“This film actually depicts lynching as a positive thing,” she says. Maybe the most racist film ever made,” says Ellen Scott, author of the just-published Cinema Civil Rights. “The film is one of the most racist films ever made. and that’s how those still work to this day.”īut for all its magnificence, what is inescapable in any assessment of The Birth of a Nation is the troubling racism that leaps off the screen. “That’s what Titanic is, that’s what most of those kinds of films are. “The way it works, the sweeping historical epic, you put families divided by war, and a romance story at the centre,”says Paul McEwan, who’s the author of a forthcoming book in the BFI Classics series on the film. The picture establishes a narrative structure that’s still being copied by modern Hollywood. It is the film that showed the world about the potential of cinema,” says Armond White, who reviews movies for National Review and Out Magazine. There would be no extended movie narrative without Griffith. Many classic battles in modern cinema from Braveheart to The Lord of the Rings are said to have drawn from the battle sequences in The Birth of a Nation. The use of night photography, panoramic long shots, montage and parallel editing all worked extremely well, as did the war scenes involving legions of extras. But it was revolutionary for another reason: “It was very important in it was the first full-scale long narrative using a lot of the new techniques of film-making,” says Rice. It made history by becoming the first film ever to be screened at the White House. “It was a box office success – a mainstream film, so utterly mainstream,” says Professor Alan Rice, a Birth of a Nation expert at The Institute for Black Atlantic Research at the University of Central Lancashire, who has been organising a series of symposia on the film. By 1922 it had been watched by more than five million people. The film ran for more than three hours and employed (according to a New York Times report from the time) 18,000 people and 3,000 horses. It was the epic story of the relationship between two American families, one Union, the other Confederate, at the time of the Civil War and the Reconstruction that followed. Nothing on its scale had even been attempted before. The Birth of a Nation was the creation of DW Griffith, who had tried his hand as an actor and playwright but whose real genius lay in film-making. Groundbreaking in its use of innovative cinematic techniques, it remains tainted by its brazen racism. The film is as confounding as ever, both brilliant and repugnant. One hundred years after it was made The Birth of a Nation still has the power to both enthrall and appall.
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