"A PLEA FOR THE ART OF THE MOTION PICTURE: We do not fear censorship, for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue - the same liberty that is conceded to the art of the written word - that art to which we owe the Bible and the works of Shakespeare."
And so begins D. W. Griffith's 1915 silent epic The Birth of a Nation: the most important, certainly the most ground breaking film in the history of cinema. Today, we take many of its innovations for granted; close-ups, cross-cutting, and panning and tracking shots have become such a standard part of film grammar we barely notice them. For contemporary audiences, however, The Birth of a Nation was unlike anything they'd ever seen before. At 196 minutes, the film presented a complex, sustained narrative at a time when features were struggling to tell stories barely a third of that length. The picture went on to become the most commercially successful film of the silent era, and in the decades that followed, celebrated film-makers such as Jean Renoir, Michael Powell and Orson Welles would describe it as the first true cinematic masterpiece. In 1997, the AFI ranked Birth of a Nation 44th in its list of the 100 greatest American films. At the time of writing, it currently holds a rare 100% 'fresh' rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
But of course, popular acclaim and artistic adulation is only half the story.
A century after its release, film critics and movie hounds still struggle to reconcile The Birth of a Nation's considerable reputation with its content. It doesn't matter whether or not you're a cinephile, chances are you'll have heard of this movie: it's the one where the Klu Klux Klan are the heroes and African-Americans are blacked-up stereotypes, raping white women and threatening the constitutional freedom of innocent Southerners whose only sin was to run plantations and grow fat from human exploitation.
A common misconception holds that The Birth of a Nation reflects American racial attitudes of the early 20th century, but the fact is the film was just as controversial in 1915 as it is today. Shortly after its New York premiere, Sherwin Lewis published an editorial in the New York Globe attacking what he saw as the production's real intention:
"White men in this country have never been just to black men. We tore them from Africa and brought them over as slaves. For generations they toiled without recompense that their white owners might have unearned wealth and ape the ways of aristocracy. The nation finally freed them, but has but slightly protected them in the enjoyment of the legitimate fruits of their freedom. We nominally gave them the vote, but looked on inactive when the right was invaded. We do not, in any state of the Union, grant to the negro economic and political equality. No white man of proper feeling can be proud of the record [...] Then to the injury is added slander. To make a few dirty dollars men are willing to pander to depraved tastes and to foment a race antipathy that is the most sinister and dangerous feature of American life."
Further criticism came from Jane Addams in the New York Post, who cautioned moviegoers not to accept what they see on the screen as fact:
"One of the most unfortunate things about this film is that it appeals to race prejudice upon the basis of conditions of half a century ago, which have nothing to do with the facts we have to consider to-day [sic]. Even then, it does not tell the whole truth. It is claimed that the play is historical: but history is easy to misuse."
Perhaps the most damning response came from Francis Hackett in The New Republic, who concluded his lengthy deconstruction of the film's racial politics by forcing the audience to question what they would gain from watching the film:
"Whatever happened during Reconstruction, this film is aggressively vicious and defamatory. It is spiritual assassination. It degrades the censors that passed it and the white race that endures it."
While newspapers debated the film, the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) picketed screenings and campaigned for it to be withdrawn from distribution. A number of other movies were produced in direct response to Birth of a Nation, many of them (most notably Spying the Spy, The Birth of a Race and Within Our Gates) made by African-American film-makers. None of them matched the success of Griffith's film.
It's tempting to suggest that Birth of a Nation's notoriety added to its impact at the box office, but this rather cynical attitude does the first audiences a major disservice. Watching the film today, it isn't hard to understand why it proved so popular on its original run. At its heart is an exciting adventure story, taking in romance, action, intrigue and suspense. The sheer scope of the production, with its cast of thousands and recreation of historical events, which at the time were still within living memory, would certainly have added to its appeal.
