"The Birth of a Nation" 1915

From The Book:
"Simultaneously one of the most revered and reviled films ever made. D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation is important for the very reasons that prompt both of those divergent reactions. In fact, rarely has a film so equally deserved such praise and scorn, which in many ways raises the film's estimation not just in the annals of cinema but as an essential historic artifact (some might say relic).
"Though it was based on Thomas Dixon's explicitly racist play The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, by many accounts Griffith was indifferent to the racist bent of the subject matter. Just how complicity that makes him in delivering its ugly message has been cause for almost a century of debate. However, there has been no debate concerning the film's technical and artistic merits. Griffith was as usual more interested in the possibilities of the medium than the message, and in this regard he set the standards for modern Hollywood."

Wow. Just...wow. I'm only at about 2 1/2 hours through it (it's 3 hours long), and I'm finishing watching it as I type. I'm a little sickened. The portrayal of blacks as sinister, diabolical, evil beings who wanted to take over the nation, and the KKK as the saviors who prevented them from doing so, is appalling. At one point, Congress is shown as having a black majority, and the session is portrayed as a circus...members taking off their shoes, eating peanuts and tossing shells on the floor, gnawing on a chicken leg, unable to be civilized, it was horrible. The movie opens up with a disclaimer claiming that it was meant as a means to show the atrocities of war and that it was made as an anti-war film, and it does, sort of, in a rambling kind of way during the first half. But then in the second half, it goes on to portray blacks as power-hungry demons. Overall, I was horrified at the romanticism of racism and bigotry.

And though I'm disgusted at the thought of glorifying the KKK, I do feel that this is an important movie to watch. As George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." To think that less than a century ago this is how people really felt about different races, and now we have a black President, it's amazing to realize the evolution of the American people. I know that blatant bigotry and racism still exist in this country, but seeing this movie really makes me realize how far we've come, and how far we still have to go.

Here's a video of the trailer:


Next movie: Les Vampires (1915)