Birth of a Nation (1915, D.W. Griffith)

Originally written on 20 May 2009 for The Screengrab. Reprinted by permission.

When I first hit upon the idea for Yesterday’s Hits about a year and a half ago, the idea was to look at movies that were extremely popular when they were first released, but which might not have maintained this popularity to the present day. In looking at movies that haven’t necessarily stood the test of time, I hoped to gain some anthropological insight into what audiences of the past responded to, both stylistically and ideologically. And while some of the movies I’ve selected have held up pretty well (and some even better than that), some of the more interesting cases have been the ones that haven’t, for various reasons. In some cases, the popularity of these films have been due to their employing some then-impressive technical breakthrough, while others were very much of their time, featherweight entertainments that simply weren’t built to last.

But ever since I first conceived of this column, one movie has remained at the back of my mind- D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Generally acknowledged as the first blockbuster in movie history, Birth of a Nation was the film that cemented the commercial viability of the feature-length release, grossing more than $10 million in 1915 dollars, which translates to roughly $200 million today. In addition, the techniques employed by Griffith and his crew were groundbreaking in their day, and exerted a profound influence on cinema that continues even today. Yet despite its influence in film history, Birth is usually condemned for its borderline hateful views on African-Americans and its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s this combination of the film’s runaway popularity and its troubling, dated ideology that makes it an ideal subject for a Yesterday’s Hits column.

So what was it about Birth of a Nation that so excited audiences back in the teens? Based on a recent viewing of the film, I’m tempted to say that many audience members simply hadn’t seen a movie this big before. In the first few decades of cinema, the dominant mode of filmmaking was in short subjects, which dramatized small-scale stories over the course of twenty minutes or so. By contrast, Birth of a Nation ran upwards of three hours long. In addition, the scale of its story was big enough to encompass the Civil War (both the Union and Confederate sides), the assassination of President Lincoln, and difficult process of Reconstruction. In 1915, this was a story that was still fresh in the minds of many Americans, and they were no doubt eager to see it “brought to life” on the screen.

Today, after nearly a century of advances in filmmaking technology, the expansiveness of Birth of a Nation is no longer impressive. Yet it’s interesting to observe many of the conventions of contemporary Hollywood cinema in their embryonic form here. The most obvious example of this is Griffith’s use of cross-cutting between different storylines that run concurrently. Today, cross-cutting can be found in the vast majority of films both big and small, but at the time it was practically revolutionary, and it’s sort of amazing to see how closely Griffith’s version of the technique resembles its current form. Birth of a Nation should be taught in every film program as a textbook example of how to use cross-cutting to not only keep several plotlines going simultaneously but also to play them off each other to increase the audience’s level of excitement.

And I have no doubt that it would be if not for the film’s much-ballyhooed reputation of racism, which I must report is completely justified. For much of the film’s first half, this isn’t an issue, as Griffith concentrates primarily on the Civil War, and of the two families- the northern Stonemans and the southern Camerons- whose fates are inextricably linked throughout the story. But once the North wins the war all hell breaks loose, as the newly re-United States is very nearly reduced to a shambles by the Reconstruction process. In the film’s view (and presumably, that of Thomas Dixon’s novel as well), Reconstruction was a period in which opportunistic northern politicians who wanted to punish the south for seceding, and the newly-freed slaves who wanted to stick it to their former masters, nearly ruined this country. And the only thing that prevented them from doing so were the righteous members of the Ku Klux Klan.

Now, there’s a forgiving part of me that wants to believe that the audiences of the day were so bowled over by Griffith’s filmmaking that they could scarcely be expected to pay attention to the odious racism that runs through the story. But the hard truth is that racism didn’t magically disappear with the passage of amendments thirteen through fifteen, and was still prevalent at the time of Birth of a Nation’s release. What makes the film’s imagery especially alarming is the way it fans the flames of hatred towards African-Americans. Throughout the film, Griffith shows us African-Americans who are stupid, lazy, gluttonous, underhanded, sneaky, and violent- in short, “sub-human”. One of the many glaring examples of this is in the scene depicting the South Carolina Senate, full of freed slaves who prop their bare feet up on the desks, gobble down food in the middle of giving speeches, and use their newly-acquired to enact a law permitting interracial marriage. The most hateful ones of all in Griffith’s eyes are the “mulattos,” who combine the intelligence and cunning of whites with the craziness of “blacks.”

The first half of the film is riveting (it could play as a great Civil War melodrama on its own), while the bald-faced racism of the film’s second half is jaw-dropping But what the two halves have in common is Griffith’s filmmaking sense, even in the wrongheaded later sequences. This makes these scenes all the more disturbing, as the ideas are so mind-boggling yet sold so well, that it’s little wonder that Birth was banned in a number of areas for fear of inciting race-related violence- or that KKK membership increased dramatically in the years following the film’s release.

There’s a famous, possibly apocryphal story that after seeing Birth of a Nation, President Woodrow Wilson declared that, “it’s like writing history with lightning.” This is something of a two-pronged statement, simultaneously praising the power of Griffith’s images and expressing fear at the influence that these particularly images might have over audiences. Today, the majority of Americans no longer hold the same kind of racism that informs Birth of a Nation, but it’s illustrative to remember that nearly a century has passed since its release, and to consider how few of today’s blockbusters will be able to withstand this same level of scrutiny a century from now. If nothing else, to consider Birth of a Nation today is to reflect on, in the words of Haven Hamilton, “how far we’ve come along ‘til now/ how far we’ve got to go.”