Review of The Birth of a Nation (1915) by Garrett C — 14 Jul 2016

Well, it's taken me a long time to work myself up into the mood to sit down for three hours to watch a film from 1916 that kick-started the revival of the KKK. But I finally did it. Why? Because this film is not just a piece of racist propaganda, it is (no overstatement at all) the film that turned cinema into art. It is the ground zero of modern moviemaking. It is the first film that combined the language of cinematic technique to make a masterwork. Thus, it is essential viewing for any student of film. The problem is of course that the second half of the film is as racist and revisionist as you can get, depicting the Reconstruction era South as being overrun by black people hell bent on destroying everything only to be defeated by the good KKK. This makes the film a mixed blessing. It's a hateful, vile work that encourages backwards thinking and violent actions. It's also a masterpiece of storytelling and form. I think Roger Ebert's review is a brilliant piece that does great justice to the conflicting issues going on here, so I'll quote part of his review here at length (which you should read all of).

"To understand "The Birth of a Nation" we must first understand the difference between what we bring to the film, and what the film brings to us. All serious moviegoers must sooner or later arrive at a point where they see a film for what it is, and not simply for what they feel about it. "The Birth of a Nation" is not a bad film because it argues for evil. Like Riefenstahl's "The Triumph of the Will," it is a great film that argues for evil. To understand how it does so is to learn a great deal about film, and even something about evil.

But it is possible to separate the content from the craft? Garry Wills observes that Griffith's film "raises the same questions that Leni Riefenstahl's films do, or Ezra Pound's poems. If art should serve beauty and truth, how can great art be in the thrall of hateful ideologies?".

The crucial assumption here is that art should serve beauty and truth. I would like to think it should, but there is art that serves neither, and yet provides an insight into human nature, helping us understand good and evil. In that case, "The Birth of a Nation" is worth considering, if only for the inescapable fact that it did more than any other work of art to dramatize and encourage racist attitudes in America." - Ebert.