The movie opens in the antebellum era where we're introduced to two families: the Northern Stonemans, based in Washington, and the Southern Camerons, hailing from South Carolina. Phil, the eldest of the Stoneman boys, is betrothed to Margaret Cameron, while her brother Ben is secretly in love with Phil's sister Elsie. After the outbreak of the Civil War, both men are conscripted in the Union and Confederate armies. Ben is wounded at the Siege of Petersburg while leading a charge against the Union forces, and is taken to a military hospital in Washington where he discovers Elsie working as a nurse. Upon learning Ben will be hanged as an enemy of the Union, Elsie arranges for Ben's mother to meet with Abraham Lincoln and appeal for her son's life. Tired of the killing and with the war now over, Lincoln pardons Ben and sets about reconciling North and South into a united nation. Before he can implement his Reconstruction policies, Lincoln is assassinated and Congress soon descends into chaos. Austin Stoneman, Elsie's father and a member of the Abolitionist movement, mobilises support from fellow Congressman for punitive measures against the South and appoints his mulatto deputy Silas Lynch as Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina.
The film's second half picks up the story in the Reconstruction era, where political corruption and lawlessness has spread throughout the Southern states. In South Carolina, Lynch has packed the municipal offices with African-American legislators, who pass laws permitting interracial marriage and rendering white voters second-class citizens. Disgusted by this abuse of power, Ben decides to take matters into his own hands. After watching white children posing as ghosts to scare their black peers, he conceives of a secret army to seize back white supremacy. Torn between her duty towards her father and her love for Ben, Elsie breaks off their relationship. In the meantime, Ben's sister Flora is confronted by Gus, a black Union soldier who expresses his desire to "marry" her. Attempting to escape his advances, Flora is fatally injured after falling off a precipice. That evening, the fledgling Klu Klux Klan track Gus down and kill him, dumping the body on Lynch's doorstep. Fearing civil unrest, Lynch outlaws the Klan, but the chance discovery of Ben's uniform at his father's house leads to the arrest of Dr. Cameron. Phil Stoneman rescues him with the aid of Margaret and the Cameron family's faithful black servants, and they hole up in a log cabin which is subsequently attacked by black militia. Unaware of Dr. Cameron's escape, Elsie meets with Lynch and pleads for his release. Lynch, who lusts after Elsie, declares his wish to marry her, causing Elsie to faint. When Austin Stoneman arrives, Lynch tells him of his plan, which horrifies the Congressman. Much to Stoneman's relief, the Klan, aware of Elsie's plight, storm Lynch's house and take charge of the corrupt deputy. In the nick of time, they also make their way to the log cabin and ward off Lynch's forces. With white rule restored, the movie ends with Phil marrying Margaret and Ben marrying Elsie.
The Birth of a Nation is an adaptation of Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s novels The Clansman and The Leopard's Spots, but it's appropriate that its opening title card references Shakespeare as many of the film's themes and characters are analogous with the Bard's work. The love story between Phil Stoneman and Margaret Cameron is a subtle inversion of the romance in Romeo and Juliet, which later aligns more closely with the play through the forbidden love between Ben and Elsie. Austin Stoneman's story arc is fashioned after King Lear, except, unlike his literary forebear, Stoneman's folly in placing the security of his kingdom with those unfit to rule doesn't lead to the loss of a beloved daughter. Ben Cameron's rallying together of a small band of men in a God-given cause is intended to evoke the brave Prince Hal in Henry V, who lays siege to fortified France despite the odds weighted against him. As nuanced characterisation arguably wouldn't appear in cinema until Erich von Stroheim's Greed in 1924, it made sense for film-makers at this time to draw on classic archetypes to help audiences navigate their way through the story. Everything we see in Birth of a Nation is in service to the plot and its message, and that message is one of racial supremacy.
After Sherwin Lewis' editorial appeared in the New York Globe, Griffith fired off an angry but respectful missive in which he stated the film was based on historical fact and dismissed the assertion there was a racist agenda:
"Most well-informed men know now that slavery was an economic mistake. The treatment of the negroes during the days of Reconstruction is shown effectually and graphically in our picture. We show many phases of the question and we do pay particular attention to those faithful negroes who stayed with their former masters and were ready to give up their lives to protect their white friends. No characters in the story are applauded with greater fervour than the good negroes whose devotion is so clearly shown. If prejudiced witnesses do not see the message in this portion of the entire drama we are not to blame."
