Thanks to Netflix, I had the opportunity to view this film. First off, it is indeed a technical masterpiece, and certainly much better looking than something you would expect from 1915.

 

That aside, this is indeed as racist a piece of trash as you will ever see. My personal favorite scene involved the state legislature, 75% black, sitting at their desks with their bare feet on the table. The movie portrays reconstruction as the battle between noble Southerners, and evil Carpetbaggers. Sadly, this was the popular view of Reconstruction in America in 1915.

 

It is hard really to get a grip on a movie like this. It is amazing how something so blatently racist was widely praised at the time.

Well considering the book the movie is based on is called "The Klansman", I wasn't expecting an unbiased view.

 

Racism (~!) aside, it's an amazing and groundbreaking film which set the standard for moviemaking.

Wow, when I saw the title of the thread I was like, "Man, I know I've heard of this movie from SOMEWHERE."

 

And, then I clicked it and I remembered we were recently discussing this movie in AP US History. I might check out the film someday and correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't President Woodrow Wilson agree with everything shown in the movie?

It was the first movie screened in the White House, but I don't know how much Wilson agreed with it. I'm assuming since it was 1915 he probably agreed with more of it than someone today would be comfortable with.

It was the first movie screened in the White House, but I don't know how much Wilson agreed with it. I'm assuming since it was 1915 he probably agreed with more of it than someone today would be comfortable with.

wilson famously loved it. IIRC, he was good buddies with the author of 'the klansman'. he's quoted as saying the film was "history written in lightning," which has added a lot to the allure of 'birth'.

 

that said, there is no more ridiculously overrated movie in the annals of film history than 'birth'. it did not rewrite the language of film, and it's not even terribly well done. nobody even shows this piece of shit in a film class anymore because it's so long, hokey and boring. about 98% of the hype about this movie was created by griffith himself (like inventing parallel editing or inventing the close-up), and for decades people just bought into it because they didn't bother to check other stuff. it was epic in scope and generated a great hype machine around it (griffith was able to turn it into a huge event and even got away charging viewers higher ticket prices for it), but in terms of raw technique it didn't do anything that wasn't already being done, and it certainly didn't set the standard for narrative film. movies weren't nearly as underdeveloped back then as people think. de mille's 'the cheat', which came out the same year, is light years better. about 20-25 years ago, film historians started scrutinizing a lot of the forgotten material from the first 20 years of movies and realized that griffith isn't nearly as important as he made himself out to be. his place in film history has been heavily re-evaluated, and legit scholars don't take 'birth' that seriously anymore.

 

Sadly, this was the popular view of Reconstruction in America in 1915.

 

that's debatable. a LOT of people raised a ruckus over the portrayals in 'birth', riots have been attributed to it, and it was banned from exhibition in a major city (i think it might've been chicago). the NAACP wanted it banned outright.

he's quoted as saying the film was "history written in lightning,"

BAM! That's the quote I remember learning that Wilson saying. Good man you are, gtd.

Useless history: Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson were known as the Progressive Presidents.

Problem: All of them were embarassingly absent in the struggle for equality for African-Americans.

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.d.../303300301/1023

 

Roger Ebert's essay on the film is very good, and sums up the film nicely. I wish I had more to add, but everything there is to say has been said, really.

Useless history: Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson were known as the Progressive Presidents.

Problem: All of them were embarassingly absent in the struggle for equality for African-Americans.

Hell, the whole "Progressive Movement" was 'absent in the struggle for African-Americans'. Man, and I thought I didn't listen in APUSH.

But audiences in 1915 were witnessing the invention of intercutting in a chase scene. Nothing like it had ever been seen before: Parallel action building to a suspense climax.

see, this is just not true. griffith himself was using parallel editing in his biograph shorts for years before 'birth'. any moviegoing audience would've seen a number of these shorts before. even his most famous example of parallel editing in a short, 'the lonely villa', which was considered revolutionary for having so many shots, was ripped off almost shot-for-shot from a french movie.

