this shit is very enlightening as far as understanding the history of 20^th century racism is concerned.

The whole experience at least wasn’t boring: only painful. I remember when the movie was down to less than ten minutes, I kept thinking to myself, “it’s almost over, it’s almost over”, as well as looking forward to reading the Ebert essay afterward. Even D. W. Griffith shouldn’t be too harshly condemned; he apparently didn’t even realize how racist the story was (adapted from a novel) while making the movie, and was ashamed of the film for the rest of his life, immediately trying to atone for it with the anti-racist movie Intolerance.                                                                                                                                                                      Putting the story aside for a moment, though, we must touch on the film’s technical side. Not only was it one of the first feature length movies ever, and the innovator of the “epic movie” template, it also pioneered modern tenants of editing that are now taken for granted. Previously, movies were presented in a linear, “stagey” fashion. This film introduced the technique of cross-cutting to show multiple events occurring simultaneously. This is showcased in the film’s most (in)famous scene in which a family in a cabin are besieged by “the evil black people” while a cavalry of Klansmen ride to the rescue. The film keeps cutting between the family defending themselves, “the evil black people” trying to break in like Night of the Living Dead, and the cavalry’s advancement, in an attempt to create suspense. It’s really a shame that all this technical innovation was used in service of such reprehensible material, rendering it impossible to get emotionally invested in any of the proceedings.

Beyond technical innovation, the film also codified some familiar story tropes. We have one of the first “badass old people” in the form of “Mammy”, who is depicted as “one of the good black people” who “remained loyal to her masters” and participates in the fighting at the end. I also regret to inform the readers that this movie is where the “superhero gets the idea for his costume” scene originated, in the scene where the “hero” gets inspired to create the Ku Klux Klan. He sees a couple of white kids scare a group of black kids by dressing up in a sheet and jumping out at them (playing on the “black people are superstitious and afraid of ghosts” stereotype that was prevalent for years), and gets a “eureka” look on his face.

This was when the movie officially cracked me the Hell up. I actually burst out laughing at the sheer stupidity of it all, and that’s where I think the film’s value lies. In our modern world where no sane person will be influenced by it, we can look back on stupid, bigoted shit from the past with ridicule rather than getting all up in arms about it. Just visit the comments section of an old, racist cartoon on YouTube. You’ll see people getting outraged at it, people getting outraged at them for being outraged at it, scumbags agreeing with it, etc. Why can’t we learn to just laugh at the stupidity rather than bicker over it? That’s why I wish there could have been a screening of this film in one of the several film classes I’ve taken. It would’ve been an interesting experience to watch it with a crowd, being able to see and hear their reactions, to heckle it, cringe at it, gasp at it, laugh at it, and in the end, simply engage in a mature, civilized discussion of its significance to both film history and American history.

P. S.: Seeing Hidden Figures the very next day was a much needed antidote.

 

External Links:

Roger Ebert’s essay.

The movie (in case the embedded video doesn’t work).