The "good negroes" Griffith describes are the servants who come to Dr. Cameron's aid after Lynch has him arrested. There's an interesting moment during the rescue where one of the servants baits the braying black horde of freedmen around him by asking Dr. Cameron, "Is I e-qoll to a white man jes' like yo-sel'?" [sic]. In the two and a bit hours leading up to this scene we've had images of slovenly black men picking their feet between mouthfuls of fried chicken and watermelon, mulattoes licking their lips with lascivious glee at the thought of deflowering white women, and violent ex-slaves spitting at their shackled former masters. Griffith's already answered the question for us, and our response is meant to be "No, you're not - and you never will be." They represent Griffith's preferred model of race relations: a system based on African-Americans accepting, without question, their inherent inferiority.
Griffith does treat these servants with a certain measure of respect, even if isn't afforded to any of the other black or mixed-race characters. Gus for example is nothing more than a slave to his baser instincts. He doesn't seem to understand the enormity of his crime after his attempt to rape Flora, and is even shown bragging about it to his drinking buddies in a sleazy gin house. When the Klan finally catches up with him, the audience is clearly meant to breathe a collective sigh of relief: the animal has been captured and white women everywhere are safe.
Perhaps the film's most insidious example of racism is the depiction of Silas Lynch, whose biracial
heritage is the motivating factor behind his cruelty and scheming. The
circumstances of his birth qualify him as illegitimate, making the
character a bastard in both a literal and figurative sense. He's not the
embittered product of a society that prohibits interracial coupling,
it's his tainted blood that made him this way. More than the carpetbaggers in Washington or the African freedmen overrunning the
South, it's Lynch who is the focus of Griffith's fury. He's a black man
who can pass as white; he's inveigled his way into high office and left
the door open for his nigger cousins to follow. He's the real cancer eating away
at post-Civil War society, and the film never lets us forget it.
The late, great Roger Ebert's entry for Birth of a Nation in his Great Movies series argues that Griffith, himself a product of Reconstruction, wouldn't have recognised racism in the quite the same way modern audiences do. In fact, the term wasn't part of the common lexicon in 1915 and didn't gain popular currency until the mid part of the 20th century. In many ways, Griffith's approach to what we now call racial politics was deeply rooted in 19th century concerns that were, to a certain degree, understandable in the context of the era. After Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863, chiefly proposed as a means of financially crippling the South, slavery wasn't fully abolished until the 13th Amendment was passed in December 1865. Approximately 95% of the slave population was based in the South, accounting for roughly one third of the overall population. In a pre-Welfare age, the economic effect was devastating and keenly felt by many white Southern families - not least of all Griffith's own. In a 1916 interview with Photoplay Magazine, he recounted a childhood incident involving his father, a former Confederate soldier, which shines a light on the attitudes we find played out in Birth of a Nation:
"About the first thing I remember was my father's sword; he would put it on to amuse me. The first time I saw that sword was when my father played a joke on an old negro, once his slave but who with the heads of four other families refused to leave the plantation; those four families were important factors in keeping the Griffith family poor. Down South the men usually wore their hair rather long; this negro, who in our better days had been the plantation barber, had been taken to Louisville, ten or twelve miles from our home at Bairdstown, and had seen Northern men with their close-cropped hair; when he came back he got hold of my brother and cut his hair close, Northern style. When father saw this he pretended to be enraged; he went into the house, donned his old uniform, buckled on his sword and pistols, and had the negro summoned. Then, drawing the sword, he went through the technical cuts and thrusts and slashes, threatening the darkey all the time with being cut up into mince meat. The old Uncle was scared pale, and I took it seriously myself until a wink and a smile from my father enlightened me."
Is it any wonder Griffith prefers subservient blacks to those with the same rights as white citizens? Or why one of the most famous intertitles in the film describes the Klan riding out "in defence of their Aryan birthright"? It also goes some way to explaining why Griffith often presents the African-American characters so comically.
