The Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915)Adam & Sam's takes (starts at 38:59)Going into the Birth of a Nation, I knew two things about it : that it was a groundbreaking film that changed the face of cinema forever, and that it was racist. I don't think I was quite ready for either aspect however.
It's fitting for a film with such a dual legacy to be divided in two clear parts, and to an extent they somewhat fit with this legacy. As I was taking a few minutes of intermission after the first half, I found myself thinking two things. The first was that this wasn't as racist as I expected... not that it isn't, but it's core focus is on the story of two families and their respective fates during the war. I was impressed by how - to put it bluntly - watchable it was. It has this feeling of cinema viewed as a composite of literature, opera and painting. The way Griffith uses frequent title cards to set up a scene, illustrating what he's written through image and sound, is striking in its relative simplicity and its effectiveness. It makes for a very didactic film, but the storytelling, at least in that first half, is deft enough that it just works. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the film is the score, essential in providing both tone and rythm.
The result is a powerful epic, a tale of a nation devouring itself, mostly dedicated to denouncing war (though it isn't entirely free of Truffaut's aphorism on war films), clearly motivated by pacifist ideals, to an extent. And the fact is : civil war is a terrible, terrible thing : the fact that Griffith puts the blame where he does doesn't prevent that from being true, and the first half of The Birth of a Nation ends up being very effective in that regard.
And then there's the second half. Again, it's not like the first half is exempt of racist overtones, but the second half is where the film changes its focus. I had heard it referred to as basically a recruitment ad for the Ku Klux Klan, but I didn't realise that was to be taken literally. D.W. Griffith's view of the Civil War as presented here seems to be as follows.
1. There was a Civil War, unclear why (I would guess he has a low-key dislike of slavery but it's hard to tell), but that Lincoln sure was a great guy. Anyway war is terrible.
2. After the war, black people - enabled by northern radicals - took control of the South and mercilessly abused white people, preventing them to vote, and just generally being out of place and gross.
3. Thanks to the KKK, we then arrived to some sort of an ideal state (the Nation being birthed), by which I presume he means segregation. The North and the South united in their protection of the Aryan race, something like that.
A fascinating detail is the intertitle coming just after the intermission, explaining that Griffith doesn't mean to cast aspersions on any race in the current (ie 1915) context. I don't know if this was added after the film proved controversial (I should note that the version I watched was over 3 hours long by 15 minutes or so, while Sam mentions it being under 3 hours so I don't know exactly what's going on there), but I find its presence to be illuminating : I took it to mean that now that black people had "learned their place" and been adequately repressed in the South, things were all fine and dandy : he has nothing against black people see, just as long as they don't try to step out of their "natural" social status. To be clear I'm not saying it alleviates anything in the film, it's more that it's an inadvertently scathing critique of 1910's America.
In any case, the second half soured me on the film to an extent. The didactic nature of the storytelling means that you really can't get away from its message, and it makes even the impressive action climax rather uncomfortable to watch in a way taht the first half wasn't, not as much anyway. The hints of Ride in the Valkyrie in the score, and the glorious imagery of the KKK riding to slaughter a black mob... remarkable, but somewhat hard to appreciate.
What I did appreciate was the way the film morphed from a historical epic anchored in a certain sense of reality (a heightened one certainly, but still) to a fantasy story : this is particularly notable with the villainous Silas Lynch (interesting name...). His behaviour in the final act reminded me of a fairytale villain more than anything else, and he's actually a very interesting character, a tragic figure torn by the classic probem of wanting to raise above its status. The way Griffith inteds that to play doesn't prevent it from actually being compelling, and I would say the same idea applies to the ostensible hero. His founding of the KKK is meant to be triumphal, but now it plays like a fall from grace : here is a man who was show before to be decent, heroically saving a Union soldier during a battle (likely a slave owner too I know, but bear with me) and who is now incapable of surviving in a changed society and resorts to hate and violence.
But I'm rambling so I should wrap this up, and while I mention that I should say that I found the second half also lost the relatively crisp rythm of the first, but perhaps that was just because its focus made it inherently uncomfortable. In any case, it's hard for me to decide exactly how I feel about this, and the rating I give it ends up feeling even more arbitrary than they usually do. All I can say is that it's absolutely worth watching, a fascinating film in more ways that I expected it to be, nowhere close to the grind I expected it to be.
6/10