 

Griffith assembled and perfected the early discoveries of film language, and his cinematic techniques that have influenced the visual strategies of virtually every film made since

eh, not really. griffith was one of the main figures working within a system that was developing toward storytelling. in things like analytical editing, griffith was actually kind of behind the times: he liked intercutting between scenes a lot, but his way of shooting a single scene tended to be distanced and static. what griffith was really useful for was helping develop cinematic shorthand for character psychology--summing up a character's inner personality or struggles in a handful of actions or facial expressions or costume or whatever. he wasn't the ONLY one to do that, but he was able to do it in a really efficient and fluid way that did become a major trope of classical film that's still used today.

 

Silent films began with crude constructions designed to simply look at a story as it happened before the camera.

okay, this is embarrassingly wrong, and a major indicator that ebert doesn't really know what he's talking about. early silent films were not concerned with telling stories, they were concerned with SHOWING things to the audience to astonish them--a kiss, an elephant being electrocuted, a train, singular jolting events that had nothing to do with telling a story. they had more in common with fairground attractions than plays or novels, and didn't start to develop like plays or novels until 1905-07ish or so.

 

the big problem i have with the version of film history in ebert's review is that 'birth' is the only concrete example of silent film that he cites, which is a hallmark of an unfounded blanket claim. he keeps saying things like

astonishing compared to other films of the time

WHAT other films of the time? what else came out this year, the year before, or whatever, that 'birth' was so unlike? you can't just say "once upon a time, movies were static and clunky, and then 'birth of a nation' came along and everything suddenly changed forever," you have to give some kind of empirical ACCOUNT of what was going on at the time, how griffith fit into it, and how he moved it forward. ebert doesn't, he just cites a couple sources. one of them, bordwell's 'on the history of film style', ebert even admits is suspicious about the very kind of grandiose claims he's making. but it's reduced to

Bordwell has some quarrels with that widely-accepted basic version of film history, but Bordwell lists Griffith's innovations, and observes that the film "is often considered cinema's first masterpiece."

this tells me essentially nothing. bordwell was one of the big film historians to debunk griffith's importance, and ebert pulls out this weird trick to allow him to reassert that very importance. (this book also covers cinema's birth and its early concern with attractions over stories, which is conveniently skipped by ebert to reinforce the story of movies "growing up" with the coming of 'birth'. this tells me that ebert has not read the whole book.)

 

his other source

The critic Tim Dirks adds to cross-cutting no less than 16 other ways in which Griffith was an innovator, ranging from his night photography to his use of the iris shot and color tinting.

makes me equally suspicious. i've studied griffith in 3 or 4 different classes, and i've never heard of this guy or his writings. if he's a film critic, then chances are he hasn't spent hundreds of man-hours poring over old prints in museums looking for changes in style like david bordwell has. critics aren't historians, and they tend to hyperbolize (like when pauline kael says 'last tango in paris' is "the most liberating movie ever made" or when critic X says 'gummo' represents everything that's wrong with america), and there's nothing wrong with that, and their perceptions do help us assess the importance of movies in history. but when they try to make definite historical claims (as dirks and, by extension, ebert are doing), they should be taken with a grain of salt.

 

on a personal level, i also disagree with his claim that 'triumph of the will' is a great film that makes an argument for evil. i saw it a year or so ago, and thought it was terrible.

that's debatable. a LOT of people raised a ruckus over the portrayals in 'birth', riots have been attributed to it, and it was banned from exhibition in a major city (i think it might've been chicago). the NAACP wanted it banned outright.

I've heard it was ultimately banned in five states and 19 cities. Brances of the NAACP strongly protested its showing in major cities like Chicago and Boston.

 

There's a bit of a misconception about how universally it was accepted. True there was a much larger number of people who found this to not only be acceptable, but entertaining. The riots and protests are just some of the backlash that came about because of the film. The same took place during subsequent re-releases in theaters.

 

The backlash was so strong that portraying blacks as such dastardly characters was deemed too controversial, which resulted in them primarily being confined to the "comic relief" roles that characterized blacks in the first part of the century.

Eh, Griffith may not have invented the techniques he used in Birth of a Nation, but he's still praised for the cohesiveness with which he used them, and, in some respects, for improving upon said techniques.