It's notable that Griffith drew on 19th century satirical cartoons in his representation of black legislators, whereas in other, noticeably more sombre scenes (in particular the Siege of Petersburg and the assassination of Lincoln) he used, and even credited in the intertitles, literary and photographic sources. The presentation of the former sequences edge unmistakably towards caricature and the carnivalesque. It doesn't end there, either. The "Is I e-qoll..." line quoted above is an obvious attempt at wry humour, while Gus' clumsy attempt to woo Flora prior to her sexual assault approximates a comedy of manners in which the would-be suitor is completely ignorant of his lack of grace and good breeding. We could even read the penultimate scene where the Klan restores white supremacy in the South by forcibly keeping African-Americans away from the ballot boxes in this way. They laugh and smirk to each other as they reach the polling station, but when they see their hooded masters pointing guns at them they scarper in the classic Keystone tradition.
Myth has it that Griffith tried to atone for Birth of a Nation with 1916's Intolerance, a chronicle of prejudice throughout the ages, but this couldn't be further from the truth. While every bit as ground breaking as Birth of a Nation, Intolerance was Griffith's riposte to the critics and protestors he felt were trying to block his freedom of expression. When the film was re-released in 1930, Griffith added a new introduction comprised of an interview between himself and Walter Huston (fresh from playing Lincoln in Griffith's first sound production), during which he smugly asserts that everything in Birth of a Nation is "as it happened" and gets Huston to read a brief passage from Woodrow Wilson's History of the American People to confirm it:
"The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation until at last there had sprung into existence a great Klu Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern Country."
Sometimes you have to throw your hands up and walk away, remembering that history and social commentary aren't the sole preserve of dead presidents and truculent film-makers who refuse to acknowledge that their way of seeing things isn't absolute.
After discussing the politics of this film it seems futile even attempting to draw attention to its finer points, but it would be utterly remiss if we didn't at least try. After all, great art doesn't always have to represent humanity at its best to be beautiful.
The Birth of a Nation has some of the most remarkable cinematography ever committed to celluloid, bringing to mind the work of Henry Fox Talbot and Julia Margaret Cameron. The scenes set during the South's antebellum era present a false past that Griffith himself would have no memory of but nevertheless exists within the landscape of the mind. This is a luscious, bucolic place where the timber that makes up the dwellings in the Cameron's South Carolina home is alive with the memory of distant hardship and the dream of manifest destiny, the Hedera leaves (not native to America) representing a land tamed but untamed. It may be an illusion of pre-Civil War life but it's bloody effective. It appeals to an innate sense of nostalgia we're all subject to at some point in our lives, whether it's a world we half-remember from our dim and distant past or one that never existed in the first place. In the latter case, it doesn't mean it isn't emotionally valid, despite whatever it is that wills it into existence. Here, Griffith brings a lost, largely imagined world to life, and it's utterly enchanting.
One of Griffith's many innovations with Birth of a Nation was commissioning an original score. Although sound and film synchronisation first originated in the Edison laboratory in 1896, the technology available for successful playback was extremely crude. During the silent era, films were often soundtracked by a live band (or, more often, pianist) accompanying the film with an appropriate, pre-existing series of musical numbers. In an attempt to create a more immersive experience, Griffith hired Joseph Carl Breil to write a full suite with leitmotifs emphasising individual character arcs and overarching thematic elements. The resulting score is a breath-taking achievement. Film soundtracks may have become too intrusive and emotionally predatory in recent years (I'm looking at you, John Williams) but in silent films they're absolutely necessary to convey the correct emotional beats. Used correctly, it's like watching a ballet: music and choreography harmonised to such a degree it's impossible to separate them. The Birth of a Nation achieves this with consummate precision. Only 2001: A Space Odyssey boasts such an inspiring soundtrack.
I'm conscious, though, that Birth of a Nation is still an impossible film to defend. Does it deserve unconditional accolades and admiration for its contribution to the art of cinema, or should it be buried as an appalling (albeit well-made) relic of unchecked prejudice?
Since I don't agree with censorship I'm inclined to go with the former option. Despite its problems, The Birth of a Nation remains an important piece of cinema. I'm not sure it can be enjoyed by contemporary audiences in quite the same it was when it first premiered, mostly for reasons of taste but also because the cinematic language it introduced has become so ingrained in our consciousness we hardly notice it anymore. However hateful its message may be or how invisible its achievements have become, it's as much a piece of history as the Magna Carta, the King James Bible, the Bill of Rights, The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. Like those works, it can only be studied from a distance and with a sense of perspective.
