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The Birth of a Nation
Reprinted by permission of Donald Bogle from his
film reference work, Blacks in American Films &
Television: An Illustrated Encyclopedia (Simon &
Schuster)
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A legendary classic, a racist masterpiece. Technically
innovative and sweeping. Director Griffith made brilliant use
of the close-up, cross-cutting, rapid-fire editing, the iris,
the split screen shot, and realistic and impressionistic
lighting. His once-record-breaking $100,000 spectacle ran over
three hours and eventually altered the entire course and
concept of the feature film. But the treatment of its black
characters has also made this possibly the most controversial
American film ever released.
An Old South/Civil War reconstruction Era drama, The Birth
of the Nation [1915] focuses on the family of
kindly Dr. Cameron. On the Cameron plantation in Piedmont,
South Carolina, masters and slaves are friendly. In the fields,
the darkies contentedly pick cotton. Lively pickaninnies dance
and perform for their white masters outside the slave quarters.
Mammy joyously runs the big house. All is calm, at peace, in
order during these glory days of the Old South.
Then the War breaks out. The old world of gentility collapses.
A troop of Negro raiders terrorizes the Cameron family.
Afterward during the Reconstruction period, carpetbaggers (led
by the corrupt Senator Stoneman) and "uppity" blacks from the
North move into Piedmont, exploiting and corrupting the former
slaves, unleashing the sadism and bestiality believed to be
innate in the Negro, turning the once-congenial "darkies" into
renegades, and using them to "crush the white South under the
heel of the black South." The former slaves quit work to
dance. They roam the streets, shoving whites aside. They take
over the political polls, disenfranchising the white citizens.
A black political victory culminates in an orgiastic street
celebration. Blacks dance, sing, drink, rejoice. Later they
conduct a black legislative session, itself a supposed mockery
of Old South ideals, in which the freed legislators are
depicted as lustful, arrogant, idiotic. One bites on a chicken
leg. Another sneaks a drink from a liquor bottle. Another
removes his shoe and props his bare foot onto his desk. The
stench created by the barefoot legislator becomes so foul that
another passes a rule that everyone must wear his shoes during
legislative meetings! Other rulings are also made. A title
card reads: "It is moved and carried that all whites must
salute Negro officers on the street." Another title card
proclaims: "The helpless white minority." Still another
announces: "Passage of a bill providing for the intermarriage
of blacks and whites."
Matters reach a heady climax when the lusty renegade black buck
Gus hotly pursues the delicate young Cameron daughter. Rather
than submit, the poor thing - the Pet Sister as she's called -
flees and throws herself from a cliff into the "opal gates of
death." (Interestingly enough, during a showing of The Birth
of a Nation - many decades later - to an all-black audience
at Howard University in Washington, D.C., when the poor Pet
Sister jumped to her death, the black audience stood up and
cheered. The Birth of a Nation can still rouse tension
and hostilities.) Later the mulatto Silas Lynch attempts to
force the fair white Elsie Stoneman (played by Lillian Gish)
into marrying him. Finally, when all looks lost, a group of
stalwart, upright white males, wearing sheets and hoods, no
less, soon have a victorious confrontation with the blacks.
Defenders of white womanhood, white honor and white glory, they
restore to the South everything it has lost, including white
supremacy. Thus we have the birth of a nation. And the birth of
the Ku Klux Klan, too!
Absurd as some of the plot of The Birth of a Nation
might sound today, the film had enormous power and
extraordinary effects. The final ride of the Klan was an
impressive piece of movie propaganda, superbly filmed and
brilliantly edited. Indeed it was so stirring that audiences
screamed in terror and delight, cheering the white heroes and
booing, hissing, and cursing the black baddies.
Griffith also "introduced" the mass movie audience to the black
film stereotypes that were to linger in American films for the
next 70-some years - the noble, loyal manageable Toms, the
clownish coons, the stoic hefty mammy, the troubled "tragic"
mulatto (she's Senator Stoneman's mistress), and the brutal
black buck. All had appeared in previous short films; indeed
they were carryovers from popular fiction, poetry, and music of
the 19th century. But never had they been given such a
full-blown dramatic treatment - and in a film seen the world
over. Of course, the stereotypes in The Birth of a
Nation were all the more disturbing and grotesque because
the major black roles were played by white actors in blackface.
(Real African Americans had only minor parts.)
The Birth of a Nation became one of the biggest
moneymakers in movie history. At a private White House
screening, President Woodrow Wilson praised the film. Like
The Clansman, the Thomas Dixon novel on which it was
based, the movie appealed to the nation partly because of its
mythic view of the Old South and particularly because of its
exploration of the great white American nightmares: interracial
sex and the strong sexual black man. A scary black/white
fantasy, the film's ending wiped away white America's sexual
fears about the Negro and temporarily at least permitted the
national psyche to relax.
Controversy, however, followed The Birth of a Nation.
The NAACP launched a formal protest movement against it. (In
later years when the film was re-released, there were new
protests.) Afterwards the film industry, fearing controversy
more than anything else, assiduously avoided any depiction of
strong, aggressive, defiant sexual black men. Most of the black
males audiences were to see in later films of the late 1920s
and 1930s were comic, non-threatening figures such as the
characters played by Stepin Fetchit and Bill "Bojangles"
Robinson. The buck figure actually does not return in full
force in American films until some 55 years later with such
pictures as Shaft and Sweet Sweetback's Baadassss
Song. At the same time, some black leaders, determined to
counteract the shocking black images of The Birth of a
Nation, set out to make black films with positive
characters, and eventually there was a whole new wave of
independent black filmmakers such as Oscar Micheaux.
Producer/Director: D.W. Griffith
Screenplay: D.W. Griffith, Frank E. Woods, Thomas F. Dixon, Jr. based on the novels The Leopard's Spots & The Clansman
Cinematography: G.W. Bitzer
Editing: D.W. Griffith, Joseph Henabery, James Smith, Rose Smith, Raoul Walsh
Costume Design: Robert Godstein
Cast: Lillian Gish (Elsie Stoneman), Mae Marsh (Flora Cameron), Henry B. Walthall (Col. Ben Cameron), Miriam Cooper (Margaret Cameron), Mary Alden (Lydia Brown), Ralph Lewis (Austin Stoneman), George Siegmann (Silas Lynch), Walter Long (Gus), Wallace Reid (Jeff), Joseph Henabery (Abraham Lincoln).
BW-185m.
 
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